future of ~the internet~

thats all apples fault i think, thanks for the brushed metal look "jon ive" you dick

I expect that the whole idea of "addresses" will become a retro signifier at some point, like modem sounds are now

― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Sunday, February 20, 2011 12:38 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

It's being screamed that Gawker is "breaking the web" but not honouring 1 URL = 1 representation, but sites like Twitter and Facebook are already doing the same thing -- there's no useful URL to describe the tangled state "representation" you can get into following a reply chain or drilling into a friend-relationship.

― stet, Sunday, February 20, 2011 12:46 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah i think this is a super important thing thatll have to be sorted as the foundation of the web is you know links - as of now im firmly in the everything should have a url including states of web apps or w/e camp - although obvs its p easy to see the problems/impossibilities that come w/this position

All the alternatives I can think of just will never fly commercially, but eg it would be way more useful for a URL to link directly to an actual bit of content, whether that's a text article, movie, mp3 or status update than it would for it to link to a mountain of HTML/JS/CSS/Flash/w/e.

Breaking those two apart would be killer.

Which is sort of what APIs do, I guess, but they're all different and bespoke, and I really don't see REST/autodiscovery fixing that.

The web was designed to share scientific papers, and so this whole thing about URLs being direct links to pieces of content, sry "representations" became the holy grail for semantic types who wanted the web to be for computers rly (see also: REST).

― stet, Sunday, February 20, 2011 12:46 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha i was in boston a month or so ago talking to my friends neighbor who is this old school computer legend, the guy who more or less invented the spreadsheet iirc, and now hes trying to be a internet thought leader - hes super smart but not the best communicator in that dismissive nerd way - we got to talking abt the value of design - i was arguing that its essential as far as getting yr point across to people - eventually he got sort of frustrated and blurted out i dont want to talk to people, i want to talk to computers!

oh I think URLs will always exist, but they won't constitute this visible way of interfacing with the internet. people used to have to tune in their TVs.

so the question of who provides the abstraction layer, and how it works, becomes very important. how do you find the "channels" or "apps" (which will each have different models of how much and what kind of interaction to have with "external" "content"). something like YouView comes to mind. the US, as usual, is caught in never-ending wars of attrition between private concerns (comcast, netflix, apple, etc) and may find itself way behind, as it was with mobile phone technology for a decade

so the question of who provides the abstraction layer, and how it works, becomes very important. how do you find the "channels" or "apps" (which will each have different models of how much and what kind of interaction to have with "external" "content"). something like YouView comes to mind. the US, as usual, is caught in never-ending wars of attrition between private concerns (comcast, netflix, apple, etc) and may find itself way behind, as it was with mobile phone technology for a decade

this is pretty otm, but i think governance of the underlying technology behind all this is so decentralized that it's going to continue to be a content issue for the foreseeable future, viz. youview, spotify for instance - it's not as if the issue with mobile phone technology 10 years ago was that americans couldn't play snake ii (imperfect analogy, but you know what i mean)

All the alternatives I can think of just will never fly commercially, but eg it would be way more useful for a URL to link directly to an actual bit of content, whether that's a text article, movie, mp3 or status update than it would for it to link to a mountain of HTML/JS/CSS/Flash/w/e.

― stet, Sunday, February 20, 2011 1:05 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah this makes sense, the content is accessible from wherever, but if you want the social, relational, w/e data you have to specifically connect to the particular network (graph? platform?) - it works from a business pov too as in well give you enough of our stuff to become indispensable but if you want the whole deal you have to play on our turf

i hate that rss feeds are so passe now

i love my google reader

― HOOS the master?? STEEN NUFF (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Sunday, February 20, 2011 12:45 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

twitter rules rss droolz

also open apis (and, shit, even oauth/clones!) GREATLY simplify the development process of a lot of this stuff, as does the quick evolution of really solid frameworks - jquery ajax retrieval methods now vs. six months ago, my god

i think governance of the underlying technology behind all this is so decentralized that it's going to continue to be a content issue for the foreseeable future, viz. youview, spotify for instance

right, that's what i mean! w/mobile phones it was tech issues that slowed everyone down, but the reasons for those tech issues slowing everyone down was that the major players wouldn't/couldn't work together on common platforms that everyone could benefit from. with the web it's not tech that's the problem (despite endless discussions over HTML5 or whatever) it's content, and common platforms for content.

