1 - The need for the web to be profitable in some way makes 'single tools' hard to build. You have to grow users, add features, etc, etc. So even if you have an API or something useful it likely won't scale economically. Unless it's government supported or behind a foundation of some sort. The Twitter API comes to mind here.
2 - This is tricky because for the web to meet the UNIX philosophy, everyone has to agree. You can't have the team that manages the equivalent of the `ls` website decide to change their output, or strike up a deal with the `diff` team to force `diff3` out.
Once again, capitalism ruins everything fun. That's hyperbole, kinda :-)
Depends. I accept the capitalism's ability to raise resources (capital) for larger-scale projects, but generally profit motive fucks everything up. The Internet was fine until every pathetic "enterepreneur" out there smelled easy money and come to ruin it all. It happens in every industry. Capitalism creates abundance - but abundance of worst possible crap sellers can still get away with.
That's true. The free market was mostly [1] absent from the research into packet switching in the 1960s, the actual deployment in 1969 of the packet-switched network that became the internet, the invention of email, FTP, the domain name system, the mailing list, newsgroups, IRC, the MMORPG (initially referred to as a multi-user domain or a MUD), the web, webmail, the blog, the RSS feed, the wiki and Wikipedia, but, yeah, starting about 1987, profit-motivated ISPs started slowly to appear that offered access to the internet to organizations and individuals.
1: I use the qualifier "mostly" because the government did farm out most research and engineering tasks to a handful of for-profit companies (Bolt Beranak Newman, the Mitre Corporation, SRI International) that specialized in governmental contracts.
That may be true. But, the Internet existed because of massive multi-decade investment from folks without a profit motive. All of the fundamental Internet protocols were created through those organizations.
Look at what capitalism gave us as an Internet like experience: compuserve, aol, etc. Those were all horrible closed wall systems.
But there are many massive investments at the academic and government research level that lead to nothing directly useful for consumers due to lack of investment interests in bringing it to market. Just look at the next generation Internet architectures that go nowhere. You can't ignore economics.
I'd date the actual, functional takeover somewhat later than that, but the web really was a lot more fun pre-dotcom-bubble. I'm not sure I would say I want to go back to it, exactly, but there sure is a lot that I miss.
Eh, there is a lot to be missed from the 'net, yes; but from the web? Like what? I mean, even when we're generous, 'pre-dotcom-bubble' is 'pre-2000' - the web was crap back then.
- It was much lighter; entire websites used to weight less than a single JS file today. We've increased the size of pages by an order of magnitude (and processing expense by at least two) for no real reason except laziness.
- The SaaS/cloud model wasn't so popular, which means trying to lock you in by stealing your data, or doing absolutely ridiculous things like IoT does, wasn't something you saw.
But that's how it's presented, not content. Look I dislike 5mb pages with 2 paragraphs of text content as much as the next guy, but if I had to choose between that and 1000 shitty Geocities 'personal homepages' and the vast wealth of information that can be found on the internet today, I'd choose today in a heartbeat.
How can someone claim with a straight face "but the web really was a lot more fun pre-dotcom-bubble" ? Good luck trying to find anything outside of nerd subculture and physics/math/CS content (exaggeration of course, but the core is true). (of course it could be 'true' if all one cares about is nerd subculture and physics/math/CS content...)
There is little actual content in present day Internet relative to its size. Look, what is produced on those websites that also tend to carry heavy presentation is not content. Real content is Wikipedia, or Hacker News, or various people and their various topical subpages, personal blogs, up and including stuff hosted at Geocities and Tripod Lycos. What is not content is most of the stuff that's created for money, including majority of today's "journalism". Information that is shallow, false and/or useless, and that exists only to make you click or buy.
90% of for-profit content could disappear just like that, and humanity would be much better off. Every information that is valuable, you can almost always find for free, posted by people who don't try to use you.
I don't care about content/download size ratio, I care about content (quantity and quality) in absolute size. Download speeds have progressed faster than page bloat.
Wikipedia didn't exist in 1999 (not for years, and even Slashdot was barely more than a gossip site. Good quality discussion back then was on usenet or irc. The concept of a 'mooc' was just a wet dream of some 'cypherpunks' and 'technoanarchists'. Download a manual for your microwave or car, do online banking, email anyone but your hardcore nerd friends? Forget it. Price comparison shopping, ordering something from another continent? Lol. I remember riding my bike to a local bank branch to pick up foreign currency, which I stuffed into an envelope and snailmailed. Had to ask at the counter of the post office how much the postage was, because there was no way to look that up online.
Mp3? Sort of existed, you could download song by song from geocities pages; that was before the crackdown that led to Napster even. But the "selection" was minuscule, compared to today.
