The biggest internet players count users as their users, not users in general. Interoperability is a detriment to such plays for dominancy. So there are clear financial incentives to move away from a more open and decentralized internet to one that is much more centralized. Facebook would like its users to see Facebook as ‘the internet’ and Google wouldn’t mind it if their users did the same thing and so on. It’s their users after all. But users are not to be owned by any one company and the whole power of the internet and the world wide web is that it’s peer to peer, in principle all computers connected to it are each others equals, servers one moment, clients the next.
If the current trend persists we’re heading straight for AOL 2.0, only now with a slick user interface, a couple more features and more users. I personally had higher hopes for the world wide web when it launched. Wouldn’t it be ironic if it turned out that the end-run the WWW did around AOL because it was the WWW was open and inclusive ended up with different players simply re-implementing the AOL we already had and that we got rid of because it was not the full internet.
The writing’s been on the wall for a while now.
The move is towards aggregation of content, weather that be other sites, or user created. That is not aol ( well not the original aol service, but very much the current aol).
He’s basically complaining that there aren’t open apis for each “data silo” that everyone can access and consume. I’m not sure how that amounts to aol 2.0. Aol’s limited internet was this crazy walled garden of services that could only be accessed by paying their monthly fee ( in addition to the barrage of ads) that was also your internet provider. So they controlled the content and the access to it and everything else.
Enter aol keyword “pepsi” => sends you to pepsi’s aol “exclusive” content instead of the website, etc.
Let’s see, well Google does sound a lot like AOL. They sell fiber (thus they are an access provider), they provide DNS-resolution, they provide email. They provide search and they control a very large portion of the ads.
I haven’t even mentioned Facebook Zero:
http://www.ictworks.org/2014/08/29/is-facebook-zero-the-future-of-p…
Or appstores on smartphones, for example Apple. Clearly that is curated content too.
Edited 2015-08-06 01:05 UTC
And yet they provide APIs for most of their services, which was what the article was calling for
Pretty much ever smartphone app does not have (public) APIs
Edited 2015-08-06 08:10 UTC
There’s no incentive to keep things open if they don’t provide competitive advantage (or if the owners of the company – the capitalists, the ones who get to make all the decisions – think it provides a competitive disadvantage). Welcome to capitalism.
So how would the situation be different under a non-capitalist system?
I don’t see how that would ensure that every webapp has and provides APIs, unless it were government mandated.
Please feel free to provided facts and examples…
Web 1.0: Everybody should have a website
Web 2.0: Everybody should use our website
Web 3.0: Everybody should make their site using our APIs
No,not similar. Google aggregates and provides links to content from others in their search results, google news, g+, gmail. It encourages you to go out and explore the internet.
Mobile systems are probably the closest. But they lack the immediacy of the old AOL content. To access something new, you first have to search for, find, install the app.
Also: My dad had no problem getting stuck in AOL and not reaching the internet back in the 90’s.
Today? He can never remember his app store password, so he uses the mobile browser for everything. He’s locked out of the walled garden..
Nothing new. When in a boom all are friends and wants to cooperate. When in a slump silos are erected and fiercely defended. This has been the tech cycle for some 3+ decades, if not more.
South Korean web services have been doing something similar like that for the past decade or so.
I also wonder which moronic drone decided it’s good idea to require ActiveX, Internet Explorer and Windows combination for these websites. I have separate virtual machine to use various services which basically install root kits into your system – how else you can get BSOD because of website ?
At least in Europe the company would be laughing stock for this.
Edited 2015-08-07 09:08 UTC
This really is a load of nonsense.
It’s not because google, facebook, apple, etc provide you with an all-inclusive ecosystem that you actually have to stay in it.
You can just simply go visit some other site or whatever.
This is like saying that giant supermarkets are evil because they also have a restaurant and a bar.
You don’t _have_ to go to that restaurant and/or bar.
Of course the supermarket would like you to … but you don’t have to.
but if everyone else goes there, the alternative options die due to lack of users/clients.
it’s that simple.
you can ignore any big walled garden system all you want, that at some point you will have to participate in one, because almost everyone else is there.
e.g. are you honestly expecting to drive all your friends away from skype/facebook because you don’t use those?
But that’s the point, and is the best argument against the idea that we’re going AOL 2.0. Skype and Facebook are separate. Google and Apple are not the same. The OP isn’t saying they won’t participate in a walled garden, but rather that there are so many gardens both walled and otherwise that you end up participating in a good chunk of most of them. Therefore, we’re not stuck in just one and therefore, this article is nonsense.
The point is exactly that you have to participate in all of them separately (e.g. FB account, Google Account, Skype account, etc.) rather than there being standard protocols for exchanging data between platforms.
Compared to email:
I get an email account somewhere (or even stand up a server myself) and I get to communicate with anyone who has an email address. What if I had to get a Gmail account just to email my friend with a gmail.com address? Plus an MS account to email someone at outlook.com? A discrete account at *every mail server/provider whose users I wish to communicate with*?
