Perhaps he should examine some of the Facebook publicly available scans that have been done by "academic researchers", e.g., in South Korea. It is not rocket science to crawl Facebook.
Facebook's data is accessible. As is any website's back-end database. You are kidding yourself if like the author you think you can put something like Facebook on the public internet and have it be "private". If people with the skills -- and there are plenty of them; surprise, they don't all work at Facebbok -- put in the effort they can get the data. All they need is a reason/motivation to do so.
But let's have some more embarassing "tech journalism" (uninformed pontification) from a once respected journal. Put more nails in the coffin of the notion of "professional journalism".
Google is really good at seamlessly integrating the companies they acquire to give the appearance to users that Google develops much more than they actually do. The Google brand becomes synonymous with development that they actually did not themselves do.
I think what he means is getting funded is commoditized.
But that will not continue indefinitely. And that is because eventually someone will want to know how the company plans to make money. When the company cannot tell them, they stop investing. And it spreads back up the chain. The whole thing collapses.
I'll bet she was thinking of the data mining and analysis possibilities opened up by allowing users to input information in the form of "notes". Of course, that's just a guess.
They made money in the past, as more and more users kept signing up and using the site (more new eyeballs on the display ads). We're looking to the future now. What happens when the number of new users starts to slow down? As a public company, there is increased pressure for it to perform and to grow. Increasing the enormous net worth of the CEO and some insiders and then gradually fizzling out is not, one would think, the objective of a corporation that goes public. The usual reason companies raise money through IPO's is to grow the company.
If you're with me in spirit, I take that to mean I'm not "wrong", I'm just unrealistic, a dreamer, etc.
I think web developers have a lot of power over how the web operates. Much more than marketing departments.
In the spirit of making money, I'm right there with you. Web developers have to eat.
But to think the matter of the web's usability, or unusability (what the blog post described), is out of their hands, and solely in the hands of marketing departments, I don't buy it. Marketing has the budget, they do not have the skills, or even the knowledge.
I see numerous examples year after year that show that both large and small companies do not have the first clue how stuff works or what the implications are on end users. Developers present them with a proposition and the company writes a check. When some egregious practice comes to the attention of the press, the companies often have no idea what they were even paying for -- they do not understand what was being done.
One need only look at SEO and the types of websites it produces. It's quite a stretch to try to hold marketing departments responsible for this state of affairs.
Let's look at this in simple terms. Let's look for evidence of a "business model".
Website becomes popular.
Website gets personal details from users: email, maybe photos, address, etc., plus it gets a list of "friends" for each user.
Website shows display ads.
(Website gives birth to games company. Games company goes public then loses half its value in two months.)
Does website have a "business model"?
Wait, we're not done.
Website monitors everything users do on the website as well as, to the extent they can, the other websites users visit, using web beacons scattered across the web (Like buttons, aka "Facebook Connect").
Website shows display ads.
Do we have a business model yet?
But wait, there's more.
Website goes public and raises a heap of easy cash.
Website acquires a web browser, produces a mobile phone and begins monitoring everything users do on the web and every conversation they have with their friends.
Website shows display ads.
Do we have a business model yet?
Or is this just lots and lots of spying, information collection and dreaming that this is somehow useful for business?
Display ads are not a business model that will grow a business, unless the business is itself a display ad company.
(And Google already acquired those guys years ago.)
Is it a user who wants to add features to something that otherwise works fine for its intended task? (This is a guess based on how the blog author uses the term.)
If yes, why doesn't he just say, "Screw users who request features?"
What is a "power user"? I hear this term a lot. I'm not sure what it means.
The ideal to strive for is what we call the "Goldielocks effect".
Not knowing too little. Not knowing too much. Knowing just enough to get the job done.
In computing there will always be multiple solutions, and tradeoffs. What you want to aim for is "The simplest solution possible."
In my experience, this is really hard for most developers.
Maybe the smart thing to do is find someone who makes it look easy and trust their judgment. Again, my experience is that most developers are reluctant to do this.
The question is not how much someone knows, it's whether they know "enough" to get the job done. Goldielocks.
In general, do marketing people know how to create websites?
If not, how can they even know what is possible to create using HTML, CSS, etc.?
If the answer is "they look at what the competition is doing," then how did the marketers at the competitor know what is possible?
It has to start somewhere. Who was behind the web back in 1993? Marketing departments? Are marketers the ones who know what can be done with HTML, etc., and what cannot?
If a marketing department asks a web developer to implement something that the developer knows will be an annoyance to end users, and then he decides to tell them it is not possible, does the marketing department not accept this answer? "Look, we know how to make websites, we know this can be done and we'd do it ourselves if we had the time, but we're busy doing marketing. Either you do your job and build this site as we ask, or we'll find someone else."
So, at some stage, some web developer somewhere makes a decision.
