This week Paul and Rich eulogize the web, which has been dying since its inception. They compare the early, organic days of the web with today’s trends towards massive commercial centralization. They also talk about Outbrain and Taboola (“20 slides spread over 400 pages”), Disqus and Facebook comment threads, and the hellscape that is wish.com, leading Rich to declare, “Maybe the web sucks! Maybe it should die!”
We mix up the WIRED “Web is Dead” cover from 2010 with a story from 1997 about Pointcast and push.
We also mixed up John Hermann and John Mahoney. Mahoney wrote about chumboxes.
Paul: Every couple of years the web is dead.
And what people are saying is that the open set of standards and rules and protocols that make up the web that are very decentralized, so I set up a server, you set up a server, you put up a page and you link to my page, we don’t actually have to have any handshake deal to make that happen. That’s a big, decentralized, connected document. That’s the web, and it can do stuff with JavaScript, it can sing and dance.
What people are saying when they’re saying the web is dying or that it’s going to die is that some new consolidated platform or thing is going to show up and make all that other stuff irrelevant because people are just going to prefer to use the one big thing.
Rich: Is this bad? I was actually having a conversation with a friend, sharing this exact topic, and he said, ‘So what? What’s the big deal?’
Paul: Rest in peace. Onward we go. Thank you web for getting us started.
Rich: When he confronted me with, ‘So what?’ it took me a minute because I didn’t really have a great…I mean, there’s a bit of nostalgia, there’s a bit of, well OK, this can’t be great, because what you’re essentially saying is: this is, to me, the equivalent of all the little coffee shops in that charming town are gone? And there’s like two Starbucks and a Dunkin Donuts. And you kind of recoil from that, because that’s just a little sad. The charm, the independence, the uniqueness of these places.
Paul: I always see Disqus as the FEMA trailers of the internet, where it was just like, ‘Whoa, this is a disaster, let’s put down this temporary housing and hope it all works out OK, and then later we’ll come back and figure it out.’ And then you come back five years later and everyone’s just really angry.
Come meet Khoi Vinh, Director of Mobile Product Design at Adobe and one of the most influential product designers working today. At Adobe he’s been putting the attention back onto designers and the needs of the design community, working directly to create tools that move interaction design forward at a global scale.
Khoi is internationally recognized for bringing the tried-and-true principles of the typographic grid to the World Wide Web. He writes and lectures widely on design, technology, and culture, and has published the popular blog Subtraction.com for over a decade.
Today’s links
Today’s North Korean slogan: “Prepare to be elite soldiers of modern warfare and stout fighters who are equipped with the military strategies and tactics of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, the heroic fighting spirit and flawless abilities to fight an actual war!”
