future of ~the internet~

http://grab.by/93lb

hey doodz thinking we could muse abt the state of technology/design/business of the net in here - feel like theres some good ilx conversion on the topic but its sort of scattered and intermittent - itd be cool if people went full nerd and dropped some knowledge in here regardless of its esotericism

porn rules.

despite not having any background in IT, that's what half of my job revolves around. We've been working on pilots all year to test out "Linked Data" (AKA Linked Open Data or LOD, and heavily overlapping with the Semantic Web) concepts that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has been pushing for the last several years.

Linked Open Data is actually pretty exciting because it's a way of structuring data so that it can be automatically detected by other machines - could be a huge boon to researchers. could also help Watson REALLY kick ass on Jeopardy! next time. However, unfortunately I'm not yet educated enough to go full nerd on the concept. :-/

ie, a human would never be able to keep all of the connections between these datasets in mind, but properly structured linked open data could:

http://i55.tinypic.com/xdxge0.png

anyway i was gonna this comment on one of the gawker threads but ima put it here - thinking abt how the gawker redesign is trying to port some of the functionality/ui of native mobile apps back to the web and its not really working out mostly because its hard to get the feel right - i imagine its because of the variety of platforms/browsers/machines people access the web on is so vast

this is obvs part of a larger trend - theres chrome apps for nytimes and huffpost that are v similar and have the same jankey feel problem - the only site that seems to have done it right yet is twitter - and they kept it super simple by just implementing the pop out side pannel - on native apps particularly like iphone where youre developing for four devices total its much easier to control the feel

its interesting cause theres all this powerful technology that makes these sites possible but then youre left w/this subjective very hard to control in the fractured web environment make or break proposition which ends up being just sort of vibe based - like do people feel they can groove w/yr site

btw lmao scott

zs this more or less talking abt the semantic web that people think is the next big leap right

ever since 2001, yep

i swear it's ALMOST here this time, promise!

btw infos on the image of obama nerd dinner http://www.businessinsider.com/people-at-obamas-tech-dinner-2011-2 p amazing collection of people

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 yeah i think one of the main things thats made the web so successful is that its really easy to make web pages and theres a lot of different ways to do it - that flexibility has made barriers to entry low and a lot of creativity possible but its also made the whole thing a big delightful mess - people have tried to organize it but even like xhtml got the gassface because it was too uptight

if the future of the internet involves "ECM solutions that don't arbitrarily try to jam everything in a bunch of nested tables" i for one support our new etc

anyway, that's going to be about the extent that i can "contribute" to this thread because i barely even know about the present state of the internet, let alone the future, but pretty excited to see what others have to say!

well im personal v interested in what u have to say re being involved in this semantic web project in proximity to the god tim berners lee - come back and tell us more - i think youll find by attempting to explain what youre all up to youll understand better and in no time at all youll be in charge of the entire internet!

thinking more abt the gawker/twitter redesigns and the urge to port native app qualities to the web while making and eating pancakes that the subject connects nicely to a popular shift in design/development practices which is the preference for frequent minor iterations over big redesigns - an example would be the way facebook goes abt tweaking things here and there constantly - the benefits are obvious from the pov of easing users into changes and testing discrete aspects of what youre trying to do - there are some draw backs from the pov of lock in/status quo bias/ability to be bold

but i think an underrated aspect of this approach is it helps you think abt what youre doing - really contemplate each lil piece and how it fits into yr strategy/philosophy - it can bring you back down to earth and open up compelling new lines of thought

gawker is maybe not the best example to continue using in this convo as they have a whole nother related problem in that their new shit is just quite broken - although obvs that couldve been avoided w/a more agile approach

its interesting too that they got in early in this trend but theyre not a technology company so maybe they dont really have the chops to pull it off

was thinking the first big departure from the feel/functionality of the traditional slide show style one full page after another web site model to a more flowing/asynchronous environment is the infinite scrolling on the facebook/etc news feed - everyone is p confortable w/it at this point - that i imagine will be the thing that first filters down to more traditional sites

im trying not to comment on the redesign but this is a kind of interesting thing:

http://qawker.linkbouncr.com/

i.e. what the redesign could be like if it isnt/wasnt so buggy

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

but note for example how much it changes the feel of the page when scrolling actually works

was thinking the first big departure from the feel/functionality of the traditional slide show style one full page after another web site model to a more flowing/asynchronous environment is the infinite scrolling on the facebook/etc news feed - everyone is p confortable w/it at this point - that i imagine will be the thing that first filters down to more traditional sites

would LOVE if that became more common, but isn't the whole point of the tedious slide show format to drive up page views/ad revenue?

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

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

But isn't the other aspect of the semantic web that the producers of content have to add a lot of structured metadata to everything? Besides the sociological issues (convincing everyone to add metadata) my impression was that the big problem is designing formal languages that are expressive enough to capture a broad swathe of information types while still permitting the kind of computation that semantic web dudes dream about.

(I don't know a whole lot about the semantic web, to be fair)

That was an xp I guess.

my issue with the semantic web as a concept is it always seems to be explained in the most tortured language ever, can somebody explain this benefit:

The key element is that the application in context will try to determine the meaning of the text or other data and then create connections for the user. The evolution of Semantic Web will specifically make possible scenarios that were not otherwise, such as allowing customers to share and utilize computerized applications simultaneously in order to cross reference the time frame of activities with documentation and/or data. According to the original vision, the availability of machine-readable metadata would enable automated agents and other software to access the Web more intelligently. The agents would be able to perform tasks automatically and locate related information on behalf of the user.

The idea of a semantically-structured web doesn't necessarily have anything to do with searching or machine learning, although those are two areas that would strongly benefit.

Basically, it's the end-game of separating visual design and content to the point where the entire document -- using "document" as a definition of a full piece of content -- should be machine-parsable. HTML doesn't lend particularly well to this, although some of the newer proposed tags lend well to defining the beginning/end of blog posts, individual article titles within a page, etc.

Things like RDF, or even RSS, define specific tags for dates, author, etc.

It's not that you'll have to add tons of metadata to everything, it's more a matter that the metadata that we're already embedding is not properly structured. Tagging is ok, metatagging is dumb and irrelevant since it's best used internally in organizations (externally, it's historically just for SEO).

Edward, I think they're trying to say that I should be able to look up blog posts in a specific timeframe and see facebook posts/twitter posts by the same person easily, all using clearly-defined semantic data (standardized date tags).

see, that seems like a retro-fitted explanation to me, since this social network stuff wasn't really on the horizon in 2001 when the semantic web was conceptualized

it's like a theory that's so abstruse and generalized that you can look at anything and call it semantic web

like is this really semantic web? finding stuff to put in yr shopping cart quicker at bestbuy?

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9209118/The_semantic_Web_gets_down_to_business

one of the big aha moments I had recently was seeing how the droid handles contact management - aggregating your friends' facebook/gmail/twitter/flickr/whatever to a single identity so you can engage with them holistically

that seemed like a big breakthrough in communication/notification etc and something long the lines of the example mh gave, but that seems like an extension of social networking, the internet actor as discrete content aggregator, not some 2001 metatagging type stuff

I'm retrofitting it in that I'm mentioning current services, but it's really the general idea.

Things like grafting RDF tags on to HTML (like the example on the semantic web wikipedia entry) is useful for search engine crawling, but it blows compared to specialized feeds. Microformats are nice, but I don't even think Apple has detection in Safari, which is funny considering their mail client sniffs for events and contacts and the microformats for those pretty much say "this is a contact".

Much of the semantic web data is available, it's just in proprietary data feeds via API.

Edward, I know they're hammering out issues, but did you notice any duplication of contacts or weird guesses in the Droid aggregation? You're going to run into that issue anywhere that there isn't a unique identifier (like email address or phone number) that is shared between services, but the point of a semantic web with standards is that you could just point to your page of contacts on any of those services and they'd either be in the same format or at least tagged with standard tags that your device would recognize. As it is, someone at Google just programmed a different adapter for each service.

Note that I'm using "tags" in the XML sense, not in the metatagging sense.

Note that I'm just describing semantic web ideals, here. I don't think we'll ever see anything near universal support because lock-in and in-house "innovation" are always going to stomp on the benefits of having an open format.

slightly glib observation but seems relevant:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/05/the-web-browser-address-bar-is-the-new-command-line.html

the big problem is designing formal languages that are expressive enough to capture a broad swathe of information types while still permitting the kind of computation that semantic web dudes dream about

that's always been my assumption too. something could happen where domain-specific taxonomies get traction, and then some of those get interoperability and we have some centers of gravity ... but i don't see what would drive that, especially with everyone trying to lock up their users.

micro sofft thinks the future is clouds lol

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

― El Tomboto, Tuesday, February 22, 2011 2:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

fyi currently US smartphone percentage is something like 30% to say nothing of the rest of the earth which tends to be considerably behind the first world

i'm just sayin

*smartphone PENETRATION percentage

probably higher in east Asia which is where the 21st century is

just sayin

ya'll making out like Twitter and Facebook are here for good, but you just know in five years time everyone will have moved on, and what they'll have moved on to will start off as an underground, non-app supported thing, launched from a straight-up browser. It's always the way of these things.

xp, also higher in europe where mobile phones happened before like 2006 or whenever they first arrived in the U.S.