I remember reading the confession of a talented developer who wrote, using mini scheme, stealth malware to serve pop-ups. His skills were so good that he could disable all competing malware; the competition was helpless. The NY Attorney General later shut down his employer on consumer protection grounds. The developer was not typically an author of malware, and knew what he was doing was wrong, but his excuse for working with this outfit was that he needed a job.
Without that developer making a choice, the malware company would never have known it was possible to do what they were able to do with the help of this particular talented developer. The use of mini scheme, self modifying code and disabling all competing malware were not in his "job description". He showed them what was possible. And surely they loved him for it. But how about the users infected with the malware, who had to see his employer's pop-ups every day with no way to "turn it off"? What would they think of his work?
Are we sure that "=" and not "==" is the correct operator?
If "==" was appropriate then there would be no problem of ambiguity. And there would be no need for the clarification.
Because meanings could never change with context. There could be no "misinterpretation". Only the truth table result of "false".
Which is more important in human communication: case-sensitivity or context-sensitivity?
It's a little like advertising perhaps. Advertising has become more of an art form than a tool. Awards given for achievement in creating ads are based on the perceived artistic value of an ad, not on its market effectiveness.
Web development is viewed as an art form by web developers. The web is not a tool to them. It's a canvas.
But the reality is that for many users in many cases, the web is a tool. They just want to accomplish some task, and they are not going to pay attention to artistic value.
Maybe a good example is Amazon. Many web developers criticise the site's design. But Amazon is doing just fine. Because users do not visit Amazon for an "experience". They visit it to buy things.
Maybe there should be two versions of every website: 1. an artisitic one aimed at "user experience" where the developer could display their design skills and 2. another aimed at getting some task(s) done, quickly and efficiently. The latter might follow some universal standard. No thinking involved in its "design", just following a spec.
The user could choose. The problem for the author of this blog post was she had no choice.
Email is a bootstrap that no "next-generation" communications solution can do without. Every startup, whether focused on communications or not, wants your email address. That is not a coincidence.
From a marketing perspective, email also has the greatest reach, greater than the web. The majority of the still relatively small percentage of the world's pop. that is connected to the internet are more likely to use email than the web, and they spend more time using email than they do the web.
If you do the research I believe you will find that these are the facts.
Email needs to be improved (e.g. cut out the middlemen -- "email providers" -- somehow, perhaps run email servers within trusted peer-to-peer groups: groups that are established using only the internet and without the need for a web browser, javascript, etc.). Email does not need to be "replaced".
Email is a simple and effective concept and as such, it is not going to "go away". So let's work on trying to improve it, architecturally.
The "walled garden" approach to communications, maybe using different gardens for different types of contacts to whom you provide your mail address, makes sense. Maybe it wouldn't stop spam, but it might contain it, e.g. to certain gardens. But any solution dubbed an "email killer" that based on the public web is not truly walled. It relies on a complex web browser. There will be ways to get in. And it's the same old story: people want to get in to spam you or scan your email for hints they can give to advertisers.
Imagine if the post office scanned every letter for hints they could give to advertisers, like the ones who fill your physical mailbox with junk postal mail. Why do we accept this with email?
Improvements on email need to start at a lower level: the IP layer. Peer-to-peer. Move away from "calf-cow". Take back control of our mail.
What's the sense in spewing out endless chunks of code when no one (even the authors later on) can take the time to read it and understand it?
Why not review the code that's already been written (like the open source code Apple and other walled gardens rely on to build their systems)? This is the sort of tinkering that will help us develop alternatives.
To find the doors, and build new ones, we have to read old code, not simply write new code.
Walled gardens, which are just another annoyance in a long line of progressive manipulation of the computer user for profit, together with an increasing lack of responsiveness (despite ridiculously powerful hardware), drove me back to UNIX, assembly, FORTH and C. In some strange way I'm thankful for the annoyances of "modern computing" because I realised there is still so much more to learn about the "old stuff". I don't consider this move back to the old school to be "tinfoil hat", although it certainly can be used for that purpose. I just like being able to understand and control the machine, and having it be consistently responsive.
I can definitely sympathise with the OP. But I have little motivation to learn Javascript. It is a workaround to get a little control through the browser, but it is still browser-centric and has so little power relative to lower level languages. It is not a long-term solution to the problem the OP describes.
Perhaps he should examine some of the Facebook publicly available scans that have been done by "academic researchers", e.g., in South Korea. It is not rocket science to crawl Facebook.
Facebook's data is accessible. As is any website's back-end database. You are kidding yourself if like the author you think you can put something like Facebook on the public internet and have it be "private". If people with the skills -- and there are plenty of them; surprise, they don't all work at Facebbok -- put in the effort they can get the data. All they need is a reason/motivation to do so.
But let's have some more embarassing "tech journalism" (uninformed pontification) from a once respected journal. Put more nails in the coffin of the notion of "professional journalism".