This is exactly the situation being described for the current “app”/platform paradigm. Because there are no open protocols for these applications, you end up with zero interop between the platforms and you *have to* use accounts and applications specific to each platform in order to reach users/content on that platform, rather than simply having one account/application for that *class* of content/users/communication.
You couldn’t be more wrong, and you couldn’t have picked a worse example.
Mail is open, it has been open since the dawn of the internet … SMTP. Google, microsoft, yahoo (lol), whatever … They all use smtp to send mails to one another.
For chat, google offers xmpp compatibility, as does facebook.
Google offers activesync, imap, smtp, http, api access, even good old pop.
Seriously … How is any of this non-standard?
There’s a million ways to use their services. Same goes for facebook.
AOL used thier own proprietary protocols for everything.
This article is nonsense.
How can you even get mad at a company for offering you stuff for free, AND even trying to cater for all your needs? I call it good business sense.
I guess the author goes in to seizure every time he sees a mall.
OMG i can buy a steak AND drink coffee?!
Outrage!!!
You misread my comment.
I wasn’t commenting on their revenue model or bitching about the level of service/whatever they offer for free. What I’m talking about is the tendency towards standing up provider-specific services that cannot communicate with other providers’ services. My view is that the tendency is problematic and encourages centralized services dominated by a few large players rather than decentralized, federated services with lower barrier to entry.
[edit: grammar]
Edited 2015-08-07 18:00 UTC
I understand where you are coming from, but this is just not going to happen.
All of these products are based on open protocols which have been in place for ages.
They use open protocols on the gigantic open social experiment that is the internet.
Sure, they might try to lock the user in, and native apps are a way to do this, but … they can never be successful locking users in. Not when computers are open by design.
When i look at things like a chromebook, or an iphone, etc, sure, i worry a bit … but then again, i know that no matter how much they try to lock users in … they could never do it without building something ON TOP of open protocols and standards.
The internet, although very old, and badly secured/designed in some places (BGP, SMTP, ICMP, etc) is open by it’s very design. It was very very well thought out. The only remaining hurdle is dns, and i hope they get on with dns-sec and the decentralization of dns.
No company would ever reign supreme, simply because no other company will adopt it’s standards.
You can build a kickass product, ecosystem, etc … BUT …
You will have to build it with the same tools and standards as everyone else.
Edited 2015-08-07 19:10 UTC
This is disingenuous. There are very large closed platforms that continue to operate as siloes because of the network effect (e.g. FB Messenger; WhatsApp; Skype; etc.). Yes, eventually those platforms will be obsolete, but it doesn’t change the fact that in the meantime the default seems to be building closed, unfederated platforms, and users need to participate in all of those discrete platforms if they wish to contact users that are only present on one and not the other. Let’s say one or more of those platforms dies / becomes obsolete: in the current state, what is the likelihood that the new shiny replacement is federated rather than closed?
Interoperability doesn’t happen out of nowhere; it takes work. I personally will continue to advocate for interoperability and federated protocols as the target rather than figuring that the base for the system is built on open standards (IP, TCP, HTTP, etc.) and calling it good enough.
Edited 2015-08-07 20:55 UTC
Stares at a tree, doesn’t see the forest.
We have moved away from the scenario you’re describing, and we continue to move further and further from it.
What you’re asking is that competitors open up their products and IP to others. That will not happen.
I also see no reason as to why that should happen.
It makes no sense.
What did happen is that we now have a lot of competing products, ecosystems, etc all (mostly) based on open protocols and standards.
And while they might not work with each other directly in many cases, it is trivial to move between them. You can easily move data between services without losing any of it.
You can copy paste a mail from gmail into outlook.com with the formatting intact for example. Now don’t laugh … shit like that didn’t work right at all for ages.
And, yes, you can copy the text and content because it uses open protocols and standards.
Try copy/pasting stuff from a native app without support for this …
Just because things aren’t the way you want them to be, doesn’t mean that they are broken.
I can load up a website, chat with people, send email, listen to music, watch youtube, etc etc etc just as well on my linux pc, a windows pc, a mac, an android phone, ios device, etc etc etc.
I can even browse the web on my irix box.
I can look at the data, have it rendered correctly, save it, share it with others, you name it.
We’ve never had this level of interoperability and compatibility before.
Although i do think that the wrong technology has been chosen to get there in many ways (raping html and js into doing things they aren’t supposed to do for example), it works, and it works very well for the most part.
The level of openness and standardization is pretty damn high nowadays.
Not too long ago, you couldn’t even exchange files between macs and windows machines properly for example.
Don’t forget that there also has to be room for innovation.
Anyway, i get where you’re coming from, but i just think you’re wrong.