"It's always the way of these things."

Yeah totes remember when this happened in the 70s.

30% smartphone "penetration" is pretty staggering considering the first smartphone that wasn't a piece of shit was introduced in 2007

Thing starts underground, becomes popular, monitised, adopted by the mainstream, taste-makers move on. This is hardly a new phenomenon. xp

Yes but some things become so ubiquitus that they just don't move on. Something will have to be pretty fucking special to provide what an alternative to not only us but our parents in what Facebook currently does.

Twitter isn't yet part of everyone in the worlds daily lives, so yeah I can see something taking it over.

Something will have to be pretty fucking special to provide what an alternative to not only us but our parents in what Facebook currently does.

Will it really though? Facebook is just Twitter + Flickr + email. At least that's how most people use it.

"Yes but some things become so ubiquitus that they just don't move on"

you sound like francis fukuyama. facebook will have plenty of users but negligible cultural/econmic impact in 5-10 years. twitter will be nothing, and is already kind of a joke which no one who matters takes seriously afaict.

the importance of facebook as mentioned by somebody in the fb thread is that they got everybody to use their government names xp

an interesting question for me in a post URL world is how will content get passed around. URL shorteners Are heinous. ideally you'd be able to get some kind of preview before you click on it - but so far implementations on blogspot or w/e have been beyond bad.

I got it though - PiP browsing - window inset into your browser gives you a preview when you hover- where's my 10 million dollars VCs

twitter will be nothing, and is already kind of a joke which no one who matters takes seriously afaict.

!!

Why wouldn't the next thing start as an app? Instagram was app-only at first.

I think the global future is going to be pretty interesting considering smartphones -- and I wonder how long we'll keep using that word, as it smells like mothballs -- are more widely used than computers in some areas and are the primary way some people are using the internet. For anyone who's not in an office in front of a computer, I'd guess that they use the internet a lot more from their phone than they ever do on a desktop or laptop.

We're starting to see more situations like Instagram where it's a matter of determining how the primary mobile use can be extended or enhanced by a full web browser or desktop application.

twitter will be nothing, and is already kind of a joke which no one who matters takes seriously afaict.

plz expand on this

i mean this is its future: http://twitter.com/bbccomingofage. not that it is going to be overtaken by [self-]promotion but that it is no longer "cool"

i thought the twitter narrative was pointles>gimmicky>useful for certain things>twitter feeds being referred to in news items

referred to in news items = death i think

i mean does anyone seriously think it's going to be around in, say, 10 years? i'm just saying it's going to be quicker than that, i guess.

what's gonna replace it?

i don't know

if i did i would be drinking mountain dew to a soundtrack by trent reznor, not talking to you assholes

when you have a credible* replacement for public communications call me and we'll get some angel funding

*not blogs, tumblr, facebook, etc

not buying the implicit assumption in that that there is a real need or desire for "public communications" of 160 chars that is of interest to any more than a tiny tiny fraction of the population, once the initial craze has died down ca. 2012.

there i said it.

that a lot of people use it (although it's not really that many) does not mean it solves a ubiquitous problem. a lot of people bought tamagotchis.

people didn't use tamagotchis to help organise worldwide political protests tho

1) people didn't use twitter either!

2) rolling revolutions in developing countries is not a business model.

facebook statuses already do everything twitter does

i don't use twitter much myself, but that's because i'm a geek and use an actual rss reader. real people get their links from twitter.

facebook is too oriented around real-world friends and the interface is increasingly awful.

lol at "real people get their links from twitter."

also lots of things help organize worldwide political protests, like way more than twitter does, we just don't hear about them because they aren't "twitter."

there is literally nothing twitter does that facebook can't adapt itself to do better. it's been shifting away from being oriented around real-world friends for a long time now.

twitter is awful and useless imo, only time I ever look at it is when someone links to it

the future is awful and useless

caek, getting/posting links is a lot of the value of twitter for the many, many non-geeks who use it.

i think facebook will die before twitter does. it's just trying to do too many things at once.

i sort of always wondered how exactly rss readers would take over the world. barring some iPad-based miracle it looks like they won't for a while. twitter has that space locked up.

all been downhill since the glory days of compuserve imo

i was just lolling at the idea that twitter users are somehow representative of "real people"

love twitter but trying to rationalise this is a waste of time really. i'd expect it to eventually allow longer tweets just via a 'read more' option anyway. would probably quit facebook if it wasn't for its usefulness just as a social diary.

yeah it would be cool if they allowed longer tweets and also had a 'like' button but then wait it would just be facebook minus everything else facebook can do

i'm lolling at the idea that a usable forum for public communications is some fad

maybe facebook will own it, i dunno. but it's not like twitter is surviving on novelty value.

apparently the future of the internets is some twitter fbook grudge match

who will survive and what will be left of them

i'm lolling at the idea that a usable forum for public communications is some fad

forums for public communications can not be a fad or die ever

yeah seriously, it's possible that in ten years ~neither~ will be around, and what "replaces" them might not look like either.

how will the revolutions organize then though ?! rip political change and human communication : (

will html be around in 10 years

i previously summarised my feelings abt twitter btw

its like i dont understand the conventions, and it feels like boring middleaged ppl figured it out quicker than i did and i'm sick of watching the news and they do their twitter bit and i'm like what? why do ppl on twitter matter. And the stupid fake words its generated are uniformly irritating like what retweet? idk then theres this thing where you're supposed to follow things in realtime now and i'm like what i cant keep up and all of this is gibberish to me.

― plax (ico), Friday, February 4, 2011 9:58 PM (2 weeks ago)

so the future = centralization then? apps just become UI shells that do all the dirty work via cloud computing, media is all delivered via streaming services from a central server (ie spotify, netflix's on demand thing, etc). nothing is decentralized except the actual device (phone, pad, whatever you want to call it)

haven't said a word about revolutions

"may not look like either" - well, duh. but the point is that twitter and facebook actually provide value to people, and will not die until something else emerges that can provide equivalent value.

tamagotchis provided value

First, anyone who thinks that twitter is a substitute for linear conversations like those on facebook wall posts, ilx, etc. is nuts.

Second, twitter is useful because of its limitations, and what you can build off of those. The entire idea that you've got this activity stream that you can zoom into for further content (iPad app actually lets you pinch-zoom user info, and slides in a web browser window) or view as low-bandwidth text is pretty neat.

Also, don't know if anyone noticed or cares, but facebook uses xmpp chat now, so you can use the same programs to connect to google talk or facebook chat.

there are a million substitutes that provide roughly equivalent value as tamagotchis

after about 3 1/2 yrs with one, finally entirely deleted my facebook account and after getting over initial withdrawal (erm, yes) that included a lot of logging back in (mostly to look at picture's of my best high-school friend's new latina girlfriend), i've hardly ever think of it - and have an insane amount of free-time i never actually thought i had in the first place.

it rly doesn't help that there is no "insta-delete" button, but a 2wk ~necessary~ wait period in which they wink and tell you your account will be deleted after then.

but god what a relief it is to not meet somebody and know they'll not be going home tonight to browse through "my life" and judge what music/whatever taste i like. i feel human again or something.

can we get back to talking about the semantic web

there are a million substitutes that provide roughly equivalent value as tamagotchis

― just woke up (lukas), Wednesday, February 23, 2011 3:06 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

babies

future of internet isn't just the semantic web

sometimes it's tamagotchis

core facebook/twitter services

status update
social graph
profile
location

now facebook and twitter may not be the leading companies providing these services in ten years but the demand for them isnt going away

twitter's main service is being a top notch celebrity-trolling vehicle

fad-monger

xp

i kinda think that via the emergence of the internet of things that profile and location will be more valuable than status and social - so facebook and twitter could remain at the top of their current markets while being simultaneously rendered somewhat irrelevant

also im know im way behind on this covo but i dont think the future of the net is walled app gardens - i dont think theres much demand for the most basic function of the web to be wholesale taken away

twitter's main service is being a top notch celebrity-trolling vehicle

― ℳℴℯ　❤＼(◕‿◕✿ (Princess TamTam), Wednesday, February 23, 2011 4:03 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha yes it has allowed us to get closer to our idols than ever before

jordan is engaged to jose cansecos daughter iirc

let us not forget ~solar panels~

timoreilly Tim O'Reilly
Solar rooftops as social network? Why @sungevity’s New Hire From LinkedIn is No Surprise http://bit.ly/gZqlsJ
53 seconds ago

twitter is like seeing thousands of headlines to articles I never want to read

lots of tweets are headlines, maybe follow diff people idk

i don't "get" twitter

lol u old

thats maybe the biggest barrier to twitter mass adoption, when you look at it its doesnt necessarily make sense, all the RT # @ nomenclature particularly isnt doing them any favors

i do think their new thing of calling themselves an information network is a pretty good pithy explanation

the advantages twitter seems to have over facebook: asymmetric relationships, simplicity

the word "tweet"

i dont even know wth twitter is but i will find any excuse i can to say "retweet" out loud

twitter is broadcast, facebook is ephemeral but concentrated

yeah that sounds abt right

on the other hand: facebook is a book w/faces in it, twitter is a bird

It's weird, I say random one-off stupid comments on twitter and people who have met me from work will follow me there, but I will say a completely different set of personal things on facebook.

