Rant: Share The Web
June 18, 2007 Posted by Al Castle
2comments Categories: OSX, PRWeb, Puter Stuff, Read These, Web Design & Dev, gnash-teeth
It seems everywhere I turn someone is writing, talking or funding another “share the web” “social networking” site. Almost all of them have the same recipe.
- Build a site using LAMP or Ruby On Rails
- Provide free registration - possibly an upgrade path.
- Ajax/Flash - Upload photos, videos, music, misc data files and other content.
- Bookmark, rate, tag, comment on third party web pages.
- Offer various feeds of points 3,4
- profit. ok maybe not.
So basically that’s exactly the same thing the web already was/is before the new buzz words, each website is a collection of files and links. Sometimes these websites are a collection of users, for example Slashdot. It existed long before the buzz and granted it’s mostly a troll haven of thrice posted news from the month before it’s still an example of online social behavior on a large scale - pre-blog era (PBE). Of course in the PBE we also had web-rings, the sort of primordial slime of social networking.
So blogging software (ie CMS) made it more accessible for users that found Front Page and MS Word too difficult to create a crappy web site and couldn’t figure out the shareware FTP software to upload to their 3rd rate ISP’s IIS server. Suddenly we have a lot more content online and everyone is happy from the guy with the crappy content and site to the ISP. I’m okay with that, people should feel like they can express themselves. I remember how I felt when I first learned HTML and put up my very own completely pointless website. (Actually several of the commercial ones I’ve done are equally pointless but it was a paycheck.)
I’m also okay with sites like delicious (despite it’s horrible name), same with digg. I don’t regularly use them but they were good ideas initially that seem to have reached their full potential. The number of copycat sites may now cease.
Tagging in general just seems like a general good way at categorization of existing content and many sites that have nothing to do with socializing are making use of it.
Audio and video casting have their places.
What do I have against sharing the web and social networking? I love the idea of sharing, in fact my favorite tool is StumbleUpon. I simply adore it and can’t imagine the Internet without it. It’s simply the gold rush mentality and the ‘drive by media‘ both on and offline which are fueling it. The sheer number of sites trying to combine all of this using my above non-patented recipe is absurd and is beginning to annoy me with all the attention they are getting. Same with the clones of digg, flickr, et al.
What’s worse is the old school businesses that slap a delicious logo on their website and say they are embracing social networking. Having news releases put out and charging customers more for the logo. Let it go, lets continue to innovate and can people stop using 2.0 after every silly thing.
What are you working on Senior Castle you may ask? Well I can’t tell you, binding contracts and all that, but pay you no mind what I’m doing. And as to PRWeb we’re using social networking concepts where they make sense. Most of which are just various ways to interact with our existing data and are not the core of our business model, something we’ve always done and embraced during the PBE.
What’s out there? What’s next? I’m ready to move on. Too many people are on this bus, riding this wave. The more I ponder it the more I see what’s going on the less excited I am. The next thing, in my mind, requires new interfaces, which means new OS’s and protocols. Maybe I’ve watched too many Japanese cyborg-mech cartoons and read all of Gibsons books (even the really bad Idura one) more than once. But for what I want to do it doesn’t exist yet and frankly I’m not smart enough to create these new standards so I have to wait for the rest of you to catch up and build the damn thing for me.
I’m an armchair visionary, my mutant gene gives me the ability complain and whine without shame. Surely somewhere, in some government lab of DARPA, the DOD or the MASAD someone is working on the future. Are you?
