Welcome to the Socials. All of them.
The New York Times writes today about social networking’s next phase- specialization and diversification into niches, aided by new startups like Ning, which claims to let you “create your own social network for anything”. Oh boy. Myspace lets Joe Sixpack create his own awesome website for anything, producing atrocious monstrosities of blinking,flashing,writhing, non W3C-valid HTML. For my work, I have to do a lot of research on social networks, which obviously includes MySpace as a major segment of the market. Every time I visit MySpace, I die a little on the inside, so much that I am seriously considering using Lynx to browse it.
Now we are offering the same demographic, which knows as little about Web 2.0 as it does about Web 1.0 whole social networks! I am not being elitist here, I swear. I know next to nothing about cars, and so I don’t try to fix my own car, just like your average computer user should not be fixing his own computer without at least some rudimentary training(I have a mixed history working in tech support). Now, what if my mechanic walks up to me and says hey, how about you build your own car? Come on, it will be great! You can add all of the features you want, it will have a musical horn, and blackjack, and hookers! Even offered all of the tools for the physical construction of a car, knowing nothing about optimal automotive engineering, my car will probably not be a very good one. The same thing will go for roll-your-own social networks, as millions will scramble to become the next MySpace millionaires. “Look, pa, I just click here and here and wait for my billion-dollar check frum that theere Googel!” To be fair, Ning exerts a lot of control over the social networks it provides, not giving users complete free reign. But the next MySpace of social network design might not, leading to a whole lot of rusting junkers decomposing along the Information Superhighway.
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I use Dillo for a lot of my browsing. It shows some images, but no flash or other annoying plugins. It doesn’t support scripting, so there are no popups. It doesn’t even support CSS, so the layout is usually quite different.
Some sites will require JS, Flash, and so on. Depending on how well I trust the site, I may go ahead and use a regular browser there, or I may forego the site entirely.
The ads for that home lending site (Flash animations with dancing cowboys, moving tatoo needles, inflating animals, and so on) that appear on two of the three big search engines are so annoying that I’ve stopped using MSN/Live entirely and I’m limiting my use of Yahoo.
The target demographic is the main reason we have to deal with mixed case and spaces in filenames. They are the reason you see multipart/mixed emails nested so deep you run out of memory opening attachments. They are the reason DRM even exists. They are the reason web designers waste their talent working around MSIE issues. They are the reason we still have to put up with Real Audio’s advertising crap. They are the reason email is so clogged with spam it’s totally useless. They are the reason Verisign committed the DNS atrocity of putting ads on non-existant domains. They think a computer is a web-browser on windows, and web2.0 is a huge part of that illusion.
Every time I walk out of a DMV or a Waffle House I drop to my knees and thank God I’m not in that demographic. Why in the world would I want to write code for them? I couldn’t bear it.
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