main advantage of twitter over fb = people use it as an actual breaking news source mainly due to the effectiveness of the trends feature (altho obv trends gets swamped with trivial shit too) and that legitimises conversations/rants to actually take place within twitter where stuff is so often first learned.

twitter is more about timely delivery, facebook is more about standing relationships

classic comms theory is engineers trying to be sociologists, like it describes the shape of something but that's it. "this room is square," well yes, i might behave a little differently because it's square but... not really.

i for one think tombot and tracer hand have been otm so far to which i might add, future of the internet is all about 1) abstraction as a method of control and 2) means of profit 3) around ownership of content and that the biggest semantic developments are going to be about describing ownership of ideas. if u really want to affect / fuck with the future of the internet, affect / fuck with copyright law. but make sure u get lots of money first.

xposts

ehhh it just seems like a blatantly pessimistic/misanthropic forecast not really founded on anything

i mean so far the story of the internet re copyright of content is a weakening trend

Ive tried so hard to find twitter useful and engaging and I just dont. FB sucked me in though even when I didnt want it to. I've always been more of a blogger I guess, so there's that. Heck I still use my livejournal.

On aother branch of the future of the internet though:

IPv4 vs IPv6. When's this going to happen? It must be at the point of happening by force now, what with IANA or whoever saying "hey guys we're running out of IP addresses btw" recently.

i use google reader prolly how ppl use twitter but i mean i dont want all this information ppl are telling me twitter is too fast slow the f down imo

I only have like 6 ppl on twitter that I even follow, and i had to un-follow one because without exaggeration he tweeted every 5-15 minutes. My page was just flooded with his random shit.

what do people make of Flipbook? I don't have an iPad so I've never used it but a kind of twitterized rss reader with a slick integrated design.. well it FEELS like the future somehow. then again it's not so very different from the "portalmania" of the late 90s

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e66/LimitedLiabilityGirl/WebofAngels.jpg

Found on "take shelf" today!! Totally reading this tonight.

JUST FYI the back sez:

The Web links the many worlds of humanity. Most people can only use it to communicate. Some can retrieve and store data, as well as use simple precoded programs. Only a privileged few are able to create their own software, within prescribed limits.

And then there are the Webspinners.

Grailer is Fouth Literate, able to manipulate the Web at will--and use it for purposes unintended and impossible for anyone but the most talented Webspinner. Obviously he cannot be allowed to live.

Condemned to death at the age of nine, Grailer must go underground, hiding his skills, testing his powers--until he is ready to do battle with the Web itself!

Obviously he cannot be allowed to live.

His name was Jon Williams.

This is the future of the internet iirc

xp lolololol Trayce, I thought the exact same thing.

Tracer, I take it you mean Flipboard? The novelty of it has worn off a little for me, but I still like ... flicking through it idly every so often. It doesn't really scale very well as an RSS reader or tweet-link reader – it doesn't weight stories according to popularity in the way that, say, tweetedtimes.com does. But it's certainly a nice casual reading platform, and if they had more linkups with publishers it would be more interesting.

i can't put this into a coherent computer-person post but el tomboto's theory about engagement with apps replacing browsers upthread reminded me of what i miss about the old internet (pre-google), which was the randomness of searches. it was possible to find very tangential connections to one's search criteria even on the second or third page of results in altavista or yahoo, and this enabled what used to be called 'surfing' the internet. nowadays people don't surf, they just plot their paths to and between their destinations: the earlier randomness of catching waves has been lost.

i'd go on but i'd embarrass myself further. over to you lot.

geocities had different "cities" i liked to imagine what they looked like and i wished i lived there.

Google results are noticeably shitter these days, so maybe the glory days of surfing can return.

xpost

those glory days are gone. all the search results are stuffed high with corporate/business entries. which is why tomboto's app argument makes sense. people won't want to search for 'hmv.com' - even by 'i'm feeling lucky' - if there's an app button to press.

the fact that the future of the internet - in the context above - could be defined by saving a couple of clicks concerns me. there wass a flourishing plurality in the last 15 years. but now the old corporate world has caught it up and smothered it.

lol wtf r guys even talking abt, you sound like youre writing some dystopian novel

I don't know if it's really the old corporate world. When it comes to the top search engine results, it's more the crappier end of the new corporate world. Link farms, "answer" sites and such.

i don't do dystopian novels, ice cr?m.

well plz present some rationale for the entire up until this point internet narrative of creative destruction and inovation to turn 180 to a static corporate controlled futurescape - something better than 'people seem to like mobile apps' and 'google results are not the best' - i mean you know corporate interests wouldve loved to control this thing from the beginning - instead we got the unraveling of the music, print, and advertising worlds and the rise of huge new technology companies more interested in facilitating peoples internet experience than controlling the content of it

i feel like this is connected with why the youtube app search results are so shitty

I use Twitter - for following people - and I don't see how it could replace my google reader. Twitter is good for a 5 minute 'what is happening at the moment' distraction but I need GReader to help me look through articles at my leisure.

oppet, I also actually read tweets, but apparently a lot of people mostly just click links (and then read at leisure in other browser tabs)

i have links from weeks ago still floating around

don't forget the vanity/competitive aspect of twitter - getting RT'd, follower count etc. easy to get carried away with this nonsense.

twitter content is much more dynamic than rss cause of retweeting and whatnot

xp http://stackexchange.com/ is a kind of amazing community that really effectively exploits that vanity without ending up like reddit in tone imo

yah thats p much the problem im like hold still xp

like you can subscribe to a blogs rss and youll get all the posts but if you follow the lady who writes the blog on twitter youll get all her posts and links to things she finds interesting that were never blogged abt and retweets from people she follows then you follow some of those people and so on

the internet does not hold still, man

yeah like theres a blog i follow where she blogs her tweet summary lol

stack exchange is p useful!

ive used it

also the fact that you like have to watch everything AS its happening it seems its exhausting just the idea of it

like i get thats what a feed is but the fact that there is no real reassuring archive makes everything feel like an ever evaporating present everything solid melts into air

eh you can check in w/it whenever you want, read as much as you want, itll always be there for you

yeah I see the appeal of the dynamism in Twitter but I guess it just doesn't fit how I read stuff. I can't really access much good internet during working hours, so I have enough trouble keeping on top of reading from blogs/sites I already like (ridiculously old fashioned way of thinking now, I know). I like to sit down and read through a load of articles at my own pace.

tbqh one of the reasons i never got into rss is i like websites - all the disembodied content bums me out

yeah, the user content on stack exchange ends up being useful *because* of the way in which it's encouraged i think. it's totally superseded a lot of pre-existing q&a forums, especially usenet. xp

it's way, way too fiddly as a community for general use participation, but it's still a resource for googlers because of how carefully it's curated.

and counting the unread articles, also a downer!

what do people make of Flipbook? I don't have an iPad so I've never used it but a kind of twitterized rss reader with a slick integrated design.. well it FEELS like the future somehow. then again it's not so very different from the "portalmania" of the late 90s

― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Thursday, February 24, 2011 6:59 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

its way overrated

Suggest Ban Permalink

don't forget the vanity/competitive aspect of twitter - getting RT'd, follower count etc. easy to get carried away with this nonsense.

― ♘ (blueski), Thursday, February 24, 2011 8:23 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah to me this seems like the REAL genius of twitter, turning the internet into a middle school popularity contest - asymmetrical friendships is probably the greatest internet idea

tbqh one of the reasons i never got into rss is i like websites - all the disembodied content bums me out

I know what you mean but it's not all bad, esp when trying to read non-mobile friendly sites on a phone screen.

and counting the unread articles, also a downer!

