In a blog post last month, Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape and cofounder of Ning, a site where you can create your own social network, bemoaned comparisons between GeoCities and modern social networking sites such as Facebook and Ning. He goes to great lengths to list features of Facebook and Ning, that were missing from GeoCities. Me thinks he does protest too much. GeoCities pioneered the idea of online communities. You would expect that Ning, a product launched over a decade after GeoCities, would have a rather longer feature list.
The post has reaffirmed a view that I have had a for a while. That Web 2.0 is really just Web 0.9 beta dressed up in venture capital marketing. For example:
- Public profile (Facebook, MySpace, Linked In, etc.): previously known as your home page before all the domains were registered by domain squatters.
- Social Networking (as above): Hyper-Linking to your friends’ home pages.
- Groups (Yahoo! Groups, Google Groups, Groups on Social Networks): Web rings, Mailing Lists, GeoCities.
- Social Bookmarking (del.ici.ous, Digg, etc.): export your bookmarks as HTML and load it up to your home page.
- Blogging (Wordpress, Typepad, etc.): a .plan, a concept from UNIX back in the 70’s. Game developer John Carmack of id has had a .plan for ever.
- User editable content (Wiki): Back in the day, many websites were open to editing and Web Browsers were able to save edits directly back to the server. In fact “Collaborative authoring” was one of the original intended uses for the Web.
The issue with Web 0.9 beta was that it produced horrendously ugly home pages, with users adding in every glitzy new feature they could get their hands on. Animated GIF’s, the “marquee” tag, lurid background images and horrendous colour schemes were common. A bit like a typical MySpace page.
Does Web 2.0 make it any easier to create good looking, personalised, user generated content? Blogs generally use a template based approach, which makes them easy and good looking. But you still need to know some HTML mark-up for your posts, or use Markdown. However, personalising themes is no easier as you need to dip into XHTML and CSS, along with a graphics application and potentially a programming language such as PHP or Perl.
Facebook is pretty prescriptive on design, leaving little scope for personalisation. MySpace’s customisation generally leads to horrendous looking pages that have a fairly common structure. Without scope for multiple pages, Facebook and MySpace profiles quickly become cluttered and ungainly.
Wiki’s do not provide any scope for customising the look, so it is back to XHTML & CSS. And to modify content, you have to learn a new mark-up lexicon, Wikitext, albeit simpler that XHTML. The remainder, bookmarking sites, photo sharing sites, etc., give no scope for personalisation.
The harsh reality of Web 2.0 is that to provide content you need to know a combination of XHTML, CSS, Wikitext, Markdown, BBCode and potentially a programming language or two to boot. Oh! for simpler days of HTML, CGI scripts and a dinky web page editor.
Web 2.0 is great. But with a decade of development since the advent of GeoCities, you would expect there to be significant development to earn the 2.0 moniker. Just as Excel has its roots in Lotus 1-2-3 and Visicalc before it, Social Networking sites should retain some humility and accept where they came from, whether it be GeoCities or even Tim Berners-Lee’s original imaginings of the Web.