file systems are dead - the "rest of us" never really used them in the first place. the app was the portal. if i want to write a doc, i start Word, open things, save things. apple twigged this hardcore with the iPhone. similarly, with the advent of walled gardens and app versions of newspapers, addresses will be dead as well. the question is, what will replace the address bar and/or google as the vanilla starting block for accessing all this stuff?

lol quora is a kind of fascinating oversharing look into startup/valley culture atm http://www.quora.com/Mark-Zuckerberg-1/How-smart-is-Mark-Zuckerberg-academic-wise-Is-he-as-smart-as-Bill-Gates

"porn rules" is a joke but fuck it, porn will always be the innovative industry in how much of the internet works. Hell there was just a conference called http://www.contentprotectionretreat.com/index.html where the porn industry decided "The goal of the CPR is to significantly reduce digital piracy of adult content and to effectively drive those who engage in adult content piracy completely underground by January 2012."

i.e. so while newspapers and big production companies (music, tv and film industries etc.) just spend their time bitching and suing individuals, porn is getting shit done.

and its not like they never proved they can do whatever they put their minds to before, either

gdamn it! my answer to the quora gates/zukerb question has already been collapsed

Possible version of Chrome w/out URL bar: http://www.conceivablytech.com/5746/products/google-may-kill-chrome-url-bar/

hee hee.

i thought this was interesting, re walled gardens, payment, etc:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/18/the_payment_problem/

although obvs that couldve been avoided w/a more agile approach

― ice cr?m, Sunday, February 20, 2011 5:19 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha

for the thread's consideration http://diveintomark.org/archives/2011/02/18/ie9-is-the-new-ie6

rounded corners!

more on the subject of content platforms:

http://counternotions.com/2011/02/16/stores/

What choice do publishers have then? They first have to ask themselves two fundamental questions:

1. What business are we in? — Are we in the business of creating scarcity in news and media to leverage it against eyeballs for advertisers? Can our current model survive the transition to digital? Are we capable of setting up our own stores? If not, do we understand we must change our revenue streams radically? What sorts of structural and financial remodeling do we have to undergo internally to adjust to giving up 30% to Apple?

2. Quo vadis? — If our current distribution has to change, on whose digital platform will we move? Is there, in other words, an alternative to Apple App Store?

so carmelo anthony jut got traded to the ny knicks - espn is super conservative abt verifying breaking news so theres no confirmation of the deal on their site

http://grab.by/955S

but they do have this lil twitter widget w/all their reporters in it

http://grab.by/955j

clever

I think future of web=

* people who use general-purpose browsers "tomorrow" will all be considered about as normal as these dudes http://✧✧✧.mail-arch✧✧✧.com/lynx-✧✧✧@non✧✧✧.o✧✧/msg03394.html

* although perhaps the ubiquity of web competency nowadays means that many people will at least have the ability to use a general-purpose browser in their toolkit somewhere for such as porn, leaks, pirating, etc.

* "autodiscovery" won't be important if services are all linked to clients by apps. nobody is going to go back to operating and maintaining their own homepages no matter how much this guy wants to help us: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/nyregion/16about.html

* hypertext already failed at sharing academic and scientific literature. we're here 20 years later and ACM, IEEE, AAAS, etc all still guard their content behind paywalls and in the form of PDFs. epic, epic fail. so it's safe to say whatever content or open data initiatives we see in the near term (applying RDF concepts to all our data! learning how to make everything namespace-aware and building sweet XSLTs on the fly!) the keepers of the keys will continue as they always have and the amazing, groundbreaking results of all the potential mashups (as opposed to the obvious, dipshit mercator projection of population density as sampled via x service mashups) will stay in somebody's fucking towers, undiscoverable and unlinkable without $$$ up front

* in fact given that everybody is just going to have an app for their news vs. the other guys news it's liable to get far worse than it is today. I mean shit, the wikipedia model itself is to link internally first and then throw all the sources at the bottom, and they're the best of the latter-day web. everybody else links you to their own content period, fuck the rest; provider-specific apps will just make this far, far worse

* so the future of the web is that it becomes so proprietary that it becomes what we always said we wanted out of cable television: a la carte channels. No links between anything, but at least I'm not paying for some shit I don't want. Where there are links they're to FUNNIEZ between FRIENDZ so hey whatever chill out bro you're not even carles

* twitter already disassociates content by two degrees (tweet > obfuscated link > link > content) and the way people use it with tumblr nowadays the world keeps showing up like this (which is UNBELIEVABLY STUPID by the way): tweet > share/retweet > obfuscated link > link > tumblr > reblog > year-old photoshop and/or other artifact of a fictional event