― ice cr?m, Thursday, February 24, 2011 12:34 AM (2 minutes ago)

lol mine is always 1000+ unread and i just ignore it and assumed that was the standard but then i was looking over someone's shoulder and they were clearing theirs out and i was like ugh that would be a full time job, feeds for irish times, five star hiphop and nyt art beat by themselves are a pain in the ass to keep up w/ when yr just reading the odd one.

i try to be strict about keeping the number of rss feeds i subscribe to below ~100, and then it's only sites that update ~daily-weekly-monthly that i read most posts on. stuff i just check out when i'm bored (news sites, etc.) i just have a bookmarks folder. that way the unread stuff in my news reader stays low, ~50 new per day, most of which take seconds to read.

don't forget the vanity/competitive aspect of twitter - getting RT'd, follower count etc. easy to get carried away with this nonsense.

― ♘ (blueski), Thursday, February 24, 2011 8:23 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah to me this seems like the REAL genius of twitter, turning the internet into a middle school popularity contest - asymmetrical friendships is probably the greatest internet idea

― Neu! romancer (dayo), Wednesday, February 23, 2011 7:35 PM (10 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

its a maybe feature for power users - like if twitter wants be ubiquitous they know that most people who use it will never tweet that much or get many followers - theyre consumers of tweets

ice cr?m, yours is the only twitter feed i read. hope you can handle the responsibility.

(via rss). be sure to let me know of any big deals in the twitterzone.

obligatory:

http://achewood.com/comic.php?date=10162003

my only use for twitter is squatting on my government name, hope one of the hundreds of other people w/ my name gets real big and wants my name

cool man thx but do you mind following me on twitter instead following me on rss DOES NOT HELP MY FOLLOWERS COUNT AND SHOULD BE ILLEGAL xp

Hadn't encountered Stack Exchange before - is this like Quora but better?

i love rss, although i get pissed off by feeds that are truncated/delayed.

twitter is cool if i'm extraordinarily bored and have read everything in my reader, which is not often.

HIGH SPEED INTERNET

xxp yes

Oh yeah and the other reason I like reading articles through rss is that once I scroll past the last paragraph I get to read another article, not a bunch of commenting fuckwits.

sorry ice man. i am a twitter parasite.

whoooooooshhhhhhhhh

I got out of the RSS game like 5 years ago, it was such a timesink

ILX is my RSS feed these days

which brings up the idea of intelligent gatekeepers, I know google is working on this via personalizing your searches, but has any company made real headway in this direction

Hadn't encountered Stack Exchange before - is this like Quora but better?

― Pisle of dogs (seandalai), Wednesday, February 23, 2011 7:44 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

stack exchange is more for technical advice on particular topics - like they have all these diff dedicated verticals wordpress, math, bicycles http://stackexchange.com/sites

Twitter seems to fill that same niche that irc did (even down to the hostile jargon) -- irc was even used to get word out in 89 iirc. I miss it now it has been abandoned to the dweebs and pirates. Same thing could def happen to twitter, but the principle of having a way to read short updates and have fleeting conversations w/strangers will stick around.

Don't think I have enough points to read stackexchange yet. I still need to connect it to my oauth endpoint and then vote on fourteen tag submissions before I can get access to the secondary comment review facility which will let me amass enough points to read edit notes on questions that have more than seven up votes.

haha

choice incomprehensible posts from web 2.0 xp

i had to un-follow one because without exaggeration he tweeted every 5-15 minutes. My page was just flooded with his random shit.

― Trayce, Wednesday, February 23, 2011 10:40 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

sorry abt that

hahaha :) No it wasnt you. (I'm memorygongs if anyone wants to hook me up but I p much never post, so)

Man I used to LIVE on irc back in the day - I was a chanOp on #melbourne and #gothic on oz.org server and I could run both those and priv chat windows all at once somehow.

I went back on there a while back and it was a ghost town, same old saddos still logged in but no one saying anything - and if even 2 chats would open I couldn't keep up, and I have no idea how I managed to in the past.

haha a few years ago i went back to a newsgroup that shall remain nameless and the same dude was still trolling everything wtf

Ah newsgroups, I miss them tbh. They were my pre-ILX ilx.

there's this dude that's really into prog........xp

lots of tweets are headlines, maybe follow diff people idk

― ice cr?m, Wednesday, 23 February 2011 21:34 (Yesterday)

I am following u now do not disappoint me

ill try my best boss!

haha I used to be heavy into IRC, almost got made op of #starwars on undernet

I miss mIRC.

I looked up a couple folks I know and it's funny to see how many ppl tried and gave up on twitter

self included

secret of twitter is follow news sources not friends

A HA

http://grab.by/987s

eh who am I kidding, I'm not a compulsive news junkie, I just wanna know what got added to streaming netflix and where the local noise & punk shows are

I 'preciate the hat fulla stars tho

i have a bad perspective on all this stuff b/c i kind of HAVE to use both twitter and google reader for work. so far for me twitter is basically only good for breaking news, but its GREAT for that, it feels like an old-school news ticker, which is maybe why "media people" love it so much. (and that in turn is why hype hype hype)

i dont think itll change the world (i dont really even understand HOW its supposed to have like caused a revolution? like the mechanics of twitter being a political tool are foreign to me. people retweet slogans?) but i think it or something like it will always exist, if only as a tool for news junkies/reporters. (also for palinesque media-hating pols & celebs)

(also seems worth pointing out that i didnt really like twitter until had a couple hundred followers and all of a sudden people were actually reading/RTing/replying to me with some frequency. & my guess is that most people who are hyping twitter are in the same boat, and dont see how boring it can be if no one is paying attention to you)

sounds like you have a great perspective on all this stuff

I am nominating max king of all media

http://grab.by/98rJ

i still irc on the reg tbqh

I use the internet to get jobs and music thats it

(also seems worth pointing out that i didnt really like twitter until had a couple hundred followers and all of a sudden people were actually reading/RTing/replying to me with some frequency. & my guess is that most people who are hyping twitter are in the same boat, and dont see how boring it can be if no one is paying attention to you)

― max, Thursday, February 24, 2011 10:31 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i have over literally 100 followers - i havent really been into using it for two way communication - i like it more or less for syndication purposes - in fact when im checking out someones feed to see if i want to follow them and its all @ replies and RTs im like naaah - im in it for the links mostly - although recently i seem to have started following a lot of i dont know what to call them 'mentally ill twitter comedians' - like people who say v strange abstract things that structurally look like jokes but dont really make any sense - also it made me realize thats kinda what my tweets look like :/

ya i follow norm mcdonald too

game recognize game

xp

although recently i seem to have started following a lot of i dont know what to call them 'mentally ill twitter comedians' - like people who say v strange abstract things that structurally look like jokes but dont really make any sense

i follow/know/rip off some of these guys and its weird to me how they have pretty big followings and this kind of quip culture has emerged on twitter bc of it

georgelazenby to thread

I pretty much stopped reading twitter entirely. idk. I mean it's not that I don't get it or anything but I guess I found it kind of annoying. Too much crap to follow. Maybe I should try again.

yeah i never use it and dont get much value out of it personally

tbh I read it first thing in the morning while on the toilet

good to know, thanks

i sleep w/my iphone inside of my butt <<twitter style joke lol

like people who say v strange abstract things that structurally look like jokes but dont really make any sense - also it made me realize thats kinda what my tweets look like :/

― ice cr?m, Thursday, 24 February 2011 19:13 (2 hours ago) Bookmark

i was gonna say

Only reason I am even on twitter is due to a couple people I know who basically dont use anything else, and their tweets are locked, so its that or I never hear from them. Which is ridiculous of course.

well plz present some rationale for the entire up until this point internet narrative of creative destruction and inovation to turn 180 to a static corporate controlled futurescape - something better than 'people seem to like mobile apps' and 'google results are not the best' - i mean you know corporate interests wouldve loved to control this thing from the beginning - instead we got the unraveling of the music, print, and advertising worlds and the rise of huge new technology companies more interested in facilitating peoples internet experience than controlling the content of it

― ice cr?m, Thursday, February 24, 2011 12:01 AM (22 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i've read your post several times and i still don't know what the fuck you're trying to say. hence. dick.

for 'corporate controlled futurescape' read 'the espn iphone app'

future of internet:
streaming video overtakes everything, taking up a shitload of bandwidth and eventually crushing cable and satellite television
marauding groups like Anonymous continue to menace society

i'm so scared

well plz present some rationale for the entire up until this point internet narrative of creative destruction and inovation to turn 180 to a static corporate controlled futurescape - something better than 'people seem to like mobile apps' and 'google results are not the best' - i mean you know corporate interests wouldve loved to control this thing from the beginning - instead we got the unraveling of the music, print, and advertising worlds and the rise of huge new technology companies more interested in facilitating peoples internet experience than controlling the content of it
― ice cr?m, Thursday, February 24, 2011 12:01 AM (22 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i've read your post several times and i still don't know what the fuck you're trying to say. hence. dick.

