Optimizing the Noisy Internet
July 28, 2017
Humans love to complain, especially the older generations about how their youth was superior to the current day. Alan Franzoni rants about how the Internet has gotten too noisy in “Stopping The Internet Noise-A Useful Internet Back Again.” Franzoni complains that the modern Internet is not as useful as the Internet of the 56K modem days. He lists the ways the old Internet was more productive. He starts with old Usenet discussion groups and mailing lists. What he liked about this old discussion boards were that he could subscribe to one application service instead of having to do it multiple times. He then turns to IRC chatting, citing its superiority because it was a single application with a consistent interface.
He bemoans the loss of Google Reader, which is an actual loss. The ability to read all of your daily Web sites in one consistent feed was nice. What Franzoni hates is that he cannot mark things as reading, there is zero to little API, and there is not any focus. This is what he wants and suggests how the Internet can be improved:
•Topics. Google Plus created somethings similar to that with Collections (without RSS, of course); or we could just create a blog or username for each of our topics – I think most of us won’t discuss about so many totally unrelated different fields. It’s a change of mentality – we shouldn’t write something just because we can. Unless we are celebrities, people, especially strangers, won’t follow us just for the sake of it – we need actual, quality content. Smallchat is fine on FB or Twitter.
APIs. I’m not saying we should get back to IRC or to NNTP. But we need a common API for Instant Messaging and forum-like software so that people can use their favorite tools to organize their data sources. Installing tons of apps or visiting tens of websites every day is not an option.
His rant is about the lack of a good app that digests the Internet into a single, serves reading list. Franzoni really needs to try out the Feedly app.
Whitney Grace, July 28, 2017
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