<story><title>Developers: stop re-AOLizing the web!</title><url>http://technicalfault.net/2014/07/03/developers-stop-re-aolizing-the-web/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ris</author><text>Technically email isn&amp;#x27;t the web.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not to say the web isn&amp;#x27;t being AOL-ized. How many firms do you see these days advertising their presence on Facebook or Twitter over their own website (over which they have full control), in the same way we used to see companies everywhere advertising their &amp;quot;aol keyword&amp;quot;?&lt;p&gt;The reality of &amp;quot;the cloud&amp;quot; is we&amp;#x27;re squeezing things back into a few giant silos.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drzaiusapelord</author><text>&amp;gt;Technically email isn&amp;#x27;t the web.&lt;p&gt;I see this very same things on the web. Heaven forbid you use internet explorer as your browser or are a version behind. The amount of smarmy, &amp;quot;Use a real browser&amp;quot; messages I&amp;#x27;ve gotten when testing things in IE is unacceptable.  I have no love for IE, but lots of people use it, and I need to support it at work. Just because its difficult to write html for for certain use cases doesn&amp;#x27;t mean its useless. I understand when using something IE doesnt support yet, but that didn&amp;#x27;t seem to be the case with these websites. Often these sites are run by 20-somethings straight out of school with some kind of &amp;#x27;stick it to the man&amp;#x27; identity politics. Yeah if you&amp;#x27;re a middle class person who went to college, have healthcare, have a non back-breaking computer job, etc guess what, you&amp;#x27;re the man.&lt;p&gt;I feel like we&amp;#x27;ve never transcended the proprietary mindset and popularity still rules.  This email client may be an extreme example, but the web is pretty unfriendly if you&amp;#x27;re not using firefox or a webkit based browser. Oh, the opposite was true in the past? So what. That doesn&amp;#x27;t make the current status quo acceptable. I love how we justify the various ways we refuse to learn from history.&lt;p&gt;On mobile its even worse. We&amp;#x27;re not even shoving things into silos. We&amp;#x27;re saying, &amp;quot;Look, this featureset which could be trivially be put into a HTML5 webpage is now a local app proprietary to this platform. Install it, deal with its constant updates, its crappy UI, etc.&amp;quot; Does every newspaper in the world and forum really think I want to install their app? I&amp;#x27;d have hundreds of apps on my phone if I did.&lt;p&gt;I really think we&amp;#x27;re regressing a bit. The cloud-ification and foolproofing of things just leads to a handful of megacorps providing near-mandatory services and applying their own policies and politics onto those services.  We keep losing ground to them on things like privacy, stability, ownership, etc for convenience. Not sure where this is going to lead to in the end, but it won&amp;#x27;t be anything like we&amp;#x27;re used to. I doubt it&amp;#x27;ll be for the better. MSN and AOL tried to build a walled web garden in the 90s and were laughed at by the tech-savvy. Now the tech-savvy are the ones sporting ipads and android phones and willingly  entering these new walled gardens.</text></comment>
<story><title>Developers: stop re-AOLizing the web!</title><url>http://technicalfault.net/2014/07/03/developers-stop-re-aolizing-the-web/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ris</author><text>Technically email isn&amp;#x27;t the web.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not to say the web isn&amp;#x27;t being AOL-ized. How many firms do you see these days advertising their presence on Facebook or Twitter over their own website (over which they have full control), in the same way we used to see companies everywhere advertising their &amp;quot;aol keyword&amp;quot;?&lt;p&gt;The reality of &amp;quot;the cloud&amp;quot; is we&amp;#x27;re squeezing things back into a few giant silos.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stronglikedan</author><text>&amp;gt; over which they have full control&lt;p&gt;That may just be the problem. When everyone has full control over how they present themselves, then everyone presents themselves differently. The problem with this approach is the inconsistency - a user has to learn their way around a different UX for each entity&amp;#x27;s presence.&lt;p&gt;With Facebook and Twitter, it&amp;#x27;s a familiar UX for the end user, and the information related to different entities is presented in more or less the same format for all entities. This makes is easier for the end user to find the information they are looking for, and sometimes that&amp;#x27;s better than branding.&lt;p&gt;So, while it&amp;#x27;s important for an entity to have a branded web identity, I think that it&amp;#x27;s equally important for an entity to have and promote a presence on popular social media as well. It&amp;#x27;s a sort of dumbed-down identity for the masses.</text></comment>