― utterfilth (whatever), Thursday, February 24, 2011 6:11 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

just means im advanced, from the future

fyi on the radio just now a guy just said

if i'm trying to figure out how to beat apple i want to build a faster machine with even more apps and maybe at a lower price. that's the future.

^^^ real insights

lol

basically i dont see how the history of the internet up till now which has been 'liberating content' switches to 'locking down content' is all - at least present a plausible narrative where users would be cool w/giving up their freedom/free stuff

if i'm trying to figure out how to beat apple i want to build a faster machine with even more apps and maybe at a lower price. that's the future.

― HOOStory is back. Fasten your steenbelts. (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, February 24, 2011 6:20 PM (58 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lmao its funny cause its quite literally 'the past'

just means im advanced, from the future

― ice cr?m, Thursday, February 24, 2011 11:18 PM (35 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ok, prove it. surprise us all.

^^^ doesn't follow ice cr?m on twitter

doesn't do twitter

or should i?

anyway i posted a condensed version of my argument a few posts back - i apologize for being incomprehensible - that bothers me too - like i was literally complaining to myself abt tombots posts being willfully cryptic while i wrote that lol

it must be an age thing, i'm out

future of the internet - ppl still bitching at each other.

It's a senior thing - you wouldn't understand

i look forward to the day where i can outright murder someone over the internet and order a pizza w/one click

I don't like murder, i'm out

hold on ok, this should just take 5 mins

fuck off

dude what

wtf

hey i apologise if i've got in the way of some useful discussion on this thread.

you have been kinda inexplicably hostile

A: http://futureoftheinternet.org/

sputtering
on a path to a lockdown
unsettling new kinds of control
“tethered appliances”
holocaust tattoos
Google mash-ups
made up word is at risk
the Borg
lost opportunity
netizens

you're welcome

also
http://www.bruceeisner.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/08/26/future_internet.jpg

thats me right now

you've shaved

future shave

lol @ future of the internet book exposing the view im arguing against, no respect

i did notice that but it sounds like it is prob a terrible POS so you are still on solid ground. also, the guy's name is Zit Train and he draws attention to it by having his name on railway tracks. someone at his vanity publisher obv hates him.

hahahahaha

I'd say that the idea of devices being "locked-in" -- which is complete bullshit because we're more cloud/web app dependent now than ever -- isn't all that important in the long term. If anything, the breadth of devices available now is ridiculous. Instead of having one device that is easily modified and expanded (PC), we have computers in everything and they're all able to futz around with data and communication in different modes.

http://searchengineland.com/google-forecloses-on-content-farms-with-farmer-algorithm-update-66071

I am doing this twitter thing, who's with me

future of ~the internet~ depends on it

whats ur handle

handsofthedevil

Following u. You'd better be good so that the two times I month I actually remember to check it aren't big disappointments. Don't let me down here E3.

yah youre in the spotlight, on deck circle, got my eyes on you

PRESSURE

dag yo

basically i dont see how the history of the internet up till now which has been 'liberating content' switches to 'locking down content' is all - at least present a plausible narrative where users would be cool w/giving up their freedom/free stuff

app stores are cool, the OS provider is the ultimate middleman/arbiter of content, generally speaking people seem more than happy to hand over the keys? This is the trend I see.

I like your point about liberation vs control. I think both have been pretty strong drivers for internet activity - if there wasn't some temporarily satisfying illusion or promise of control then the degree of investment we have today probably wouldn't have happened. On second thought compared to my first argument above, there are pretty strong points to be made for the pendulum trending in either direction at the moment - apps/hulu on the one hand, wikileaks/anonymous on the other.

I personally have worries about increasing segregation between phone ppl and freebsd ppl but frankly that is the kind of concern only I have, and the truth is those two demographics are closer to one another in how they use computers today than they ever have been.

Maybe if people start making more apps that make it easier to set up and manage your own cloudiddy content/service that's not necessarily tied to somebody else's branded packaging and distribution scheme (not that there aren't a few already, I guess) I'll be pretty convinced. Maybe I'll see if I can put a tumblr authorin' app on grandma's ipad and fool around with it.

sort of an update: all the twitter/tumblr apps for iOS devices seem just designed for one-way blathering and seemed really poorly suited for content liberation theology

but then again letting even more of everyone have a fairly cheap broadcasting platform is still a step closer to where we think we ought to be, even if that broadcasting platform does ostensibly belong to a device vendor, an app developer, an ISP/phone service and some semi-describable funny-named content distribution service before it belongs to you

http://theinternetwishlist.com/

This is a collection of ideas for apps and websites people are wishing for.

Think of it like a suggestion box for the future of technology.

If you’d like to contribute, simply post an idea on Twitter and include #theiwl in your tweet.

standalone apps will not be the future:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/11/apps_are_not_the_future/

If you’d like to contribute, simply post an idea on Twitter and include #theiwl in your tweet.

Somehow I doubt this is the future of the Internet: http://moodfish.com/

That Reg piece is dreck. bojennet otm in comments.

I started an album based on the concept of markers to deter inadvertent human intrusion, I keep meaning to get back to that...

http://downlode.org/Etext/WIPP/

whoops

In the future, the internet's massively interactive computing and information sharing capacity will enable humans to both form and expose conspiracies with breathtaking speed.

http://www.slate.com/id/2289342/

So in another vein let me share my automobile analogy a bit

we're like 30 years in to the history of the personal computer - rounding up, but not really, 20 years in to the Internet

now 30 years in to cars, you still have all the major manufacturers within 50 miles of one another. More importantly, they only really have to compete with one another, and nobody gives a fuck about safety

it wasn't until the late 50s or so (~40 years of mass automotive growth and adoption), with overseas competitors like Volvo leading the way, that anybody cared about safety features, and even then it took leverage from insurance companies to get American manufacturers to take it seriously

Massive adoption of seatbelt laws and legislative requirements for things like airbags are really recent developments, overall; it's relatively terrifying to think about how many years people spent behind the wheel of what we would now consider deathtraps, although it's important to consider that traffic wasn't nearly as bad for most of those years (less humans around, and certainly a lot fewer cars on the road)

Computers and the Internet ostensibly should adapt to the circumstances at a much faster rate, given the speed of adoption and the population of users, but:

- seriously, there's like four companies driving the bus: apple, adobe, google and microsoft, MAYBE two of which have half-decent patching programs, summed together, so I guess that's like saying if one of them was rock solid, or if they were all .25 of the way there (the latter seems accurate)

- nobody is getting killed or even filing claims for losses against these companies, so there's no reason for insurance brokers to bother stepping in to prove a point

On the other hand, car accidents happen because of driver errors and random chance/malfunction; Internet shit happens because of those same kinds of things PLUS common, outright malfeasance. Should I feel better because we're right in line with the auto industry's slow crawl towards safer engineering, or worse, because while we're not actually killing people outright, we're still making everything more difficult and risky than it has to be?

Internet of the future looks like your iphone, not because apps will kill the web, but because the web is a hellhole. Apps and App Stores are service whitelisting at nearly its best; jailbreakers are hot rodding jackasses asking for it on the drag strip (much props though)

Apps and App Stores are service whitelisting at nearly its best

This is a really interesting analogy, I like it.

IMO the dark spots of the internet are the large, large data systems powered by software that's almost completely run on intranets and only pops up as data sources for web tie-ins and the occasional consumer application. I mean, commercial entities like IBM and SAP are still ungodly huge, make software and sell services, and they're virtually invisible unless you're a large business. Microsoft lives in this realm too, but their products aren't really that different in that area.

^ the dark spots on the internet are the info aggregators who buy and trade your personal info and browsing habits. they may be storing that info in IBM or SAP systems (more like oracle or w/e) but that's neither here nor there.

True, true. Maybe I mean grey? There's still a hell of a lot of info in the backwaters, and defining "the internet" at the consumer, individual level and the companies they work with directly is a little short-sighted.

I mean, what about your health insurance company? They're (semi-)legitimate in being a repository of personal info, but if someone breaks in or if they use it wrong, they have the possibility of being worse than the commercial aggregators.

I guess I look at it like the info your insurance company has is as secure as it's ever been, and industries like those have a long history of regulation and oversight. however there's still a wild west out there when it comes to tracking consumer info + behavior. I have been in meetings where companies have pitched matching consumer purchases via credit card info across a variety of websites to figure out their aggregated purchase profile. it's still not clear what the total fallout is going to be from the epsilon data breach.

That sort of thing makes me cringe because it's more about your identity as a person, as far as what you consume can provide, and can result in some really insidious marketing and being creepy. Then again, you can always cancel credit cards, right?

"as secure as its ever been" is kind of slippery when you consider no one was ever really that secure, and now all their records are in modern computers that aren't supposed to be internet connected but may be. Dumping databases has never been more lucrative.

