The problem is that it's worse than the one we have today in the only way that most people care about: it's harder. To participate, it expected you to know how to do a bunch of things that seem trivial to tech folks but frighteningly complicated to everybody else. You had to buy a domain. You had to choose a Web host. You had to know how to connect the domain to the Web host. You had to choose the right software to do what you wanted to do. You had to install that software, and configure it properly.

The reason hosted services became popular is because they let you skip all that stuff. You fill out a form and you're up and running. Someone else worries about all that other stuff for you. This makes those services accessible in a way that the Web of 2000 was not.

Of course, to get that accessibility, the hosted services make you give up a lot of things. You lose access to your raw data. You lose your privacy. You lose the ability to change vendors if the one you're on turns evil.

But to non-technical people, those losses aren't obvious. They don't understand what they've lost until losing those things turns around and bites them. It's like DRM: people don't understand why DRM-encumbered music downloads are bad until their iPod dies and they want to move their iTunes-bought music to an Android phone. "What do you mean I can't do that?" is what you hear the moment the penny drops. But before then, they don't understand the risk.

This is what will need to be overcome to make tomorrow's Web like yesterday's was: it'll need to be as easy for people to use as today's is, or you'll need to educate the entire world about why they should put up with it not being that easy. Otherwise people will keep on blindly stumbling into the heavily-advertised walled gardens, not realizing that's what they're doing until the day they decide they want to leave, and can't.

People used to have blogs on livejournal or other services, some were trying to create content, write interesting posts. I met a lot of new people through that medium too.

But now everybody is locked inside the narrow bubble of their own social network. People don't become friends on facebook - they usually "friend" their IRL friends. You can't fit a good meaningful post into a tweet. And you can't have a normal discussion without sane comment threads like on livejournal - and I haven't seen that on any of the popular social sites.

That's also a part of the web we lost.

The "walled garden" networks will always strive to find their value in lowering the barrier to entry for new participants on the web. Facebook makes it super easy to share your photos with your family and friends and passively update them on the minutiae of your life. Twitter does the same thing to large degree in a more public fashion. Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest... all of the same zeitgeist: user experience.

But the cognoscenti are certainly aware that the web is the sum of its parts and walled gardens are antithesis to participation within its ecosystem. However the problem is and has always been participation: there is no single sign-in, no simple user experience, no common parlance for the mainstream to absorb. We got about as far as blogs and stopped there once MySpace, Facebook, et al took over.

I'd prefer a return to the roots but I think we'll need software and services that provide a better user experience and product-based focus rather than the service-oriented approach that has become popular.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with that IMO- people are far more likely to have their real names on Facebook, and thus leave sensible comments rather than total drivel. But it makes a point that he doesn't include in the article- sometimes these centralised information stores can be useful.

The way out of this mess is for people with loud voices to support efforts like Tent.io, open, decentralized, standardized protocols that don't lock us into corporate silos: https://tent.io/

I hate to add emoticons to this quite serious discussion, but I can't help but think that we've lost; over the course of 40 years, a lot more than the cooperation and interoperability described here.

We lost operating systems that expect the user to eventually learn a programming language.

We lost the expectation that a user will ever learn one.

We lost the early expectations of a peer to peer Internet.

We lost the hope of encryption protecting anybody beyond a few stubborn nerds and activists.

We lost the idea of client programs, forcing more and more of our data into computers we don't control.

Were losing the idea that the public can manage their own computers, as we have thus far seen a poor job of it.[0]

Were losing our memory that these things were possible, that they ever could have been or could be.

Were losing the chance to change these things for the future, should we wish to.

[0]: I remember reading over 50% of computers on the Internet are in a botnet, if anyone could indulge my laziness and source this; I would be grateful.

The author said "we've abandoned [these] core values", and this is precisely why Wave failed: people don't care enough about these values.

[0] http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/05/hello-world-meet-goog...

Yes there was Flickr but you could discover photos. Thing is, Flickr is still there and you can still use it. What's clear from this is that Flickr didn't (and doesn't) cover what is the use case for most people: sharing photos with a limited group of friends and family.

Technorati? Honestly, I think this is an example of living inside a very small bubble. I'd honestly never heard of Technorati until long after it had waned.

I don't agree that the monetization of the Web has degraded the value (to the user) of links on sites other than links on sites aren't the primary discovery mechanism like they used to be, which is actually a good thing (IMHO).

