Has the Web Become a Dead End?
April 3, 2013
I have been less and less enchanted with the Web as a mechanism for years. Good luck with some of the cloud computing services. Good luck with some of the hosted big data processing services. Good luck with hosted search.
Latency is often my companion.
I read “Our Regressive Web” and learned:
An entrepreneur friend of mine remarked to me recently that if someone invented the nightly news today—or a show like Brian Williams’ “Rock Center”—we’d all think it was a great idea. Think about it: Instead of having to follow all these different news sources, you could just tune in, get a digest of all the important stuff that happened, and you could trust that it had been verified, that it was balanced and high-quality, and would all be well-produced. It struck me, as I tried to wrap my head around the demise of Google Reader and Google’s inexplicable de-emphasis of Google Alerts, how both those ideas—Reader and Alerts—fit the same criteria.
The end of a push service is no big deal. I survived the death of PointCast and Backweb. I even worked through the shift from Desktop Data’s push to an alert type service which was free and less hostile to my in box.
But finding information is getting harder in my opinion. This passage resonated with me:
Yet here we sit, both of those awesome services essentially shuttered in the last year, primed for the scrap heap of Internet history. Then there’s Delicious—a similar idea that allows you to organize your links by categories and see what other people thought were valuable—which has not been shut down, per se, just slowly maimed beyond recognition, its loyal users driven away. And for what reason? Nothing better has risen up to replace them. The underlying needs of a fairly large user base (that these services meet) still exist. We’re just regressing. It’s the one thing I find most disheartening and perhaps most frustrating about this trend. It’s something that needs to be heard, particularly by the people who wrote off these services as Web 1.0 or Web 2.0 relics—the type who said, “Well, nobody used RSS, so good riddance.” The collapse of these services, to me, represents an alarming reduction of key services designed to improve online information from the user’s perspective.
Regressing? I don’t think the word is strong enough. The Web for many applications is almost unusable. Disagree? Use the comments section of the blog and feel free to insert links to unusable search and content processing services. Azure chip consultants need not participate.
Stephen E Arnold, April 3, 2013
Sponsored by Augmentext
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