I'm just thinking of people I've talked to/worked with who were at places like Progressive and Sprint and the ridiculous security holes they said existed around ten years ago. People are generally better now, but...

Then again, when I started college, posting your test score next to your SSN (a "secret identifier" that wasn't your name) on a board outside the lecture hall was normal, and *that* wasn't much more than a decade ago.

one of the things that comes up a lot in certain conversations I have with ppl is that the cloud is actually going to be a fantastic thing for security, because now you have to pay attention to enforcing your controls instead of letting it ride because the server lives in a building you rent. The false sense of safety from physical (or "kinetic") aspects of all these logical services is finally going to go away, meaning that CIO/CISO types may have to finally own up to the fact that so much of this bullshit has been a paper tiger slash consulting racket for the last decade.

Outsource everything you do, then tell me exactly what's different about your security profile other than you maybe don't know the first name of one of the sysadmins because you see him on the elevator a lot. Control and state assertions are only more important in cloud country if you were an idiot in the first place and thought your inventory stickers on the servers were helping you avoid some kind of risk.

I mostly agree, but people will still be dumb.

please, please i urge you, do NOT WATCH THIS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x96KP1wfbpY

ok

you've seen it already, hush.

http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html

Bitcoin P2P Currency: The Most Dangerous Project We've Ever Seen

Of course, since bitcoin transactions are untraceable, you would have zero recourse if you sent a dozen bitcoins to someone for a couple of tabs of LSD. Just like you might lose your $10 if you gave it to a kid in the school yard for a dime bag and he never came back.

5. Bitcoin is a political statement by technotarians (technological libertarians).*

ok I watched that vid and now I believe in 5/21

The Internet pushes us all toward the immediate. The now. Every inquiry is to be answered right away, and every fact or idea is only as fresh as the time it takes to refresh a page.

And as a result, speaking for myself, the Internet makes me mean. Resentful. Short-fused. Reactionary.

I feel it when I'm wading through a stack of emails, keeping up with an endless Twitter feed, accepting Facebook "friends" from a past I prefer not to remember, or making myself available on the Web to readers to whom I should feel grateful — but instead feel obligated. And it's not a matter of what any of these folks might want me to do, but when. They want it now.

This is not a bias of the Internet itself, but of the way it has changed from an opt-in activity to an "always on" condition of my life.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/rushkoff.html

Man needs to discover the concept: "no, thanks".

can you expand on that, aimless

The Internet pushes us all toward the immediate. The now. Every inquiry is to be answered right away, and every fact or idea is only as fresh as the time it takes to refresh a page.

Sounds just like talking to people face to face to me.

http://edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip

sorta touches 12 different subjects, but what do we think of dis guy?

he doesn't seem to understand marx particularly well but he does have some interesting things to say here and there

like I'd never thought about this:

But Google's thing is not advertising because it's not a romanticizing operation. It doesn't involve expression. It's a link. It's just a little tiny minimalist link, and basically what they're selling is not advertising, they're not selling romance, they're not selling communication, what they're doing is selling access. What they're doing is they're saying, "You give us money, we give you access to these people, and then what you do with them is up to you."

love lanier, have the new book sitting uncracked on my couch atm

already had this open in another tab lol but haven't read it yet

we've been hypnotized in the last eleven or twelve years into thinking that we shouldn't expect anything for what we do with our hearts or our minds online, we think that our own contributions aren't worth money, very much like we think we shouldn't be paid for parenting, or we shouldn't be paid for raking our own yard. In those cases you are paid in a sense because there's still something that becomes part of you in your life, for all that you did.

But in this case we have this idea that we put all this stuff out there and what we get back are intangible or abstract benefits of reputation, or ego-boosting. Since we're used to that bargain, we're impoverished compared to the world that could have been and should have been when the Internet was initially conceived. The world that would create a strengthened middle class through what people do, by monetizing more and more instead of less and less.

not really sure what 'monetizing more and more' vs 'less and less' means but i'm interested in this idea that thinking all we deserve is 'reputational currency' there's a surplus value thing happening

nice profile of dude in the nyer last month btw

The answer, as I see it anyway, and the path to Jaron's "third way," is new media literacy. People need to know how to work with this stuff. We have to teach programming in our schools – not just because Chinese hackers are going to take down Citibank, but because this is the landscape on which we are spending an increasing amount of our lives. It is the territory on which – and through which – we are going to create and exchange a good portion of the value humans have yet to create for one another.

<3 rushkoff <3

he uses 'hearts and minds' a few times without getting specific, which is a shame

but I like the idea that we can save the middle class by paying people to use facebook

also the idea that what the internet needs is "monetizing more and more" is weird, if Lanier's whole argument is that "digital share cropping" etc. is bad and wrong.

or yes what iatee says

http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-Gadget-Manifesto/dp/0307269647

^ the aforementioned book btw

btw for ppl interested in the thread subject 'edge' is a really good regular read too

they had fun light thing the other day on why economics is a lot like pro wrestling

hoos, have you ever read the early 90s brigade's books and magazines and articles on networked culture and ~the future~? To me, most of it seems really hokey now and they spent a lot of time barking up irrelevant trees but it was a big deal at the time.

I think a lot of people who really built things in the mid/late 90s were not really connected to any of that, and a lot of the connection with sociological writing came later.

this is the first thing i've read by Jaron Lanier, and i'm totally absorbed. thanks for the link. where's a good place to start with Lanier?

ok starting now you guys have to pay to read my posts, 2 cents is reasonable I think

this is really going to add up

Lanier's position is that humans may not be considered to be biological computers, i.e., they may not be compared to digital computers in any proper sense, and it is very unlikely that humans could be generally replaced by computers easily in few decades, even economically. While transistor count increases according to Moore's law, overall performance rises only very slowly. This is because our productivity in developing software increases only slightly, and software becomes more bloated and remains as error-prone as it ever was.

kinda wish someone would point this out to Kurzweil so he would shut the fuck up already

i wish the future of the internet was this:

https://www.editorsguild.com/userfiles/image/Village%20of%20Damned.jpeg

To me, a lot of the culture of youth seems to be using the Internet as a form of denialism about their reduced prospects. They're like, "Well, sure we can't get a job and we need to live with our parents, but we can tweet", or something. "Let us tweet!"

lol

lol @ "let us tweet"

o i c u just said that

I really liked Lanier's essay in Harper's, and I agree with a lot of what he says, but I got a bit worn out reading his book. My problem was mainly that he couldn't resist slipping a little bit of opinion in among some more inarguable truths, and that colored his arguments a bit. But I often have that problem when a good essayist writes a book.

Anyone who wants a heavily monitized Internet should look into late Eighties and early Ninties shareware culture sometime--a similar wave of amateurish sludge, but with guilt-tripping, vindictiveness, scamming, and people threatening to put hexes on you for not buying the full version of their bug-ridden software.

I think that's a misleading comparison. at this point the value of Facebook/YouTube/etc comes from the user input, not the code or service. it's like if we were paying for cable tv just to watch our friends' crappy local tv show.

whereas back in the day, code for basic functional programs was harder to get / more valuable than it is today. the smartphone world today is prob comparable to that era - we'll pay a few bucks for a program on our phone that we'd expect for free on our computer.

I mean that's how I'm reading his argument, tho i can't think of any real means of getting from point x to point y.

BITCOINZ

ha

I still can't see the difference between a YouTube video of someone making their cat dance the Macarena or a badly drawn handmade sign of a tired office worker with the caption "You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps." There has always been lots and lots of bad user-created crap floating around, and the Internet is just the latest pipeline for it. And I don't see how things would get better if money was introduced into the equation--look at all of those car stickers of Calvin pissing on things or wooden cutouts of fat women in bloomers bending over.

btw for ppl interested in the thread subject 'edge' is a really good regular read too

I've listened to Geoffrey West's talk on the metabolic theory of ecology extended to cities and companies at least once a week on avg for the past few months. Mind go boom,

dag that sounds v relevant to my interests

It gets at an underlying structure of life that politics and religion have been working through since days gone by. Basically science throwing it's hat into the ring saying "Work together. It's good for you and for us." except w/ power functions. That's what I get from it.

And to bring it back to the net, as more and more people get plugged in, information thoroughput will increase exponentially, making knowledge, wisdom, and cultural exchange that much more efficient. But along with it comes ~equal increases in corruption/error.

http://www.amazon.com/Complex-Adaptive-Systems-Introduction-Computational/dp/0691127026

people who dig this thread might dig this book btw

According to a court document (.pdf), “Sebastian Bowler,” who appeared to be a 25-year-old Englishman and soccer fanatic with a drinking problem (based on the MySpace page he sent Duick), told the plaintiff that he was on a cross-country road trip and would be at her house in a few days. After Bowler wrote that he’d run into some trouble at a motel, Duick received an e-mail from someone purporting to be manager of the motel, who included a bill to Duick saying she was responsible for a TV Bowler had smashed.