> In the early part of this century, if you made a service that let users create or share content, the expectation was that they could easily download a full-fidelity copy of their data, or import that data into other competitive services, with no restrictions

This is only true to a limited extent IMHO. The primary services for creating information 10+ years ago were email providers. Because Web-based mail was a latecomer, services like Yahoo Mail and Hotmail grew up in an era where many people used Outlook, Thunderbird and other desktop email clients so they had to support POP3 (and later IMAP) and you could use those services to export your mail.

But that isn't the same as designing your services for interoperability. That was an unintended consequence.

As the idea of "your mail, everywhere (you have an Internet connection)" became dominant, so did Webmail. POP3/IMAP became less important.

Again, I consider this a net positive change.

> In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites

This I disagree with. Having your own domain and Website 10+ years ago was pretty unusual. Administering your own site is not easy, particularly as malware became more prevalent. This has declined because no one wants to run their own Website (or email server for that matter) because it's a crazy amount of effort for very little real gain.

The only real problem I see with the present state of the Web is that Facebook wants to own all your data. It wants to be your identity. It wants to be your Internet. That's bad. It's bad for the Web and bad for consumers. But honestly, I don't see it coming to pass. Facebook is just as susceptible to disruption as so many behemoths that have come (and gone) before it.

10+ years ago Microsoft dominated your computing environment. Many couldn't envision a future that would break free of this grasp. In a few short years Microsoft has diminished their control of your computing experience in ways few could've predicted. I'll just leave this as an example of the danger of extrapolation:

http://xkcd.com/605/

As in, site.com/view?postid=1234 or site.com/view?userid=1234. Back when "the URL [was] the new command line" and you could easily discover all the content from a site and rework it as you liked. You could tell how many posts a blog had or how many users a site had by pluggin in a few numbers and doing a binary search. No need for an API or a feed. Just look at the URL and you could see what you needed to mess with.

Then SEO happened and URLs started looking like site.com/10-shocking-secrets-about-cat-odor-control-devices, which you can't really do anything with except shorten them to shrt.nr/Ssk and make them even less meaningful.

It always surprised me that nobody complained when we started losing that.

While much of the observations may be true, the web is still a far richer and more valuable resource than it was five or ten years ago.

The point is, you can't build much on top of instagram, twitter, facebook, whatever. APIs are encumbered by pricy licenses, nobody wants to collaborate. Open standards for sharing data are dying. RSS is dead. Mash-ups are dead. Everything is behind private APIs and walled gardens, the web doesn't connect everything anymore.

Five years ago, most social photos were uploaded to Flickr

You can still do this. People choose not to. I don't want strangers viewing my social pictures, esp if I had kids. These are private moments to be shared with my friends.

Ten years ago, you could allow people to post links on your site

You still can, it's your site. If you decide to monetize your site and display AdWords then that's your call. You don't have to be a sheep and follow what everyone else is doing.

In 2003, if you introduced a single-sign-in service that was run by a company...

Don't use them and create an account. No one is forcing you to use them, but for some of us (me) it's just easier to link several sign-ins together with my Google account. These are generally sites I trust. If I don't trust them then I'll use a disposable email account anyway to register. If the "average man" on the street doesn't know better then that's his/her problem, it's the same basic principle as identity theft and people guard against that. It's time they did the same online.

In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites

Really? A few people maybe, but most non-tech people I know really couldn't give 2 hoots. Wordpress and all the blogging sites have made a lot more people I know open their "own" sites than would have been owning a domain name and all the other hosting and "headache" that goes with it.

Five years ago, if you wanted to show content from one site or app on your own site or app...

Yes, agree it is bad, but that's business. The same thing happens in the real world, just because it is online the principles of business do not disappear and unfortunately not everyone is that tech-savvy and some of those people who pumped millions into a business may not "get" the web like you.

I don't think we have "lost" any of these. People have just decided to move on as the technology has advanced. The internet is a lot more open and a lot more accessible to many more people than it has ever been. As a developer I may care about the above (I don't) but as a regular joe, I don't think I would waste 2 seconds, no matter how long I have been using the web.

Oh my gosh. This is the GNOME project!

We are on the same onramp now as we were in the late 90’s. Facebook, Twitter, et. al. are just another stopping point to whatever comes next. We lost some things along the way, we abandoned some of our anonymity, and in some ways our freedom and experience suffered. But we have also gained tremendously in the decade since. We have smartphones with apps that guide us to cool places and discovery new experiences. We have apps that make our shopping experiences easier and cheaper. We have apps that let us express ourselves in sounds, pictures, videos, text, and to share those expressions of ourselves to the world in a few clicks. We can find any number of experts and sites that offer assistance without flipping open phonebooks or blindly Googling the world.