(btw david shields can go fuck himself. terrible. can't trust anybody these days)

* what's the point of the future of the web? who's driving this bus? there's internet2 techies who want to build services to specific technocratic ends, and they've been doing that for a while. then there's kids and kids at heart who want to dick around web2.0 to build networks to satisfy whatever urge is the urge to have today. can anybody make actual money off of them besides apple, zynga and blizzard?

the web we know today is going to go the way of usenet and homepage rings, I don't think it's going to be replaced by anything so much as forgotten and only used by professors and actual code people. I hate to be all doctorow about it but IF the web is going to be changing significantly in the new social country of the 21st tomorrownets then I think the way it changes is to turn into a thing nobody calls a web anymore

so as for future of the internet I call you 200 channels with nothing on and raise you 80000000 channels. but some of them have porn so there's always something on.

david shields is a total dick, i agree

stop reposting my parentheticals with your editorial editing

I've really got to get cracking on this bruce bueno de mesquita shit, anyhoo

2. Quo vadis? — If our current distribution has to change, on whose digital platform will we move? Is there, in other words, an alternative to Apple App Store?

Oh yeah, Facebook. Duh

this guy gets it:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134336/focus=134979

you mean he wgets it

BOOM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ

"porn rules" is a joke but fuck it, porn will always be the innovative industry in how much of the internet works. Hell there was just a conference called http://www.contentprotectionretreat.com/index.html where the porn industry decided "The goal of the CPR is to significantly reduce digital piracy of adult content and to effectively drive those who engage in adult content piracy completely underground by January 2012."

i.e. so while newspapers and big production companies (music, tv and film industries etc.) just spend their time bitching and suing individuals, porn is getting shit done.

and its not like they never proved they can do whatever they put their minds to before, either

― if there is a King Moaty, apparently he is huge into slapstick. (a hoy hoy), Sunday, February 20, 2011 3:24 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark

not sure how holding a conference = getting shit done

i can announce that its my 'goal' to have hot naked chicks feeding me baby lobsters by 2012 but that doesnt mean i have some awesome plan to get it done

lol @ de Raadt

"Shame on, you hypocrite."

effectively drive those who engage in adult content piracy completely underground

Um, where it is right now?

Porn industry is kind of but not really the innovator you think it is here. The game bidness has been intimately aware of the piracy problem long before any other media industry unless maybe you count the cassette plague oh noes (lol whoa people actually added reviews of SA90's in 00's http://www.amazon.com/TDK-90-minute-Resolution-Cassette/dp/B00017YHME). lots of old standby copy-protection methods come out of game companies that shipped product on 5.25"s (type in your license code to register)

anyway what videogames have done to beat the pirates as best they can is force the content through proprietary platforms that they control, either by building content into obscure hardware like cart games or forcing an always-online check-in function. At any rate the App Store is really one big Steam engine tied to a hi-res Nintendo 1S that may or may not let you also make phone calls; so! if the future of the internet is about content lockdown, it's still app driven and everything turns back into cable tv. with better on-demand selection.

(Interestingly the other thing video game companies do that nobody else seems to (maybe porn does to, I dunno) is plan for the inevitable failure of their copy protection strategy. I love the bit in this article where the guy explains why shooting for a two month delay from official release to getting cracked is a big f'in deal:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3030/keeping_the_pirates_at_bay.php)

the NWW list thread over on ILM is an example of why I think the future of the web as app & "social" driven is pathetic and dumb. If semantic web actually worked for people instead of machines, those kinds of conversations could be presented as wiki articles or category trees while experts can continue to rattle off whatever they know in regular human back-and-forth in the regular thread

my habit of going back and writing pieces of posts in fits and starts and not giving anything the once-over before hitting submit is really starting to bite me in the wordsmith's ass

That's the future also.

I think general purpose browsers are going to be around for quite some time. The "location bar-less Chrome" idea that is going around right now is kind of dumb because, as far as Google's browser goes, the location field doubles as a search field and is the most important thing in the app for them. It's the one thing that very explicitly sends data to Google and lets them shape your browsing experience, especially when they've successfully conflated entering a URL with searching.

general purpose browsers will be around for a long time, I didn't say otherwise, but who will be using them and for what (businesses, for business, until apps for intranet travel booking and b2b stuff are more fully legitimized)? people like apps. people get espn and the weather on their phone and suddenly they forget that you can get that stuff on regular computers or even the television

It'll be interesting where the line between general search and specific apps ends up.
~nerd content begins~
I was with a friend over the weekend and we considered seeing a movie but didn't know showtimes or what was playing. He pulled out his phone and was starting up Flixster (movie-specific app) and I opened the Google iPhone app and just did a voice search ("movies in ames, iowa"). I ended up getting the results quicker, and with almost as much information, just not in a custom interface

The Google app is pretty much a web browser with some niceties like voice search, so it's not a general browser per se...

