future of ~the internet~

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

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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