Yes, we lost something. I also agree that we have forgotten some of the earlier values that made the web such a joy. We got enticed by free apps and gaudy user experiences. However, there will be a backlash someday and the next generation of Internet users will jump outside of these walled gardens to take control of their own online identity.

But the thing is, I love the web we have now, too. I love the interconnectedness and the fact that you don't need to be technical to find, share and create amazing stuff. You just have to have imagination and humanity.

So, let's go back. Let's take the web we've got today, and let's consciously retrofit it with the plumbing we had back then. Let's take the services we all work on and stick in those APIs. Let's make it all work better together, so that the sum of all the web applications is far more than all the web applications separately.

Think about the back-end services we all value: Stripe. Twilio. AWS. What unites all of them is that they're incredibly simple to develop with, and to connect into other applications. That's why Twitter succeeded in the beginning, too: because its API was simple enough that people could build apps for the nascent mobile app ecosystem. This is good for all of our products, as well as for the web's health as a platform.

It's not hard. That's the beauty of it: all these APIs and standards are simple to build and simple to use. That's why they survived. All that has to happen is an understanding that being closed is not a better way to serve your users or run a tech business.

And we had to move in this direction to get the "average Joes" and your grandma on board. Facebook pushes everything in the wrong direction IMHO, from privacy and censorship and content monetarization to technology (PHP, Hiphop, C++, hackathlons?! what new "toxic" technologies and ideas will they support or "invent" next?), but they and those like them brought "the people" online.

But now that they've survived the poisoned cheeseburgers and digested them, it's time to reap the benefits of the red pill. Now that we've taken the detour necessary to get the non-techies on board, it's time to steer the ship in the right direction!

You can still put your photos on flickr where no one you know will ever see them.

I imagine the nerd population has grown, and accelerated over time. It is just that the non-nerds are getting on-line much faster.

Adapt of die.

Going back to 2002, Microsoft had been working on "Hailstorm", which was a very poorly chosen name for something that people rapidly became afraid of ;P. It was later renamed to "My Services", but it included Microsoft Passport (yes, this is mentioned in the article, but I don't think it is given enough weight), a single sign-on service provider that Microsoft was encouraging other websites to use. It would provide details about you, including your e-mail address, to the sites you connected with.

I had remembered a bunch of people being angry about it, so I did a Google search for "Microsoft Password mark of the beast", and came across an article written at the time in some random magazine called "Microsoft's Passport to Controversy -- Depending on whom you ask, Passport is either a useful consumer convenience or the mark of the beast".

http://business.highbeam.com/787/article-1G1-83378739/micros...

However, it should be noted that one of the fears at the time was not "man, vague centralization is bad", it was "omg, Microsoft doesn't just want this service to take over the web... they want this service to take over the world". Now, of course, you read me saying that, and think "ugh, stop with the rhetoric: that's just an example of people freaking out about something we find common-place; that's what the article is about: did you read it? ;P".

But... it was actually for real. Microsoft was lobbying to make Microsoft Passport be the new US National ID system, and it wasn't just a pie-in-the-sky goal... they were lobbying to make it happen, had the ears of the right people, and were making serious progress on it. For reference, there was an article written about the situation in the Seattle Times with the title "Feds might use Microsoft product for online ID".

> Forget about a national ID card. Instead, the federal government might use Microsoft's Passport technology to verify the online identity of America's citizens, federal employees and businesses, according to the White House technology czar.

> On Sept. 30, the government plans to begin testing Web sites where businesses can pay taxes and citizens can learn about benefits and social services. It's also exploring how to verify the identity of users so the sites can share private information.

http://web-beta.archive.org/web/20020802161525/http://seattl...

I thereby feel the need to note that, even as late as 2005, if you were going to start talking about building the world's next best "single sign-on" provider, this is what you were being mentally compared with: yes, the one service mentioned (TypeKey) ended up having "much more restrictive terms of service about sharing data", but it is looking at the past through rose-colored glasses to think that things have gone downhill.

Let's put it this way: can you seriously imagine Facebook or Twitter ever being considered as the official login system for the IRS? I can't in 2012, but that was the honest-to-goodness reality of "the web we lost" from 10 years ago. At some point, in the last 10 years, it became more, not less, clear to everyone that this kind of service needed limits. There was backlash in 2002; but I believe it was much more fringe-concern than it would be now in 2012.