Oh and back then, when you wrote a site, you chose between supporting ie or netscape, or browser sniffing and serving two versions, or sticking to yhe lowest common denominator which wasn't much, to put it mildly. Ffs people won 'best of the web' awards for html that worked on two browsers and didn't look like crap! Like obscure competitions today where you build a file that is both a pdf and a jpg! My first job, back around that time, was to 'port' a website from ie to netscape.
The more I think about, the more convinced I get - any claim that it was better in those days is just rose-colored glasses.
I didn't make any claims about the things you are talking about, only that it was more fun. Which it was. It's boring now. I used to go poke around, following random links just to see what was out there, encountering all kinds of oddball pages which represented nothing more than some person's individual gift to the world, and it was fascinating. It was fun to watch it all grow. I felt motivated to contribute, to share my own pages full of whatever information or opinions I happened to have. Photos of interesting places, stories about cities I'd visited, didn't matter; it all seemed like it was worth sharing, because that's what the web basically was.
I don't find that anymore. Homepages came and went, blogs came and went, and if there's still a thriving web out there beyond the big commercial sites, I don't know where to look to find it.
I still have my personal site, and I still post on my blog occasionally, but it increasingly feels like calling into the wind. I'm not going to just switch over and post all the same stuff on some big commercial site; fuck that. The web was awesome when it looked like it was going to be a new way for humanity to talk to itself; now it seems like little more than another way for rich people to make money. It does that very impressively, but who cares? Rich people always had ways to make money and will always find more; it's not very exciting when they turn yet another collaborative community project into a profit center.
Bandwidth was more scarce too. If not for the commercial explosion the Qwests and Level 3s of the world would not have spent billions laying fiberoptics.
Capitalism ruins everything fun? Not sure I follow. There are so many amazing APIs available now, which aren't as frictionless as using Unix tools -- but why would they be? Unix tools are installed locally and don't fall under the same constraints as communicating with an external system. It's apples and oranges.
I was just using an API the other day to validate addresses. It's an amazing thing, being able to hit an endpoint and not worry about the myriad of complex processes that must happen for that validation. If that's capitalism, I'd say it's pretty good.
Sure it's pretty good. But can it interop with other APIs predictably forever without paying Zapier?
And the capitalism dig has to do with when your address verification endpoint decides that an API isn't profitable. Or that it's better for them to change the format of the response. Or require you to have a account of some sort. Or rate limit. Or...
In the overall picture, if you're not helping someone earn money, you're living on borrowed time with the services they provide.
So what magical system did you have in mind that would suffer none of your potential problems? Even a publicly funded service is still as vulnerable. Services you run yourself still cost money and have their unique set of problems. The cost benefit to using APIs is that you're outsourcing that complexity to someone else in exchange for money so you can concentrate on your core business. It's why AWS is so popular. Yes, they could shut down, but the risk is worth it. Doing it all in house is the other risk... maybe your programmers can't develop the solution needed and your company tanks because you wasted a bunch of time and money building your own address verification service for fear the external API might shut down.
The USPS (which is quasi-private, I'll admit) offers address verification, but their service hasn't been reliable, which is why we have competitors now. Your fallacy is that because something isn't flawless that the whole system is a failure. And throwing around the word 'profit' as some pejorative, dirty word is an emotional manipulation. How else would people hire or expand if not for profit? The service I'm using (Smartystreets) now offers international address verification; I'm not sure how they would have paid for that if it weren't for profit. That extra money you bring home from your job after taxes and other expenses... that's profit. Your employer is living on borrowed time from the services you provide. What happens when you quit, change your rate, or become bored with your job? I guess it's worth the risk to them.
Sure... but Tarsnap is basically Colin, serving a very niche clientele and unlikely to be worth a few billions. Almost every tool discussed in the article is targeting mass market where such considerations become important at some point.
I thought the parent's first point made lots of sense and I don't really follow your point. Marginal cost for web services isn't literally zero, it is just close enough to zero that real businesses with revenue can treat it as if it is zero. But that doesn't mean that it is at all cheap in the usual sense to run a popular web service.
The moat metaphor is common way to talk about a business's competitive advantage. In this case I'm talking about improving or at least not actively impeding web application data interchange, and maybe even exposing smaller, more granular services.
Take Wikipedia, for example, who already offer their compiled data. Now to take that a step further they could expose the transformations they use to compile that data as separate endpoints.
1 - The need for the web to be profitable in some way makes 'single tools' hard to build. You have to grow users, add features, etc, etc. So even if you have an API or something useful it likely won't scale economically. Unless it's government supported or behind a foundation of some sort. The Twitter API comes to mind here.
2 - This is tricky because for the web to meet the UNIX philosophy, everyone has to agree. You can't have the team that manages the equivalent of the `ls` website decide to change their output, or strike up a deal with the `diff` team to force `diff3` out.
Once again, capitalism ruins everything fun. That's hyperbole, kinda :-)