I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be
I’m too young to truly remember what the web was like a decade ago, I wish I was around for it. Seeing the simplicity of everything back then (from old websites/blog posts etc. such as this one) really emphasises how much companies like Facebook and Google control the web nowadays.
funny enough, i do remember the web 10 years ago, as well as the older web that the author pines for, and i don’t remember it being how he describes. for instance: it’s true that a lot more sites used RSS, but i don’t know how many people were aware of it, and the average user wasn’t using it. ditto for technorati: it sounds neat, but i didn’t know anyone who used it. i assume the author was an early adopter of some technology that was ahead of its time.
the one thing we definitely lost was choice. you could opt out of dealing with any company on the web, and get along fine. i can’t think of any company back then with as much stranglehold on the internet as facebook and google have today. yahoo was big, but there were other search engines that worked as well, and nobody would look at you funny for not having a yahoo account. perhaps AOL was the closest comparison, since they had a a lot of content you could only access from within their walled garden. but it was never enough to threaten the the open-web.
it wasn’t all good; there was a lot of junk back then too. i remember search engine results were full of SEO spam (whereas now they are full of ads). some web design trends back then were atrocious. html / css were missing a lot of useful features that we take for granted now. and browsers didn’t respect web standards (even less than they do now!). still, it was a better place, if only because power on the web was less concentrated.
See all these fields were all AJAX & Web 2.0! ;)
It was another set of companies trying to control things, Flash & if you were really unfortunate, ActiveX. I’m not sure how much Microsoft practices have set the human race back but the IE 6 monoculture of a dead browser that was no longer maintained that lacked new features was a pain that collectively web developers suffered in maintaining support for (Opera was the leader there in supporting web technologies).
Etsy & Flickr were exemplar companies with the rise of automation & system administration. Yahoo acquisition of Flickr really took the wind out of their sail.
I’m too young to truly remember what the web was like a decade ago, I wish I was around for it. Seeing the simplicity of everything back then (from old websites/blog posts etc. such as this one) really emphasises how much companies like Facebook and Google control the web nowadays.
funny enough, i do remember the web 10 years ago, as well as the older web that the author pines for, and i don’t remember it being how he describes. for instance: it’s true that a lot more sites used RSS, but i don’t know how many people were aware of it, and the average user wasn’t using it. ditto for technorati: it sounds neat, but i didn’t know anyone who used it. i assume the author was an early adopter of some technology that was ahead of its time.
the one thing we definitely lost was choice. you could opt out of dealing with any company on the web, and get along fine. i can’t think of any company back then with as much stranglehold on the internet as facebook and google have today. yahoo was big, but there were other search engines that worked as well, and nobody would look at you funny for not having a yahoo account. perhaps AOL was the closest comparison, since they had a a lot of content you could only access from within their walled garden. but it was never enough to threaten the the open-web.
it wasn’t all good; there was a lot of junk back then too. i remember search engine results were full of SEO spam (whereas now they are full of ads). some web design trends back then were atrocious. html / css were missing a lot of useful features that we take for granted now. and browsers didn’t respect web standards (even less than they do now!). still, it was a better place, if only because power on the web was less concentrated.
See all these fields were all AJAX & Web 2.0! ;) It was another set of companies trying to control things, Flash & if you were really unfortunate, ActiveX. I’m not sure how much Microsoft practices have set the human race back but the IE 6 monoculture of a dead browser that was no longer maintained that lacked new features was a pain that collectively web developers suffered in maintaining support for (Opera was the leader there in supporting web technologies). Etsy & Flickr were exemplar companies with the rise of automation & system administration. Yahoo acquisition of Flickr really took the wind out of their sail.