Elon Musk, before you wreck Twitter, heed what happened to Yahoo! Tumblr & other Internet flops

I watched a TV news report about the upheavals at Twitter, and Elon Musk's plans for revamping it and his firing of more of the staff, which have got a lot of Twitter users in a bit of a tizz, wondering whether their fears that it is about to collapse are justified.

I suspect that a lot of their fears are justified. It has been very common in Internet history for a web site that does one thing, and does it well so that it attracts a lot of users, to be taken over by someone bigger and then wrecked, so that it no longer does the thing that made it successful in the first place. Or if it does do that thing, it does it badly and then flops.

One of the companies that specialised in doing that sort of thing was Yahoo! It was very big and a power to be reckoned with on the Internet about 20-25 years ago. It started off as a search engine, but when Google produced a better search engine they decided to diversify, and started buying up other web sites that did one thing, and did it well. Nothing wrong with that. But then they started to mess with those web sites without apparently understanding what had made them popular and successful in the first place. The list of things they took over and wrecked is a long and a sad one. Here aree some of them:

• YahooGroups - Yahoo! took over Egroups, a mailing list host, and added a few useful features. Then they installed a new manager who had the brilliant idea of making it more like Facebook, It did what Facebook did very badly, and also did badly at what it had formerly done well -- mailing lists. Eventually groups.io sprang up to replace it in its original function, and YahooGroups closed
• Geocities - a free webhosting site that had the novel idea of grouping the sites it hosted into communities based on common interests. The people at Yahoo! didn't get the community thing, which helped to make free webhosting profitable, and it collapsed
• WebRing - another scheme that linked web sites into communities of web sites with similar themes and interests. Again, the people at Yahoo! didn't understand what had made it attractive, and wrecked and then closed it
• BlogLog - something like WebRing, only applied specifically to blogs and online journals. It was a kind of communal blogroll, and became very popular, which made it attractive to the people at Yahoo! But the people at Yahoo! didn't understand what made it popular, and took that away and tried to replace with with something else, which flopped.-

Yahoo! lost an enormous amount of goodwill through this, and is now a shadow of its former self, and now Twitter users fear that something similar will happen to Twitter. Let Elon Musk study what happened to Yahoo! and learn from its history before he repeats their mistakes.

There have been plenty of other examples; they are not limited to Yahoo!

There was Technorati, a kind of communal blog tagging site. You could visit the site to see who had tagged particular themes in their blogs, and when. You can do something like that with search engines, but Technorati was much more efficient. You could find the most recent blog tags on a topic. But the people who took over Technorati had the Facebook mentality. They wanted people to stay on their site. Facebook doesn't object to people going to other sites if the owners of those sites advertise on Facebook, but if you post a link to a blog post on Facebook, Facebook will show it to very few people unless the first few people react to it by "liking" it. Technorati tried to do something similar, which was totally counterproductive. People went to their site to see what blogs had similar tags. The new owners tried to get people to stay on their site by providing articles to rival the blog posts, which they simply could not muster the expertise to do. As a result, people stopped visiting their site. They did one thing well, got greedy, and stopped doing the one thing they did well, and tried to do something else badly. Elon Musk, take heed! It doesn't work.

Another example is Tumblr. It offered a lot of attractive features. E-mail posting, blog aggregating, and so on. At one time I used to put my Tumbler address in my email signature, because I could tell people that if they went to Tumblr they could see all my stuff, It had links to all my recent blog posts on other sites too. But none of that works any more, and as a result I haven't visited Tumblr for months, perhaps years.

I'm not saying Twitter can't be improved. It does one thing well, but it could do it a lot better. Its algorithms, for example, can be enormously frustrating to users, and create a very bad user experience (#UX). So Twitter users have to spend quite a lot of time and energy trying to work around the algorithms, and resent being manipulated by them. The current crisis has helped to make a lot of Twitter users aware of a rival outfit, Mastodon, which is algorithm-free.

But before making changes, make sure you understand why people who use Twitter are there, and don't alienate them in the hope of attracting others -- Yahoo! Technorati and Tumblr tried that, and failed. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, 

Clarissa's Blog: Being Hated by Conservatives vs Being Hated by Liberals

One of the characteristics of the emerging postmodern age is that it is an age of communication without community. Marshall McLuhan's global village is divided and faction-ridden. Over the last 20 years of participating in the internet (with a small i) I have discovered that one comes face to face with US culture in a way that one never did before. Now places like China are rapidly catching up, but in 1991 it was in the US that more people had modems, and connected to bulletin boards, and disseminated their opinions more widely than ever before.