Memes and viral videos were cute a few years ago but I'm tired of them now. Memes like the phrase "haters gonna hate" or anything derivative of it makes me want to punch my monitor up to this point. I remember when fan fiction was actively made fun of by all members of Usenet, now all of a sudden it's socially acceptable and people like Cassandra Claire are getting published.

I guess I'm growing out of the internet, it's not the same thing I used back in 1997.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CnWs8jDbXo

Sadly that is how I order pizza, too.

all of the semantic stuff is pretty much brand new to me, but yeah, whenever we talk about it with people at work there's always an old grizzled IT pro who is basically like "people have been talking this up for a decade, and nothing ever gets done."

ha, that's me

but this is the second time today I have encountered this phrase so I guess it is getting revived for another go

can somebody explain semantic web to me like I'm a 5-year old - is it like skynet

basically you should be able to navigate the internet without the techy stuff like URLs and search terms, based more on human language

in a way this has been realized since I can type "how do you cook a meatloaf?" into google and get an answer, but I guess it would become the dominant paradigm for getting around on the internet

wondering if the watson shit also has people thinking about the possibilities diff now

also, if you feel like having fries, the internet instantly orders fries delivered to your door for you

I would like some fries right now

*waits patiently*

plz read thread title

I guess the other component of it is that machines on the internet will understand/synthesize the knowledge of other machines on the internet, allowing for automatic aggregation of content without human intervention

if you're feeling sleepy you can read more here obv

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

I often take a little walk on my 'lunch break' (working at home) and will get a beer and walk down to a nearby nondescript park - last week I realize I'd left my phone at home and had this mini-panic... but then I was just like 'dude, you don't need your phone - get a beer and watch the dogs and the redwood trees and the birds' and it was perfectly enjoyable and the world didn't end

I might start enforcing this once in a while

living through this whole ai thing and seeing phone-addicted young people everywhere - how they inhabit space while looking at their phones - and then seeing how people essentially become tweets and reels and posts irl - has me increasingly believing that the mobile internet and info tech at large is some kind of lovecraftian force of sublime horror longing to subsume us.

― she freaks, she speaks (map)

you know, i was just contemplating how the more i think about the american president, the more sanity damage i take. lovecraftian horror works, but i tend to think of the internet as more of a memetic hazard, a Langford Death Parrot

I Love Dumbphones and believe they are the future

I was thinking early this morning that I'm addicted to my phone (I was going to put in a qualifying statement there; don't need one). Quitting booze was relatively straightforward, since I needed to think about avoiding compulsions, etc, at certain points of the day/week. My phone is so entwined in my life, I don't really know how I'm going to extricate myself from it. The moment I think about not having music and podcasts available, I panic.

That said, my most pathetic capitulation is usually 'but what about my steps?!'

i honestly think it's ok to be ok with things we don't really have a say in, where the force is stronger than our will. is that why hitler / trump happened? i don't know but i can't keep myself on the hook for things i have literally no control over any more. some of phone integration into life is like that, i think. maps is probably the big one for me. i don't think it's given enough thought and acknowledgment how much having a satellite map in your pocket has changed our experience of being physically in the world. anyway that's a pet topic of mine.

i'm basically being forced to use my phone less because i can't afford a new one. it's mostly an ipod i can use to call and text for me at this point. i've offloaded a lot of apps to have enough room for a few extra albums. it can't handle video and it can barely take a decent photo. it's still a few steps above a dumb phone. there's that old adage about being poor - nothing will teach you to become less attached than having less to attach to. lol.

the bar I go to for some reason is a total dead spot for my phone, I'll be honest it's actually pretty nice

I still have an old cell plan without any data (or barely any, I have 250mb per month, which I reserve for text messages and google maps) which keeps me from just randomly checking internet stuff when I'm outside of my house. The problem isn't so much the cell phone, whose primary use continues to be as a music/podcast player, it's the internet connection. Not having data works pretty well for me for the most part, I just have to work on getting out of the house more often.

I'm not tied to my phone at work, thankfully. I teach, and whole days can go by where I *can't* check my phone at all. Which brings its own problems...

