Ivan Pope: "There just are no sophisticated tools in Facebook - everything is like a shallow version of what we're used to on the outside. For sure, the apps have started to put some depth back into the system, but it's hard to imagine that we'll en masse abandon our email and our IM and our other contact and memory tools and use the stubs that Facebook offers."
Ah, but you don't get it, Ivan, it's what the thirteen-year-olds use, and so we have to respect it. After all, their poetry and taste in music is so good that we have to respect their choice in roach-motel web applications. The latest craze that seems to be addictive to the blogosphere is equating "popular" with "good".
Facebook is the modern-day BBS, only without the hacker charm of the original BBSes (I caught the tail end of the BBS thing, but I do remember logging into PDSL - a local free software distributor run out of this guy's house - to get a set of ASCII files listing their CD-ROM catalogue - nowadays we just use BitTorrent instead).
The social networks I like all allow you to distribute things far and wide. Del.icio.us has plugins for Firefox, plus an API and RSS feeds - meaning I can easily get hold of data that I've entered and reuse it. The same is true for Flickr, Last.fm and many other services. If I put it in, I can get it back out again with some ease. They literally are small pieces, which I can tie together in new and interesting ways. Facebook is an island.
Take my blog as an example of portability. Since it's all just a bunch of XML files, it took what amounted to a few days of programming in order to write a new version of it.
There's this really cool network that I've found. It's kind of like Facebook. You can link up with friends and chat. You can express yourself - post audio, video, text, photos or teeny little status updates. It's called the Web. Facebook is just a distraction. Let's work harder to build a better Web. That means getting the standards in a fit shape. That means finally cracking the Semantic Web. That means even greater innovation with CSS and JavaScript (I think I'm getting to grips with the former, still got some way to go with the latter). It means finding better ways of doing things. Keith Alexander is, again, right about this one - MVC will have to give way to some kind of pipelined, semantic thing, the details of which currently elude me. More importantly, it means more focus on the user experience and on decent interface design, accessibility and usability. I say those because, while they aren't a total fit with my region of interest, I appreciate the importance of them and the huge value they play on the Web.
What else? Encryption. I think encryption is still completely under-explored, and it's something that the masses have to jump on to. Mass use of military-strength encryption provides herd immunity against ever-insane levels of government surveillance. Strong encryption will be to the digital realm what muskets were to those pesky eighteenth-century New England upstarts - a continuing guarantee of freedom. Geeks need to lead by example on this front. If you need any more convincing, go read Why I Wrote PGP by Phil Zimmerman. This is important. Rather than lusting after iPhones, it's something that the technically-minded folks can do to actually make our ever more repressive socities freer. Google are holding out reasonably well. Other web companies are not doing well at all. That means you, Yahoo! Grab yourself FireGPG and route around these inconveniences on the route to a free Internet.
Because that's what it's about. The Internet. The Web. That's what all this TechMeme, Wall Street nonsense is avoiding - that this is the Internet, and everything can be routed around if a couple of clever geeks get together and build it.