And today I read a couple of blog posts that encapsulated this experience.

Clarissa's Blog: Being Hated by Conservatives vs Being Hated by Liberals:

There is a difference, though, between getting tons of hits from people who come from liberal sites that post angry rebuttals of my posts and visitors from the conservative blogs that attempt to do the same. Visitors from progressive blogs leave comments, argue, initiate discussions, offer evidence in support of their opinions. I might disagree with them, but I am forced to recognize that their comments are interesting to read. Conservative readers come by, gawp, and, at best, leave a comment of the 'I-know-this-is-somehow-wrong-but-I-don't-have-the-brains-to-explain-why' variety. Their writing is stilted and full of spelling and grammar mistakes. They think that calling one 'a Jew whore' and 'an autie retard' is a powerful intellectual argument.

I explained before why I find any conservative position to be unsustainable on the level of reason and logic. It is not surprising to me that visitors who come here from conservative websites turn out to be very unintelligent and incapable of maintaining a discussion. They don't really have opinions, that's the problem. They have emotional outbursts whose underlying causes they are able neither to identify not to control.

And I have to say I agree. In cyberspace, at least, American "liberals" tend to come across as very illiberal and intolerant. But when you read the arguments of American "conservatives", it becomes almost understandable.

And then there was this: A Spell for Refreshment of the Spirit: Civility: A Blast from the Past:

Everyone is talking about civility today. I'm not American, so before the tragic shooting recently I hadn't been closely following the ever-deepening political divide south of the border. However, for a long time I have noticed the same deterioration of civility in our society in general.

The thing that amazes me most about US politics is that there is so little difference between the two main parties, yet the closer they are to each other, the more exaggerated the rhetoric with which their supporters attack each other.

Republican supporters attack Democrat supporters as if they will leave no baby unaborted, yet in 8 years Bush did not stop abortion. Democrat supporters attack Republican supporters as if they were intent on invading every country in the world, yet Obama still hasn't brought US troops back from Afghanistan and Iraq.

The more closely they resemble each other, the more viciously they attack each other.

Of course the US doesn't have a monopoly on incivility and motor-mouth politicians. America has its Sarah Palin, and we have our Julius Malema. But America seems to have more, and more vociferous, and more incivil extremists than most other countries, at least on the public internet.

There are some areas in which I would support American "conservative" policies, but would be reluctant to do so, because the American "conservatives" who advocate such policies seem to be such hate-filled people, and to advocate those policies from a position of hatred rather than love.

There are some policies advocated by American "liberals" that I think are misguided, and some that I think are stupid, and some that I think are detestable and evil and decidedly illiberal, but on the whole the people who seem to advocate them seem to have their hearts in the right place, even if their heads seem all screwed up. And that reminds me of what a friend of mine once said:

"It is better to do wrong for the sake of love than to insist on doing right because of my lack of it."

Hackosphere: The Web is not ready for Chrome yet!

At last, a good reason not to try Chrome.

Hackosphere: The Web is not ready for Chrome yet!:

It is an understatement to call Chrome as a browser. It is a mini operating system for running Web applications. So far, most of the Web applications have been running on the server side and used the browser only for display. Recently, there has been a push towards Rich Internet Applications (RIA) that use your browser's advanced functionalities such as Flash, Javascript etc to deliver desktop application-like complex feature set. Zoho and Google docs are examples of popular Office applications that run in your browser. This trend has just started and is growing.

Hat-tip to Fencing bear at prayer.

Like many other people I've read about the Chrome web browser for Google, and have wondered if I should try it. Is it any faster than other browsers, any simpler, any more efficient?

And this article explains it better than anything else -- the push towards Rich Internet Applications.

But it misses out the most important thing: the web is not ready for Rich Internet Applications because of bandwidth caps. There is already far too much Flash and Javascript stuff around.

I've installed the Noscript add-on to Firefox to block Javascript applications like streaming video, podcasts and the like, because they are such bandwidth hogs, and all this "rich content" costs money to download.

It's a sort of electronic verbosity, like HTML in e-mail. People who never use one word where four will do love to clothe the most trivial statements with fancy fonts in different colours, animated smiley faces and the like, so that one gets the original message, and then the HTML version that is 10 times as long (and I have my mail reader set to only show the plain text anyway, so I never see the fancy stuff).

