How We Lost the Web - Anil Dash
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Full post here: http://dashes.com/anil/2013/04/harvard.html
He's definitely onto something important and he's written a wealth of information about the subject:
- The Web We Lost, offering an overview of the problem and opportunity we're discussing.
- How to Rebuild the Web We Lost, trying to offer some hope after the initial critique.
- Captive Atria and Living in Public, exploring the idea of privately-owned public spaces which begins the talk and underpins many of its arguments.
- Stop Publishing Web Pages, making the case that mainstream users' behavior on the web has shifted from traditional web pages to app-based streams, without media noticing.
- Google and Theory of Mind, showing how Google's social shortcomings led to its corruption of links, turning hyperlinks from an editorial or artistic statement to an economic one.
- Facebook is Gaslighting the Web demonstrated how Facebook was beginning to disempower and devalue web content that wasn't hosted within its walls.
- Facebook Makes It Official: You Have No Say, documenting Facebook's decision to no longer accept user input to changes in its terms of service.
From the first article, "The Web We Lost":
When you see interesting data mash-ups today, they are often still using Flickr photos because Instagram's meager 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.
8:26 PM Apr 27 2013