Anil Dash points out that everyone has forgotten how The Web works:

When you see interesting data mash-ups today, they are often still using Flickr photos because Instagram's feeble metadata sucks, and the app is only reluctantly on the web at all.

We get excuses about why we can't search for old tweets or our own relevant Facebook content, though we got more comprehensive results from a Technorati search that was cobbled together on the feeble software platforms of its era.

We get bullshit turf battles like Tumblr not being able to find your Twitter friends or Facebook not letting Instagram photos show up on Twitter because of giant companies pursuing their agendas instead of collaborating in a way that would serve users.

And we get a generation of entrepreneurs encouraged to make more narrow-minded, web-hostile products like these because it continues to make a small number of wealthy people even more wealthy, instead of letting lots of people build innovative new opportunities for themselves on top of the web itself.

This paragraph is so right on the money:

The web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they've now narrowed the possibilites of the web for an entire generation of users who don't realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be.

The big challenge will be "re-educating a billion people about what the web means, akin to the years we spent as everyone moved off of AOL a decade ago, teaching them that there was so much more to the experience of the Internet than what they know."

Especially as The Web grows from 2 billion people to billions more in the coming decade.

 Thanks for the picture!

Yes, re-educating people is the right word. As the article points out, people in the industry are perfectly aware of all this.

See also: John Battelle on why consumers should own our own data, not Facebook or Twitter or other Consumer Cloud services...