The Web We Lost (2012)
I can&#x27;t help but think there&#x27;s more than a bit of rose-colored glasses observation in this story. To highlight a few things popping out at me:<p>&quot;The web was an interesting and different place before links got monetized, but by 2007 it was clear that Google had changed the web forever, and for the worse, by corrupting links.&quot;<p>This ignores the backroom deals that were happening between orgs to cross-link to each other even before concerns about SEO (and the original algorithms sensitive to link-frequency that were game-able by adding bunches of links to a page) became significant. There&#x27;s always been some flavor of pay-to-play and favor-exchange in links (though there are certainly also people who would link to things because they believed they were good or useful, but of course, that is still true today).<p>&quot;In 2003, if you introduced a single-sign-in service that was run by a company, even if you documented the protocol and encouraged others to clone the service, you’d be described as introducing a tracking system worthy of the PATRIOT act.&quot;<p>We&#x27;ve had thirteen years of experience since then to show us the risks and failure-modes of every service on the planet trying and failing to get secure authentication correct. If anything, the modern web still has <i>too many</i> sites trying to handle username and password when they should be using one of the SSO options instead.<p>&quot;In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites, instead of being dependent on a few big sites to host their online identity.&quot;<p>First of all, I&#x27;m not sure what we mean by &#x27;social web&#x27; and &#x27;own identity&#x27; precisely here, but every email address I owned through college and after was provided by some @corporation.com provider (up until I registered my own domain backed by Google Apps). But if Anil is referring to the notion of personal pages: unfortunately, people don&#x27;t want to maintain their own infrastructure. I still have my own personal page, but its uptime is not as reliable as my Facebook profile. Nobody wants their personal page to be unreachable when a potential employer is trying to check on it. This nice-to-have runs afoul of the general issue &quot;Not everyone is a sysadmin or web developer, so <i>someone</i> is probably maintaining your service for you.&quot; The social networks just moved the maintain-for-you question from the service layer all the way to the application layer.<p>&quot;Five years ago, if you wanted to show content from one site or app on your own site or app, you could use a simple, documented format to do so, without requiring a business-development deal or contractual agreement between the sites.&quot;<p>I&#x27;ll have to take Anil&#x27;s word for this; this is the first time I&#x27;ve ever heard of oEmbed. That leads me to assume it was never widely adopted, but perhaps I am wrong. AFAICT, it&#x27;s not a w3c standard, so I assume Anil&#x27;s using some creative license with the &quot;you could use&quot; notion here. I think he may also be loosely applying the concept of &quot;user experiences weren’t subject to the vagaries of the political battles between different companies,&quot; since nothing in the spec suggests to me that a content provider couldn&#x27;t sniff the requester and respond with &quot;LOL, no&quot;, but perhaps I&#x27;m missing something in the details.<p>&quot;they’ve now narrowed the possibilites of the web for an entire generation of users who don’t realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be&quot;<p>I think Anil may be committing the sin of assuming users are like him, the web developer. Users aren&#x27;t. It&#x27;s entirely possible and extremely likely that what we&#x27;re pointing to here as errors in the development of the web were features that enabled a hundred million new users to come online.<p>Most of my relatives were not going to configure their own website to host their profile or skin their own Myspace page. Most of them don&#x27;t know HTML. Most of them have a Facebook account because FB doesn&#x27;t require any of that from its end users; it just works.