Duick freaked out over the e-mails before she received a message directing her to a video explaining she’d been punked by Toyota. The video explained that Bowler was a fictional character, and the whole thing had been an elaborate prank — part of an ad campaign for Toyota’s Matrix car.

Unknown to Duick, someone had signed her up for the campaign at YourOtherYou.com, a web site set up for the prank. The campaign was aimed at 20-something males because the company’s advertising firm, Saatchi & Saatchi LA, determined that the demographic loves to punk their friends.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/09/toyota-punkd/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+wired/index+%28Wired:+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

fuck now i wanna matrix

i don't know why but the tildes in this thread title make it one of my favorite thread titles ever

The campaign was aimed at 20-something males because the company’s advertising firm, Saatchi & Saatchi LA, determined that the demographic loves to punk their friends.

great marketing idea, no idea how that could go wrong

hoos have you ever read this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Cybernetics-Second-Control-Communication-Machine/dp/026273009X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1315863212&sr=1-1

kind of dated in methodology, but really the forefather of that shit

i got an early beta invite today to join the singularity and a few email invites to give out. who wants to join the singularity w/ me??

lol

read that in the same voice as "i'm still so excited, you guys"

kind of dated in methodology, but really the forefather of that shit

― mh, Monday, September 12, 2011 9:36 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

i'm reading gleick's "the information" right now and he mentions this as a v important/historical thing, i'll have to check it out

i was bitching the other day that 'cybernetics' seems like such a dated term now

actor-network theory is better

i'm reading gleick's "the information"

thinking of reading that at some point

highly recommended, amazing shit.

also pleasantly puzzled given that i'm only 35% of the way through the book and we're already in the 1950s in terms of chronology--helluva lot of book left to cover 60 years given the depth with which charlie babbage & morse & claude shannon & alan turing have already been treated.

i don't know about norbert weiner, it's a little bit like recommending a marshall mcluhan book to someone who wants to know about how pay-per-view works

Very true. There's a good layman-targeted book from the same era (maybe his later one?) that is supposed to be good.

hoos should read mcluhan, though

actually, just watch Videodrome and eXistenZ a few times

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Theory-Communication-Claude-Shannon/dp/0252725484/ref=pd_sim_b_2

^ a bit of my way into this, p challenging but rewarding when understood

that is to say, i'm having a tough time with some of it but when i get it it's a good feeling

i have read mcluhan fwiw

http://www.amazon.com/Human-Use-Beings-Cybernetics-Paperback/dp/0306803208/ref=pd_sim_b_1

is this the weiner popularization you guys were talking abt

(avoids 'weiner popularization' jokes)

Probably. I have the more math-oriented one at home but have only browsed it and waved it at people/

lol

btw fwiw a pdf of shannon's orig monograph of "a mathematical theory of communcation" is here

again, having been out of math class for the better part of a decade, i don't pretend to keep up with the whole thing--gleick's book has been a pretty invaluable conceptual guide.

i once met one of claude shannon's grandchildren ... grandchild intimidated me w/ braininess, can't imagine what the man himself was like.

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or ap-
proximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer
to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic
aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.

this makes me lol every time i reread it

"frequently there is meaning. idgaf."

“Even when you get several stages in, it’s still looking pretty real,” Saatchi creative director Alex Flint said about the campaign in 2008. “I think even the most cynical, anti-advertising guy will appreciate the depth and length to which we’ve gone.”

i don't know why but the tildes in this thread title make it one of my favorite thread titles ever

― the 500 gats of bartholomew thuggins (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, September 12, 2011 11:30 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

YES!

Me too! The tildes make me hear ~THE INTERNET~ as the ~TO YOU~ from this clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE7hGMMIyfE

Every goddamn time

future of THE INTERNET

^^ gets it

"there's this bias in any net environment that everything should scale, it's very hard to be satisfied on one level of reality--some venture capitalist always wants to know 'how does this scale?' scale this, motherfucker"

<3 <3 <3

http://www.rushkoff.com/blog/2011/9/22/toward-a-peer-to-peer-economy.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+douglasrushkoff+%28Douglas+Rushkoff%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

no thanks

yr welcome

?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+douglasrushkoff+%28Douglas+Rushkoff%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

http://livestre.am/12B4I

there u baby

i meant no thanks to the rushkoff, the superfluous url stuff was just an afterthought ; )

fair enuff

the past of ~the internet~

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/111901425213768112631/albums/5654055509127305937

http://sites.google.com/site/gallantlabucb/publications/nishimoto-et-al-2011
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo

cant wait for the stylish jawbone bluetooth fmri to wear while watching hours of youtubes, helping the collective consciousness learn how to reconstruct brain images

xpost to hoooos

it's kinda weird how amazon hasn't really changed all that much since 1995. compared to other 1995-era sites it looks like next-level shit.

for real, bezos been on that other level

what the fuck does jeff bezos have to do with what the site looks like?

. . .

I mean, Steve Jobs has been held up as some sort of design auteur but his skill was always having enough sense to know that aesthetics and experience were important AND hire people capable of enacting that ethos. Has there ever been an article pointing to Jeff Bezos as crafter of the user experience?

No, but I'm sure that at some point he had some final say over the design.

http://www.blueorigin.com/

http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1381&doc_id=233226

what the fuck does jeff bezos have to do with what the site looks like?

― so i had sex with a piñata (mh), Friday, September 23, 2011 8:16 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_09/b4121034637296.htm

more recently, article after article talks about him fighting for one click to mean "one click"

you think amazon's ux that's remained relatively stable for more than a decade just emerged spontaneously from some lucky coding?

amazon tablet announcement next week btw

thx 4 that article hoos, will read

I wouldn't want one click to mean one click. Who would besides a compulsive internet shopper? And I don't think that one click has all that much to do with the quality of amazon's user experience. I also don't think that there aren't significant design flaws on amazon, that it deserves any status besides "above average" or "got there first" or "hasn't obsolesced." I've had to look around and learn the layout of the pages on the site as much as I would on any other adequately designed site, and its layout of links, options, and tools for sellers takes even more learning.

The "one click is one click" angle is definitely important and relevant. However, I'm speaking more to the parts of user experience that deal with interface design and actual web interactions and the closest the article you sent gets to that is: "Customer experience includes having the lowest price, having the fastest delivery, having it reliable enough so that you don't need to contact anyone. Then you save customer service for those truly unusual situations."

That's kind of a far cry from web experience! That speaks more to supply chain, which Amazon does remarkably well.

I kind of agree on the "one click" thing being essential as well. At the time of its introduction, it was seen more as a patent trolling type of situation, and outside of specific products (mostly digital media), I don't find it particularly necessary. I tend to either shift things from a wish list to a buy list, or put together actual orders of multiple items.

fwiw, Bezos's name does appear on the one click patent:
http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=US&NR=5960411&KC=&FT=E&locale=en_EP#

amazon's great

amazon priiiiiiiiiiime

To be fair, the supply chain is kind of part of the web experience. It has to be integrated into the overall design, and customers aren't necessarily going to separate the two in their impression of a website.

the "if it works, it works" argument

I also remember people complaining about Amazon's poor customer service for years! They were notorious for not having a published phone number anywhere on the site. They now have it as an option after bouncing through a troubleshooting dialog about order problems.

never have problems w/ amazon -- prime!!!

they're also shitty to their temp workers

http://www.mcall.com/news/local/mc-allentown-amazon-complaints-20110917,0,7937001,full.story

shit just shows up! fast!

I think my point is that while the big picture is a relevant part of user experience (yeah, UX) that the particular web design part of it isn't one that I've seen with a direct link to Bezos.

That doesn't necessarily mean that there are designers that have been there for the last fifteen years who should have the credit, or that Bezos has no input in the hiring, but part of having a well-run business is the ability to hire talented people. Generally, giving people credit starts at the top but should really flow down, while blame too often is laid on the lower tiers when it should make its way up. No executive does an excellent job without relying on talented people, and no grunt worker really fails without levels of management having failed in some way.

markers I also have amazon prime but it's not the solution to everything :)

I'm speaking more to the parts of user experience that deal with interface design and actual web interactions and the closest the article you sent gets to that is: "Customer experience includes having the lowest price, having the fastest delivery, having it reliable enough so that you don't need to contact anyone. Then you save customer service for those truly unusual situations."

That's kind of a far cry from web experience! That speaks more to supply chain, which Amazon does remarkably well.

