Dejá vu? or Web 2.0 ending up like 1.0
Remember Web 1.0? For those of you who do, we used to call it "the Web".
People had to have web sites. Of course! Finally we were able to communicate with the world. And most of us thought our lives and deeds were so important to others that EVERYONE who was potentially ANYONE and had some HTML skills put up some nice "My Home Page" with some photos, what we did for fun, and so on. It was all about self-expression.
But it was hard! Photos had to be scanned, we had to learn HTML techniques (until some angels put up editors, from Aracnophilia to WebEdit, to ease up the process), bandwidth was low low low... but we made it nevertheless, then we waited for the whole world to drop by.
Mostly we found out that our lives were not that exciting to others as we might have thought, because theirs were likewise uninteresting to us... with some exceptions, obviously, like the "Super Pinga's Home Page" which came out in 1997!
And remember Web Directories? They soon evolved into portals, like Yahoo!, becoming one-stop internet destinations.
But all of a sudden, Yahoo! starts losing money, and the word was that sites had to "focus and specialise". Amazon for this, eBay for that, Google for the other, and so on.
Meanwhile, 10 years have gone behind us, and what is the Internet landscape? Now he buzz is "Social Networks", that new, exciting thing. You can put up your site, fill it with picture, list your hobbies, ... yes, like we did in 1997 with great effort. Now digicameras can spit the photos directly into the computer, all layouts are set, it's wonderful.
And there are a lot of integration between different services. Of course! Everything in one place, like in real life. People like it, it´s only natural! So the Social Network Sites, which have already the people content, are also developing as... Portals!
Have these evolutions changed anything from our intentions 10 years ago? NO! Good!
People had to have web sites. Of course! Finally we were able to communicate with the world. And most of us thought our lives and deeds were so important to others that EVERYONE who was potentially ANYONE and had some HTML skills put up some nice "My Home Page" with some photos, what we did for fun, and so on. It was all about self-expression.
But it was hard! Photos had to be scanned, we had to learn HTML techniques (until some angels put up editors, from Aracnophilia to WebEdit, to ease up the process), bandwidth was low low low... but we made it nevertheless, then we waited for the whole world to drop by.
Mostly we found out that our lives were not that exciting to others as we might have thought, because theirs were likewise uninteresting to us... with some exceptions, obviously, like the "Super Pinga's Home Page" which came out in 1997!
And remember Web Directories? They soon evolved into portals, like Yahoo!, becoming one-stop internet destinations.
But all of a sudden, Yahoo! starts losing money, and the word was that sites had to "focus and specialise". Amazon for this, eBay for that, Google for the other, and so on.
Meanwhile, 10 years have gone behind us, and what is the Internet landscape? Now he buzz is "Social Networks", that new, exciting thing. You can put up your site, fill it with picture, list your hobbies, ... yes, like we did in 1997 with great effort. Now digicameras can spit the photos directly into the computer, all layouts are set, it's wonderful.
And there are a lot of integration between different services. Of course! Everything in one place, like in real life. People like it, it´s only natural! So the Social Network Sites, which have already the people content, are also developing as... Portals!
Have these evolutions changed anything from our intentions 10 years ago? NO! Good!
Labels: blogs, communities, Internet
posted by Andre' Serranho at
08:13
2 Comments:
You could argue that methods are the same only "visibility" is greatly increased. You can easily tell the world about your story today through social networks, while 10 years ago it was much harder to do. Of course, this produces much more spam as a side effect. Have we progressed? A little ;)
By
netvestor, at 3:35 AM
I've found social networking sites like Facebook and myspace very difficult to use.
They make it difficult for me to link to my friends, unless I can convince my friends to join the same social networking site as me. Which then means that many of us have joined many social networking sites. This means that updates need to be made to each of these social networking sites. It's a lot more trouble than the simple html pages of the past. So I left all the social networks and went back to a single html page.
By
Jessta, at 5:55 AM
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