Furthermore, i use pidgin to chat with friends using the web client, their phone, and the native hangouts client every day. It works fine.
p13,
Email was federated since the beginning, so this is a poor example. Historically many services were designed to be federated. For example, a Bell customer can call an ATT customer, etc. This has been great for user choice, innovation, etc. However many new applications are evolving into closed networks where users become isolated to the service. Copy & paste is not a solution to this problem. Without federation, users can’t collaborate between providers in any meaningful way. Users have little choice but to register accounts within the data silos (that they oppose) because their peers are already there. Meanwhile, many of their peers are doing the exact same thing. The resulting network effect causes the service’s market share to get inflated above what it actually merits simply due to it’s popularity.
The future of mainstream tech might inevitably lie in large proprietary corporate data silos, and maybe it’s futile to resist. Still, there’s no denying that federated solutions are better for competition and user choice.
Edited 2015-08-10 18:27 UTC
But will they?
Ask yourself these simple questions
1) How many people think that the ‘internet’ is IE
2) How many people think that Ubuntu === Linux
Both of these show how powerful Marketing is as a powerful tool in shaping people’s view of the world. For those that follow Fox News, logonto Facebook as soon as they wake up in the morning etc etc
are IMHO easily led into the old ‘AOL is the Internet’ way of thinking.
What is the future for sites like this if more and more of the Internet users stay withing the confines of Google/Facebook/whatever all the time? Advertisers will vote with their feet and head to where the $$$$$ are to be made.
Edited 2015-08-06 07:20 UTC
That’s a little presumptious …
Sure, there are plenty of people that don’t fully comprehend what’s out there, but …
I don’t think they would necessarily comprehend one way or another … simply because they don’t care.
The AOL model faild once. With good reason. It will fail again, if it comes to it. Protocols being open or closed is an important discussion, but won’t be the cause of any aol-ization of the internet.
the AOL model didnt fail. Their model was to act as a potral to an AOL version of the internet and its content.
The same is true today but provided by someone else. If your website isnt on google, it doesnt exist (for many).
AOL failed because they didnt convert dial-up users to broadband, not because of the concept of a walled garden.
Exactly this! I had AOL from version 2.0 through 5.0, and the only reason we moved away from it was because of broadband. At the time, I remember a lot of people doing the same for the same reason.
To this day, my parents still have their old @aol.com email address. That’s a great example of how inertia can work for you, and not against.
I have also had friends comment on a street ad where the email address was not @gmail.com and immediately comment why they were stuck in the past, after all, everyone has gmail these days.
I, myself, have had to adapt to this new AOL about 8 years ago when I moved away from where I grew up. A few of my friends mentioned that without Facebook I would not be able to keep up with everyone. I continue to get invitations, shared photos, etc only through Facebook. Without it, I would hardly know what was going on.
I realize the article is talking about the open APIs, but I see it as a broader problem.
Back in the early days (eWorld early days) AOL WAS slick! Ok, they didnt modernise but the early versions were impressive!
Thom is right, this has been happening for years. Facebook is not exactly like AOL (which was a closed client sent to people’s houses through the mail) but social media in general is a lot like AOL to me. Mostly time-killing, mainstream nonsense, working against the forces of an open, free, internet for information and empowerment.
The writing has been on the wall and on my site. i’ve been complaining about this for years:
3 years ago:
http://wfnk.com/blog/2012/03/stop-using-facebook/
http://wfnk.com/blog/2012/06/facebook-sees-the-shark/
2 years ago:
http://wfnk.com/blog/2013/02/its-just-a-website-and-you-work-for-th…
http://wfnk.com/blog/2013/04/facebook-wants-to-kill-your-apps-and-t…
http://wfnk.com/blog/2013/12/facebook-is-also-tracking-what-you-don…
This is happening because capitalism. Capitalist companies need to provide a return on investment to the venture capitalist who put up the initial money, and this model dominates tech business these days. There are no tech companies whose end goals are egalitarianism or broad social benefit, so this is what we get.
I wonder if a Mondragon styled tech company could have the space to pursue ends other than a return on investment to the initial capitalists.
So what would you suggest, then? Those people need to eat, or you’re not going to have technology in the first place. Face it, you need at least some capitalism and return incentives. We’ve seen what happens in regimes that don’t have them.
I suspect the problem has much more to do with being publicly traded than with having to satisfy the initial investors. You only have to please the initial investors at first. The shareholders, on the other hand, can hound you as long as you’re publicly traded and they often have little interest in maintaining anything but a steady (or rising) gain for themselves. Many of the companies they trade or ones about which they know next to nothing, and their only interest is in not losing money through their in-home casino which, face it, is exactly what the stock market is. This is, I think, where the process breaks down.
Edited 2015-08-06 20:50 UTC
I’ve long felt that Facebook has grown to have the level of user stickiness that AOL used to have. In that respect Thom is correct.
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