― so i had sex with a piñata (mh), Friday, September 23, 2011 8:36 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i'll own up here that when i said 'bezos on that other level' i was sorta pulling it out of my ass as shorthand for 'amazon knows what its doing wrt ux'

hahaha

I want the name and title of all of your managers, hoos, so I can give them credit when you do something insightful

and that the consistency of ux bespeaks a consistency of vision that suggests a braintrust, and that i'd be surprised if bezos himself wasn't part of that in some way

I like how markers makes fun of things while at the same time being extremely sincere about them. It's like he's merged the sarcastic meaning with the literal meaning.

i do live prime tbh

i love physical books and being able to get them in two days is really nice -- esp. w/ amazon's selection & prices

love, not live

coming soon amazon liveprime

order your life in realtime

damnnnnnnn *orders life*

free 2-day shipping!

well, for only $79.99 a year

has a hoos ever worked with IA, UX, or web teams?

yah i've done junior IA stuff as an intern and its where i want to be eventually

lookin at u of balt's UX/IA grad program for next fall, fingers crossed

free 2-day shipping!

― rebels against newton (Z S), Friday, September 23, 2011 5:10 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well, for only $79.99 a year

― rebels against newton (Z S), Friday, September 23, 2011 5:11 PM

XD

speaking of

http://www.mcall.com/news/local/amazon/

The prevailing American story line right now is seething anger at politicians: that they’re corrupt, or heartless, or socialist, or dumb. But the Amazon story, and many other recent developments, suggest that the problem is significantly deeper.

Far beyond official Washington, we would seem to be witnessing a fraying of the bonds of empathy, decency, common purpose. It is becoming a country in which people more than disagree. They fail to see each other. They think in types about others, and assume the worst of types not their own.

It takes some effort these days to remember that the United States is still one nation.

It doesn’t feel like one nation when a company like Amazon, with such resources to its name, treats vulnerable people so badly just because it can.

more ~past of the internet~, neat but kinda pointless resurrection of geocities data

http://vimeo.com/29523075

http://cdespinosa.posterous.com/fire

damn

thx for that

“Think of it as a product like foursquare or Klout initially, but around your financial life,” Mr. King said. “Wherein a typical bank might say–you come to them, and you say you want a credit card–and you’re a customer with a score of say 580, the bank’s going to say ‘no, you’re marginal, you’re too high-risk.’ But we might give them a card based on other things. Say they have 10,000 friends on Facebook and Twitter. We’ll say okay, they have high influence–we should probably pay this guy to get access to his friends list!”

~You May Soon Be Able to Get A Credit Line Based on Your Klout Score~ with this thing Movenbank

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=aXV-yaFmQNk#!

why don't embeds work anymore??

They work if you take that "Feature=player_embedded" stuff out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXV-yaFmQNk

oh thx good to know

Liked it up until the pointless Steve Jobs idolatry, at which I vomited on my shoes.

true

the nearly universal tone of the comments is WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PARENTS which kind of surprised me?

but then i'm a guy who regularly posts on future of ~the internet~

An international group of online hackers is warning a Mexican drug cartel to release one of its members, kidnapped from a street protest, or it will publish the identities and addresses of the syndicate's associates, from corrupt police to taxi drivers, as well as reveal the syndicates' businesses.

The vow is a bizarre cyber twist to Mexico's ongoing drug war, as a group that has no guns is squaring off against the Zetas, a cartel blamed for thousands of deaths as well as introducing beheadings and other frightening brutality.

"You made a huge mistake by taking one of us. Release him," says a masked man in a video posted online on behalf of the group, Anonymous.

"It won't be difficult; we all know who they are and where they are located," says the man, who underlines the group's international ties by speaking Spanish with the accent of a Spaniard while using Mexican slang.

"We demand his release," says the Anonymous spokesman, who is wearing a mask like the one worn by the shadowy revolutionary character in the movie V for Vendetta, which came out in 2006. "If anything happens to him, you sons of (expletive) will always remember this upcoming November 5."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJORGO1Q2VY

whoah

They're going to shut down their Facebooks accounts too?!?!

"It won't be difficult; we all know who they are and where they are located," says the man, who underlines the group's international ties by speaking Spanish with the accent of a Spaniard while using Mexican slang.

need to watch the vid again but i'm pretty sure it's text-to-speech, sounds to me no more high-minded than 'mexican hacker using tts voice w/default spanish accent.'

p sure the only thing this guarantees is that kidnapped anon is now headless anon.

anon veracruz fb page is saying none of their people have been kidnapped, the guy who orig posted the video says 'opcartel' is going forward, sanctioned or not.

u do realize though that if a list of names comes out, no matter who puts it out, all those people have targets on their backs from the many, many people gunning for the zeta's top spot, right? xp

like if this goes forward its gonna mean a lotta z connected ppl gonna wind up dead and vcruz is gonna get even messier as the cycle of reprisal intensifies.

and yeah prob broader reprisals by z against net activists in general, can easily see them putting their victims in anon masks to make the point.

well yeah it could be some almighty bloodbath, but I don't see how threats like this are going to make the kidnappers 'see sense'. could look worse for them to back down to some vague anon threats. nb i don't know much about this situation in general so zeta thinking is beyond me.

idk about 'seeing sense,' sounds like all anon wants is their mans released

but yeah i mean this is a no-win for the z's imo

https://squareup.com/cardcase/tabs

https://www.dwolla.com/

if you're mentioning that, I'm gonna rep for the local payment up-and-comer

rad

When the kidnapped activist was freed on Nov. 4 with a note from her captors threatening to kill 10 people for every name released, OpCartel was quickly called off. “We blackmailed them,” says Barrett Brown, an informal spokesman for Anonymous, noting that the Zetas don’t often release victims alive. “And they blackmailed us.”

Raul Castro’s daughter and a dissident Cuban blogger have engaged in a prickly back-and-forth on Twitter.

Mariela Castro’s debut on the social media service began smoothly enough when she sent her first tweets Tuesday talking about a visit to the Netherlands and her work as the country’s leading gay rights activist. Then dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez fired the first salvo.

“They tell me Mariela Castro opened a Twitter account,” Sanchez wrote. “A question for her, ‘When will we Cubans be able to come out of other closets?’”

Two more tweets directed at the first daughter quickly followed: “Welcome to the plurality of Twitter ... here nobody can shut me up, deny me permission to travel or impede entrance,” and “How can one ask for acceptance only in one area? Is tolerance total or not?”

Castro, who is the head the National Sex Education Center, shot back at Sanchez by name, saying, “Your approach to tolerance reproduces the old mechanisms of power. To improve your ‘services’ you should study.”

Later, she grumbled about “despicable parasites” criticizing her on Twitter: “Were you ordered by your employers to respond to me in unison and with the same predetermined script? Be creative.”

Cuba accuses dissidents like Sanchez of being mercenaries in the hire of Washington.

On Wednesday Sanchez tweeted, “I would love it if everyone on the (Communist Party’s) Central Committee got on Twitter. We would tell them in the virtual world what they don’t let us in the real one.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/americas/raul-castros-daughter-opens-twitter-account-gets-into-war-of-words-with-dissident/2011/11/09/gIQAXPML5M_story.html

Can someone parse this "update"?
http://leaksource.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/anonymous-mexico-opcorrupcion/

Finally read the Lanier. Think much of the crit was handled way upthread, but <3 for reminding me that there was a time when we hoped that everything wouldn't be slathered in advertising and that there might be some alternative ways of funding things.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_b7lQNiW2GI8/R6MWRH3q8UI/AAAAAAAAAA8/k1-0Jw0YXRM/s320/wired.gif

But one name stands out, maybe because it was designed to. And for the moment it's sticking: zippies. It stands for Zen-inspired professional pagans, according to 50-year-old Fraser Clark, shamanic zippie spokesperson, club manager and editor of Encyclopedia Psychedelica (EPi), the magazine that first identified the "hippies with zip." According to EPi, a zippie is "someone who has balanced their hemispheres to achieve a fusion of the technological and the spiritual. The techno-person understands that rationality, organization, long-term planning, consistency and single-mindedness are necessary to achieve anything solid on the material level. The hippie understands that vision, individuality, spontaneity, flexibility and open-mindedness are crucial to realize anything on the spiritual scale."

Finally read the Lanier. Think much of the crit was handled way upthread, but <3 for reminding me that there was a time when we hoped that everything wouldn't be slathered in advertising and that there might be some alternative ways of funding things.

― stet, Monday, January 23, 2012 12:51 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

tru

so this is a long lecture, 45ish minutes when you cut out the intro, and like a lot of dense lectures its kinda better to watch-with-the-slides than just listen to it, but god i fucking love this guy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMxz7rzwee8

still trying to steel myself for a 45 minute video. what has the internet done to my mind

every time I hover over the link I think "maybe if I wait another day someone will summarise the key point inside ~ marks"

he gave a talk at PDF 12 yesterday, shorter and uses the sopa/pipa fight as a case study to touch on some of his larger themes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LNP9f8geCWA#!

son of a bitch

well there it is, regardless