The AOLization of the Internet
This is a really sore topic for me, as it is something that really pisses me off about how things are evolving in so many online communities. Everyone is trying to turn their site into a “Walled Garden” where you dare not link to any other site lest you be accused of spamming.
Windows Live and the AOLization of the Internet
Most of us hated the way AOL did that, and yet site operators, forum moderators, etc. are going right down this same path. Then along comes Microsoft, and takes it to a whole new level with Windows Live.
It would be easy to just blow this off as Microsoft trying to create a new AOL, but what bothers me the most is that this is part of a larger, more negative trend internet wide. External linking, traffic exchanges, link swapping, etc. were once time honored methods of sites helping each other grow. Now people are so obsessed with their own page views they think SHARING traffic is losing traffic. This is a terrible philosophy that is rotting far too many communities at their core.
When sites share traffic, they gain traffic. That’s how the internet works. Lets not obsess over ad clicks and pageviews so mindlessly that we forget what made the internet special. The ability to read a story, click a link for more details, return to post your thoughts, click another link for a similar story, etc. is what makes reading things on the internet so much fun. We forget this at our own peril.
I often link to other articles and am happy when someone posts a link to something relevant to the discussions on my blog. By no means am I the sole arbiter of information, and while I do appreciate a bit of filtering, I love to learn new things. Beside that, a common vocabulary and dataset often makes communication easier, and tangent running often sparks the sort of cross pollination that makes true Renaissance thought possible. It’s even physiological; your brain cells work more efficiently the more links they form. The more you know, the more you can learn and *retain* because you have a better intellectual framework to hang data on.
Going a bit further afield, a single portal for information is pretty much a propaganda machine. This actually reminds me a bit of the Wikipedia kerfluffle. Call it hyperbole, but to my mind, a monolithic media with little in the way of checks and balances (y’know, like how the media were originally supposed to expose corruption, not wallpaper it) is a clear and present danger to education.
Windows Live is just one of the many communities that try to absorb you. News, Mails, everything – you need nothing else. Google is trying something similar, their iGoogle pages allow people to surf everywhere, starting from… right, iGoogle…^^ I am reading Google News everyday.
I am quite sure Windows Live will fail, Google’s approach is much smarter. They organize everything in the background and leave the content to all others, and make themselves indispensable. If they lack something, they buy it – like YouTube. Antitrust divisions have to watch Google, I think they are far more dangerous to society than another failed “Walled Garden” by Microsoft or someone else.
I think you are right that Google has long abandoned their “Don’t Be Evil” mantra in the quest for the almighty dollar.
The totally lost my confidence with their Google Earth (whatever its called) thing where you can zoom right in and look at someone’s house. That’s absolute crap – a total invasion of privacy.
Oh, so you like to look at your own house in Google Earth, too? Or look up the from where and whom you got a letter.
I am not that concerned about that, but you have a point. I am not so happy about their “street view” idea, the direct links to webcameras. The next step is live footage from all major cities all over the earth. Sounds a bit like Orwell, but I often think that we might just fear the next step of development of a rather new medium. Who cares and takes time to check all kinds of webcams for me, after all.
But there are security reasons, two villages in Germany voted against “Street View” and did not allow Google to film their villages with their camera cars. One village was rural and full of elder people, while the other one was basically a village of the higher class, where the security services of several villas voiced concern about even more detailed info about the estates of their employers than Google Earth already provided through satellite view.
My personal problem is things like page rank and paying Google money to be top listed. The results of a google search are filtered, ranked on various criteria and the results on the first page get more visits than those on page two.
There were a few days where Google was down for less than an hour and it was a DRAMA. Some people tried other search engines and “could not find anything with them” (yes, my friend said this literally!), as they were used to the list of websites that Google usually displays first. I also felt how much I depend on this search engine.
Man, I need to find out how those 2 villages did that and get our city to do the same.