> Yesterday, appearing at the conference, Gates reiterated the goal, saying he expects governments in many countries will find it difficult getting to "critical mass" with authentication systems they develop on their own. He said some governments may opt to use companies such as Microsoft or America Online as "the bank" that registers people for online usage.

Who knows, though. I'm optimistic.

1. http://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network

Reflecting on some long-lost social circle that called an ancient BB home, I realized it had been a decade since I'd last meaningfully connected with an online community.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Take Dribbbble - folks follow, share, meet, and eventually collaborate with total strangers, following basically the same script I did 10 years ago. One of the qualities of successful online communities is their ability to catalyze connections between individuals through external channels - not just comments on a photo thread, but sharing IM, SMS, meatspace. Older communities like bikeforums.net are living artifacts of the old model. Some newer communities, like Meetup, race you through the first couple stages. Facebook works very hard to keep you inside.

I think my personal investment in communities has simply become focused on more immediate circles. But if I wanted to, there's a whole internet of people chatting about their interests with strangers who become friends (and allies and enemies).

Finally - no thread on ye olden days of message boards is complete without a link to The Flame Warriors - http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/warriorshtm/acne.htm.

Here's a 60 second concept video: [redacted]

Granted, it is probably different from the way it was done in the past, but it is still possible.

We have taken two steps forward, is it all that bad to reflect on the step we took backward?

A lot of the improvements we've made do not come at the cost of the things we've lost. Some things did have to go to enable the new ways, but some are also the victims of happenstance and circumstance. Some losses are implementation details really, or nice-to-haves that got cut for time/budget. Instead of a point for point dismissal of his post, consider the possibility that desirable properties of the old way do exist. Could long lost characteristics of the internet be rolled back into the current state of affairs in a beneficial way?

I think so. For example, a few of his points strike on the consolidation of the internet. Now that computing is dirt cheap I can run off into my corner and do my own thing, and the interconnectivty some of the new toys offer mean the people I care about know what I'm up to over here and can seamlessly experience it.

Facebook is just as susceptible to disruption

It sure is, but not by the kind of people who can't think about the concept of portable data and interoperability beyond POP/IMAP. Is mint.com not a very obvious poster child for data portability in this decade?

To any blogger back then, Technorati was as ubiquitous as Google Analytics is today. I think the point here is Technorati reached a point where it couldn't deal with all the spam and today, it's very hard to track inbound links. Neither Google nor anyone else does a decent job of this. (They show referring pages when people click on a link, but not occasions when an author creates the link.)

"What's clear from this is that Flickr didn't (and doesn't) cover what is the use case for most people: sharing photos with a limited group of friends and family."

This is a bitter irony, because Flickr was (probably?) the first service to explicitly include a privacy option for sharing with friends and family. That most people do it today on other services (e.g. FB) probably says more about senior management at Yahoo over the years than anything profound about the web and walled gardens.

This can't be understated. As a highly technical person running my own web services, even I rarely posted photos. The support burden of managing the server, securing it, and keeping family up-to-date on passwords was just never worth it.

Facebook wants to own all your data. It wants to be your identity.

I would love to hear ideas for ways we can fix this that are realistic because I completely agree with you. Any ideas have to recognize the value that sites like FB provide (as the OP did not) and come up with better solutions.

In 1995, I would not have believed that Microsoft would not be the focal point of the industry. The Internet shifted things such that Microsoft is no longer the focal point. It can (and probably will) happen again to Google and FB.

When hypertext was still conceptual and imagined in microfiche, links were still the primary discovery mechanism of new or related content. I think that idea has stuck around for over 50 years because it is intuitive. It reduces whatever models you might be imagining for discovery into a simpler form.

Google may command the top spot on visited websites, but people use it so often to just open a wikipedia article with the exact query. This suggests Vannevar Bush understood some mechanics of knowledge acquisition better than Larry and Sergei did.

The OP is right. There are fewer links on blogs, and he helped me understand why.

A friend of mine got thousands of splogs indexed in Technorati and got real traffic from it.

On the other hand, whenever I ran a blog that was legit, Technorati always dismissed it out of hand as a splog.

I don't understand this point at all. Flickr has a feature for sharing with friends and family, in fact it has a group for 'friends' and another for 'family' or you can use both. I was doing exactly that in 2005 with Flickr though to 2008 when moved that to Facebook as more friends and family were registered there. What they didn't have was all the other social network stuff like status updates, chat, people tagging etc.

And 10 years later, the early adopters have moved on to other things and the mass market has arrived to stake their claim to the social web with Facebook, Twitter et al.