I've worked *really* hard at not being available to the demands of messaging and social media. WhatsApp, etc., set up a whole suite of implied contracts with response times, availability, etc., none of which we sign up for. I've had to coach people to accept responses when I can, or when I want to - not because I don't care but because I don't want the expectation that I'm always available. A few people have pretty much cut me off because they think I'm rude. Eh.

i've definitely been using my phone less since my recent 'upgrade' to a new one, they're making it pretty easy with how shitty and intrusive all the software has gotten

i'll never abandon the hobbyist internet but that's practically a different thing than the normie internet at this point, with only a couple points of intersection like youtube and wikipedia

I know its been said a lot but I think we've reached end stage internet. It feels so creepy to be on it these days. The ways you are being monitored are so incredibly unsubtle these days. If I search a LeBron stat I'll get fed LeBron clickbait for a week. If I click on any product page I'll get served ads for that product for an entire month. If my wife starts watching a new TV show without me I know because I'm suddenly seeing it on my homepage. If I look up the price of a concert ticket I'll get emailed by every major ticket vendor in the country almost immediately. It's not just that it's that the internet itself is becoming less and less reliable. I feel like my generation is pretty good at discerning reliable info from bullshit but it's just getting harder and harder every day and AI has caused the amount of fake shit to increase exponentially. It also seems to have poisoned our brains as a country enough to elect Donald Trump not once but twice. And now that people want to pull back a little bit you find that you really can't. To quote God's favorite pedophile, "everything's computer"

i am not real

https://protos.com/the-dead-internet-theory-is-getting-a-rebrand-meet-web-4-0/

actually what spurned this bump on is the realization that in the last week I've gotten into a couple FB arguments with people who are likely bots. I click on their profiles and think there's no way these are real people. they look too young to have so much brain poisoning. sometimes their feed is just them changing their profile pic to different people. at this point AI is pretty good at writing ragebait. granted it's hard to tell because phones are really good at cleaning up everyone's language now. the misspelled words and punctuation errors that was at one point a dead giveaway that you were dealing with a live moron are gone.

and yeah I know the internet was always a cesspool but at least it was *our* cesspool. you just know those fast food CEOs are sending out companywide emails bragging about how many views their content about their food product are getting. as horrible as some places on the internet were back in the day at least you didn't feel like everything was designed to exploit your addiction by feeding you infinite content. even most video games are like that now, you can't beat anything anymore, they're effectively endless. thats why I still like ILX and Bluesky, they're fairly active but not active enough to take up too much of your attention each day

One thing I despise about FB right now (and I don't think it's my imagination) is how cursor-sensitive their ads have become. If I use the laptop with the touchpad instead of a mouse, ads are constantly popping up that I've barely grazed moving from one spot to another.

Leave while you still can!

Bot or real person I wouldn't recommend trying to change a stranger's mind on facebook.

The internet does become more tolerable once you drop the socials, granted the sites I visit are now in the single digits and will presumably continue dying off.

its mostly just blowing off steam. particularly in the aftermath of the killings in Minnesota. so many comments arguing they deserved it and then me jumping in to say "there's literally video which contradicts everything you're saying you dumb pedophile-worshipping piece of shit". it feels a little good but then FB picks up on that and shows you every controversial article on the subject it has to offer. so I guess I'm the one really being played here.

the thing that's really irritating to me is the way casino tactics are embedded into everything now. both in this increasing focus on metrics - YouTube in particular is really wild with this, with a 'studio' view that shows you exactly how your videos are performing relative to your other ones and where they are dropping off, and how everything is trying to trick you into engaging...Reddit is now pretty bad with this, giving you fake notifications every time you visit which are often things like "wow! you posted two days in a row! can you post THREE days in a row!???". you know, back in my day too much posting was a bad thing. if you posted too much clickbait bullshit on the SomethingAwful forums some admin would hit you with a weeklong ban.

frogbs - do you get those click bait NBA stories where they make all these fake tweets of different players "dunking" on each other that are completely fake?

no...what I do get a lot of though is NBA trash talk that's obviously fake...stuff like Trae Young saying he could take '98 Jordan one-on-one

frogs, what you describe is part of why I left FB

$77bn down the drain then

https://www.theverge.com/tech/881647/meta-vr-mobile-metaverse-horizon-worlds

August J. Pollak‬
✧@augustjpol✧✧✧.b✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧‬
· 5h
If instead of wasting 78 billion dollars on the Metaverse, Facebook had instead invested it all in NVidia stock in 2022, they would now have 1.74 trillion dollars okay I'll stop now