future of ~the internet~

yeah but that kind of stats-juking is getting less popular as advertisers catch on.

the web has been getting more appified as the years go by, and I imagine it'll continue.

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

i hate that rss feeds are so passe now

i love my google reader

The slideshow thing is an inheritance of Duke Berners Lee. 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).

I think that combines with the whole request/response thing that means content on the web is totally about "ask for a page of things", "get a page of things", "choose another page" and it becomes the dominant metaphor. Now every damn news site is basically the same.

Then apps came along and were totally different -- much more about continuous async flows of stuff instead of ask/wait/ask/wait. This affected how they presented content, and I think it made it easier for people to navigate (certainly the content sites I know of see massively more "pages" per visit on iPhone than they do on their sites or mobile web).

Gawker saw that and wanted in. They fucked it up, but I think that's where we're going. 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.

This post reads like a load of wank to me, and content-centric networking sounds like OpenDoc in its "makes sense for a bit then doesn't" plausibility, but maybe there's something in it.
http://al3x.net/2011/02/15/internet-future.html

also thats a much nicer, cleaner design--hate the faux-3d shit on the real site

― max, Sunday, February 20, 2011 12:26 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

omg yes h8 fakeo 3d dropshadow bullshit on so many sites - its like respect things for what they are, use design to elucidate not obscure

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

i want kotaku to update in an irregular way, like every 3-5 days. and on that day, it should only run interesting articles, even if there is only one. and kotaku should ICQ me and say "i updated my website! :DD" . i will hear "uh oh!" and walk over to the giant CRT and read it, then excitedly sit down to read what my friend has written this time

the model for quite a long time now, and not just kotaku, has been volume and lots of it

sigh. it's true. but has it always been this vapid? it's relentless.

first of all, why did i just instinctively visit kotaku.com to see what was new? secondly, this was what was new

You may now buy an ugly, slow, Mario-themed TAG Heuer smartwatch for $2,150

the headlines themselves have gotten to a point where they seem intended for the viewer to say "hmph!" in a way that's closest to disillusion with existence itself. but after that, the content of the story is also like that. everything has become fully saturated with it.

why can't a website just focus on the GOOD news!? people would love that! nothing but good news, imagine reading that!

(jk, i know this theory is tested in small towns across the country for the last 50+ years, and in fact, no one wants to read only good news)

https://i.imgur.com/uvi1gU4.png

"finally, in the year 2021, an op-ed by the editorial board of the Washington Post changed the course of climate change for the better. it was called "Hey, world, are you noticing? Floods! Fires! Could it be time to do something about climate change?"

oops! that was an reference to a sentence i deleted from an earlier post, where i wondered whether that same existentialist vapidity had come from, or spread to, newspaper op-ed sections. i deleted it because i thought "...eh, who cares". but then a minute later, over the post, it's right there. it's everywhere on my screen. there must be a solution for this. and the solution is probably on my screen somewhere, hold on

hmph

i wanna know more about these nearly 140k eggs

i would say the ubisoft one is an actual headline too but the rest yeah it's minor updates to games or reporting on social media discourse or whatever

Ray-Ban Stories

https://www.ray-ban.com/uk/electronics/RW4004%20UNISEX%20ray-ban%20stories%20|%20wayfarer-black/8056597489478

i like this

https://search.marginalia.nu

https://the-crypto-syllabus.com/yanis-varoufakis-on-techno-feudalism/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w52CziLgnAc

"Photoreal Avatars"

wild

idk if this is the thread for such concerns, but where is anyone even visiting/reading on the net outside of youtube/reddit/socials anymore? my love affair with the web blossomed in the middle of web 2.0, and community felt so abundant and alive then. i don't think it was rose-tinted glasses; the fun of anonymity, identity and personalization were embedded in the regular infrastructure of many sites - but now, everything feels so homogenous. not to mention navigating through endless captchas, cookies, 2fas, emails, notifications... i guess communities have centralized and blogs have died... but i really feel like i only open safari now to check a few reddit communities and watch yt. it's making me a bit sad...