If the content was really enhanced by all these bells and whistles it might be OK, but most of it is trivial.

So if the main feature of Chrome is that it does more of what I'm already trying to stop Firefox doing, thanks but no thanks.

Until bandwidth caps are removed, the web is not ready for Rich Internet Applications, and therefore not ready for Chrome.

The connection has timed out

It's bad enough getting these timeout message from the SAIX news server, but now it's happening with Blogspot blogs as well.

The connection has timed out

The server at www.blogger.com is taking too long to respond.

* The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few
moments.


Is anyone else getting these messages, or do we just have a slow connection?

Why I avoid YouTube, Podcasts etc

I never watch YouTube or other online video stuff. I never listen to Podcasts (don't even have a speaker connected to my computer). I hate it when people refer me to such things online, or when they fill their blogs with multiple photos and videos. I now avoid Facebook, because I'm overwhelmed by demands to look at things that require me to download and install yet another bandwidth-consuming (and possibly privacy-threatening) "app".

Why?

The end-of-the-month broadband blues, that's why.

Read this article: The cap that chokes.

We switched to broadband nearly two years ago, just after my BBS computer finally crashed. We calculated that by giving up the extra phone line, broadband would cost about the same as we were paying for dialup (about R750 a month), and we wouldn't have to rush to get everything done on the Internet before 7:00 am, and then wait for callmore time to kick in again at 8:00 pm before looking again. At least if someone referred to a web site in an e-mail or newsgroup, one could look at it any any time of day, instead of saving it up for the evening.

Or so we thought.

What they didn't tell us was that the 2 Gig cap would mean no access at all for half the month. We increased it to 3 Gig (the max). Last month we ran out on the 26th. The month before we ran out on 21st. At least for the last couple of months e-mail still worked, but before that even e-mail was cut off. That doesn't apply to web-mail addresses, of course, like Yahoo or Google mail -- they are still cut off.

And if someone refers to a web site in an e-mail message, sometimes it's not a matter of waiting till callmore time in the evening to look at it, but waiting till Internet access comes back at the end of the month.

It makes blogging impossible. It makes online calendars virtually useless, if you can't check your appointments for half the month. And then the first three days of the month are spent catching up -- trying to read the comments on one's blog (and the complaints that one hasn't responded to someone's comment), reading other people's blogs, deleting spam, marking Usenet trolls as read, putting all the real e-mail into the "to reply" folder.

And that happens even when I do avoid videos, YouTube, podcasts and the like. I wonder how anyone manages to use them. Some people must be looking at those YouTube inserts in blogs, or listening to those podcasts, but how do they manage it?

How broad is "broadband"?

About 18 months ago we signed up for ADSL, which, while it cost about the same as our dial-up connection, seemed to offer certain advantages. The main one was that one could connect to the internet at any time without waiting for 7 pm, when the cheap phone rates kicked in.

At first it seemed marvellous -- if someone recommended a web site one could click on the URL and see what was there, without the need to wait for CallMore time (by which time one would usually have forgotten all about it).

The advantage of dial-up, though, was that if one needed to send an urgent e-mail, one could do so, even at the expensive times. Broadband is not nearly as flexible. Two weeks into the month, one hits the cap, and there is no internet access, no e-mail, nothing for the rest of the month.

After experiencing that for the last few months, the old system of 12 hours expensive, alternating with 12 hours very expensive doesn't seem to be such a bad idea after all.

Or does anyone know of South African ISPs who offer a better deal?

Anyway, from now until the end of the month I won't be looking at other people's blogs much, and will not click on links unless absolutely necessary. I never look at video clips anyway, so I don't know what uses all the bandwidth.

Running out of bandwidth

For the last couple of days we have had no internet access, because we have used up our 2 Gig limit.

This means that we cannot use e-mail or any other services for one week out of four, and so if anyone wonders why we haven't responded to e-mails etc, that is why.

There seems to be an idea the "broadband" means unlimited access, and so people scoff at complaints about sending e-mails with HTML codes that take up ten times the space of the message text, and things like that. I've never looked at YouTube videos that people put in ther blogs, or refer to in e-mails, and newsgroup postings, and we still run out of bandwidth.

Of course part of it is spam, but the fact is that bandwidth is not unlimited, even in these days of high-speed connections.