"I don't agree that the monetization of the Web has degraded the value"

Good thing you work for Google and can give an unbiased opinion.

"10+ years ago Microsoft dominated your computing environment. Many couldn't envision a future that would break free of this grasp. In a few short years Microsoft has diminished their control of your computing experience in ways few could've predicted."

If you have a money-making website, the new medium, you have to pay tribute to Adwords or be bust, increasing prices on every item. The King is dead, Long live the King.

I can't just be a citizen on the web. I have to be an entrepreneur in order to matter.

I want the wide-eyed hippies back in charge rather than the Ayn Rand freaks.

AJAX is awesome, but I hate that every site uses it 'just because' and my browser in now hosting applications with persistent network connections instead of displaying a document.

> Open API's that reply in JSON

The serialization format doesn't matter. What matter is that we have way more APIs, all different, with inconsistent semantics and non-orthogonal feature sets than the non-web APIs of 15 years ago. On average the people designing these APIs are less competent than the people from 15 years ago creating more headaches for the people that are competent.

> Cloud VPS's at $0.02 per hour

Cloud virtualization is expensive, not cheap. It has its merits, the overhead for elasticity is much less than it used to be, but this matters only at scale. At small scale you get unpredictable performance and terrible I/O.

> 10 Gb ethernet

No such thing. Even on servers its rare. I had 1 GigE on my laptop 10 years ago. I can't get a better NIC on any laptop today. The world is actually worse than it used to be because back in the day I didn't need to worry about saturating Ethernet. Now I do.

> 54 Mb fiber in my house

I used to be able to buy a symmetric link with a fixed IP address and reverse DNS. Now fixed IP is a rarity, symmetric links are usually not available for non-business customers and when they are, they cost more than 15 years ago. Reverse DNS? Ha ha.

> multicore computers in everyones pocket

I don't need a multicore computer in my pocket. I need a phone with good signal and a battery that lasts. They don't make them anymore. Even if I need a computer, smartphones barely qualify. iOS is locked and Android requires me to do a type of programming I don't like. I'm used to computers that I can program the way I want, not being bound by some framework.

> GPS at everyones fingertips

I don't care. I never used a GPS, never needed one. What I've seen is that now people get lost when their GPS breaks. I view that as a failure of civilisation.

> web frameworks

I'd probably break some Hacker News scalability limit if I started writing about this one.

> caching solutions like Redis

Redis is required because the other pieces of the stack suck. It's a remedy, hardly a cure from an architectural point of view. The broad architectures around us are more unsuitable and more abused than they used to be.

It's actually worse than that. Unix and Plan 9 have thought us that's it is better to model behaviour through a single bounded interface rather than a growing set of specialised interfaces. This allows composition, protects against lock in, and allows synthetic components. Now there's a Redis API, there's a Cassandra API, there's a MongoDB API, there's a Zookeeper API, there's a Riak API, there's a RabbitMQ API. Everything has an API. A different API. Not only this destroys composability, it also hinders experimentation, increases the technical debt, makes the cost of transition higher, and bounds the writer into using a limited set of tools.

> data crunching pipelines like hadoop

Hadoop is a a player in an extremely niche field. I don't think it's relevant to talk about a thing as specific as hadoop in the context of something as general as the cultural and pragmatical shifts in the Internet. However, if you brought in the discussion, Hadoop is awful. Companies deploy it because it's trendy, not because they need it, introducing complexity, additional dependencies and a whole new set of problems to solve. Hadoop also dropped the bar on what is considered simple and sane deployment causing new software to be just as awful to deploy when they wouldn't really need to.

> payment processing like Dwolla

No idea what this is, but payments on the Internet are worse then they used to be. Sure, now you can buy anything, but it's harder to pay. Paypal periodically asks me for IDs and freezes my accounts just because I happen to move between two countries, there are many more types of cards, some work on the Internet better than others, some banks work on the Internet better than others. Merchants support only limited and disjoint set of payment options forcing me to have multiple types of credit cards and various types of accounts I don't want or care about. Back in the day, you had a credit card, it worked. Now I can buy groceries and shoes on the Internet. Back in the day I could not, but I didn't want to. I wanted to buy various types of equipement, and that I could.

> There will always be folks hankering for the glory days of alt.religion.kibology and compuserve. Ignore them.

The article was not about the olde glory days, it was about a fundamental shift in the way people and machines interact on the Internet. A transition from protocols to services. I think this is a worthy thing to discuss and your dismissive, condescending post is not warranted.