I still use RSS feeds as much as I ever did; that and Twitter is still taking me to places across the web but definite drop in the non-homogenous weird-little-site I rock up to

outside of work, where I spend a lot of time on Slack and stack(overflow|exchange)-type sites, I find my internet usage decreasing to almost nothing in my spare time. A few social sites (ILX being one of them), hobby Discords, and a handful of kinda-trustworthy news sites. Search engines have gotten to the point of being almost useless unless a person cares enough to get good at filtering out the vast sea of seemingly “AI”-generated dreck that try to pass as how-to or product review articles.

basically i've become the fulfillment of the ad-based internet economy, pretty much everything i do on the internet leads to some kind of purchase. idk it's helped me to be honest about that rather than think the information i consume is "important" in any way.

even after spending a lifetime on the internet and using it to escape the shitty culture i was born into, i frankly just don't believe that "actual" community can exist solely through the internet, and that it never did. internet can be a support but there has to be bodies in shared space or there isn't community imo.

I still go to a fair number of sites, don't know if there's much point listing them tho as they're so niche - mostly to do with comics, food in London, a few movie blogs.

What I've stopped doing tho is exploring - hardly ever find a new site via links from one I'm reading, never google a term to find sites associated with it. That's def been supplanted by YouTube, sadly.

Hanging out in discords has a bit of that old message board feel and is def superior to facebook and twitter.

I got on the internet in the mid-1990s, when anonymity was not the default - people posted to Usenet with their real names and indeed email addresses - so I suppose in that respect Twitter is a bit of a throwback. It was smaller then and perhaps because of that it felt more information-dense, but I'll concede that there's a lot more content nowadays, it's just that the ratio is unfavourable. And people were assholes back then. Massive assholes. Not in the way you'd expect, but still massive assholes.

As for general internet use I am occasionally reminded of how bleak large chunks of the modern internet are whenever I have to use a computer that doesn't have adblock, or I'm abroad and Google insists on making me use the non-personalised version of Google News. Google News' default is its own take on what is relevant in the US, which almost certainly isn't what people in the US actually want to read. I have met people from the US in real life - I was going to say "Americans" but you're going to complain that I could be talking about people from South America or Canada etc - and neither of them were dummies.

Also, simple technical queries. What's the difference between Crucial's MX and BX SSDs? Google presents page after page of links such as Crucial BX500 Vs MX500 - Which Is Better One? [New 2021], which is supposed to make you think the page was made with love and care by a human being, or alternatively "robo-content", which usually goes e.g. "SSDS are solid state drives. There are many differences between them. You might be looking for the differences. I'm going to tell you the differences. It's important to understand the differences etc" without getting to the point. In which case Reddit etc are the only option, because they're written by real people. For the record Crucial's MX SSDs have on-chip write levelling, or some kind of memory chip that looks after the SSD, whereas the BX models don't have that.

Meanwhile professional media organisations are a wasteland of poor-quality writing by unpaid interns, or on-message rubbish written to fill a quota. I don't want to hear what a 21-year-old man has to say about human society. You're 21, you're a five-year-old sixteen-year-old boy. You've memorised a lot of command line switches and facts and figures. You don't have a soul yet! You aren't conscious, or self-aware, and more importantly you aren't in a position to speak your mind because you're sackable. Totally sackable.

This is one of the reasons I participate on Ilxor etc. Firstly because it sets my mind in motion, and secondly so that I have something to read in the future. A few years from now I'll forget that I wrote this post, and I'll stumble on it and think "that was entertaining" and "that man is witty but could do with proofreading" and of course that man will be me. I am lighting a candle, but it's my candle, and it's actually a tape, as in Krapp's Last Tape, and I mean some of you are pretty good as well.

It has to be said that the internet circa 1995 was also filled with assholes, but a different kind; petty little fifty-something engineers. There are a few relics of that demographic on e.g. Airlines.net or Photo.net, because they've been around since the 1990s and have some of the same participants, now old men. Also blu-ray.com, which is full of people boasting about their collection of 4K blu-rays that they bought to replace their original blu-rays that are now junk. The same people in the 1990s would have had a large shelf with Star Trek VHS tapes, two episodes per tape, total spend £700 etc.

But this was predicted. I remember an old essays from 2001 or so called Content is Not King. It argued that the internet was email and social connections, not newspapers. It's one of those "too early to say" topics twenty-one years later:
https://firstmonday.org/article/view/833/742

I've been covering bad parts of the internet for long time now.

For years, there was one site extremist researchers warned me not to cover because publicizing it would be dangerous.

But it's time people know KiwiFarms—and how they're chasing political enemies around the world.

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) September 2, 2022

#legs are coming soon

search results are SO TRASH it’s driving me bananas and AI seems guaranteed to make it worse, help me i used to really like the internet

Time to start publishing printed books of cool links again

xp i tried to talk about this on another thread and somebody told me "just go to the library"

https://i.imgur.com/6x1qcOA.png

Google Image Search is especially impressive in how frequently it fails completely.