This post is my notes on Anil Dash’s keynote speech on “Next Year’s Web.” It’s a bit messy, but most of it is here.
Presumptuous to say what it’ll look like. Instead give us a framework to decide what it will look like next year. We have the extraordinary capability to create the web (democratization, etc.).
- anil@dashes.com
- @anildash
- Six Apart
- lolcats (spawing I can haz cheezburger) “[This is] what the web is good at.”
- Quoted in WSJ (re: lolcats)
Community of Creators
Photo of people at SXSW. Just “writing on the web” was enough of a reason to get together. Turns out they were from w/ Gawker, Twitter, Flickr, Metafilter, etc., etc.
First, 100 blogs. You could read them all, every day. Now 100,000,000.
This Year’s Web
Companies that shape the web currently. Much of the reporting and news characterise them as competitors “jousting” in an arena.
Google – search engine, then money machine, the third act is a bit strange (PageFlip. WTF?) (SF and the Valley is a myth) But Google Wave (bit like a segway: “cool tech but I don’t want to ride it” “bit like a segway for email”) Sincere about DBE (in the way only Californians can be), but many/most of their options are evil.
Microsoft – interesting. (Google now = MS at Windows 95) Parallels about new OS (W95, ChromeOS), new browser (IE6, Chrome). “People have hated us for a long time now.” ZuneHD, Bing, etc. are interesting, not ugly. “Wouldn’t be shocked if Azure is the best plaform for hosting PHP next year.”
Yahoo! – feel bad for them. Used to be cool (“most of you are old enough”). Biggest, most frequented site/s on the web. Still a fundamentally insecure organisation. But we won’t use it unless we think that the whole thing is sustainable. Like a childrens story: “Just believe in yourself.” Myth: “Google is machines, we’re people.”
Amazon – Both Kindle and the books (for Kindle, phone, laptop, etc.) both make money. Revolutionary! (Cf Google paying for Android to be used (they’ll do searches and make G money)). They’ve built an enormous infrastructure for their retail systems, selling it as AWS (funding each other, etc.)
Twitter – interesting to see how quickly they’ve become a player. But scary amount of power. @anildash as a recommended followee, got 700 in minutes. Not [just] a product, company, etc Platform, pervasive, blah, blah. Huge amount of money from funding: lots of resources, but similarly huge obligations. Recommended list is great idea for 100K users, but problematic for 100M users. Huge number of apps. Experimentations, simplicity, path of least resistance.
Facebook – shocked to find even more popular in .au than .us. Explicitly designed as a private enclave for Ivy League students. Design and platform in service of Facebook’s goals. Not enough criticism (esp. given that foreign, not contact/understanding w/ our values, etc.) “It’s complicated” relationships in other cultures might be offensive.
AOL – there are a lot of lessons. Was 1/3 of users’ access to the web. They were the biggest platform. Proprietary language (Rainman?) for applications inline with the AOL interface. Were thousands of people working using this. Now days we’d call it an AppStore. The iPhone of the 90’s. “GAOL”. Could only email each other, but RFC email won (and we get newsletters, lists, marketting, etc.)
In the same way ice cubes are made of water (but still float on top of it), these companies are “made of web”.
When we’re asked “what’s the biggest platform/social network?” we shouldn’t be thinking of the traditional pie chart of market share. The answer, of course, is the whole pie: it’s the whole web.
The biggest social network is the web itself!
We can look at the big mainstream media sites and see the pattern that’s going to happen on the web. Expect the decentralisation in online media that has happened in TV/Cable/Papers/etc.
Users are adopting a new network a year – the same rate as new email addresses – but the old ones don’t go away. We can anticipate that they’re going to form a long tail. Our sites, along with all the others, will have profiles, etc. and will be part of this curve. The “mainstream” networks will just be the top of the curve.
The current “refresh Twitter” cycle is the same pattern of centralised information distribution that we’ve been decrying in newspapers, etc.
YouTube are the richest company in the history of the universe, and they could solve any problem they want to. But the YouTube comments are still a cesspool.
So too are the comments on newspaper sites.
The people who make happy cat pictures can build good, supportive, fun communities, but the big companies, newspapers, etc. fail.
Culture Drives Adoption
Rather listen to a Spears song, than a technologist talk about music. (They’re nerds and have terrible taste.)
Encourage people to be Creators of Culture
Marsupials. He got to eat two of them!
Pangea, breaking up. Building a large number of niches.
We’ve been abdicating the control of our niche to people outside it.
In niche communities, power shifts to creators.
Ask Metafilter vs Yahoo! Answers. Y!A is the single most depressing site on the web.
Next Year’s Web
“Pustbutton” – deliver realtime updates from your site to anyone else on the web. PubSubPubHub, RSS cloud, etc. Relaying information through generic infrastructure. Very low costs.
A feature not a company.
Examples: OpenID (he was in the room when it was invented!) I am in control of my identity. One open network for authentication, authorisation, identity. Imagine the possibilities of combining this with the real-time messaging – a message from me (fo’ reals), in real-time, with whatever payload we need!
- The web is the social network
- Think about the big sites as the main stream media
- Culture, not features, drives adoption
- Learn from successes like OpenID, RSS cloud PSBH, etc.
- Relies on communities of creators
Questions
What about Apple? They seem to be doing it well.
Secrecy doesn’t scale. Spend months writing an app, send it into the black hole of the approval process.
FCC & Google Voice. Apple responded in three days.
Gruber is just a guy, but when he asks questions, the secrecy starts to come down.
The whole circus of WWDC and keynotes proves the “culture drives adoption.”
Businesses choose to live in the close region for a more pleasant experience early on. Kindle is DRM-ridden, but they’ve bought Stanza to hedge their bets. What are your thoughts?
Cyclical: closed and pretty, to ugly and open, ad infinitum.
Fighting Google News, Napster, etc. It happens repeatedly, everywhere we have technology.
Mentioned Everyblock. Aggreates data locally. Funded by a non-profit to promote local journalism, uses public data. Sold to Microsoft for $5M.
We may see free and open technologies reaching parity with closed competitors on similar time scales (with the pushbutton technologies). We may wind up without being screwed.
Homogenisation viz EC2, etc.
Can we differentiate if we’re all on the same stack and platform. But it seemed to work OK when everything was LAMP. The lower levels become commoditised.
An appstore for servers. Push a button and get a new server. Use one on Azure, one on EC2, etc. and have them work together as suited.