Scripting News: The disneyfication of tech
I’ve been warning the news publishers to be careful about viewing Twitter and Facebook as if they were equivalent to the web. This would be like Kodak trusting Apple to handle its digital photography strategy. We know now how that turned out […] Then where would you be if you were dependent on them to distribute news? It would be like the Times depending on Murdoch to print their daily paper.
Why apps are not the future
I hear it everywhere. The web is dead, apps are the future.
I heard it first on the cover of Wired Magazine in March 1997 and again in August 2010. I was so impressed I added it to my blogroll, as a reminder to all that you’re reading a dead medium.
That was said in jest, of course.
I’ll keep playing here while the rest of you flirt with apps. I’ll be here when you come back. I know it’s going to happen. Here’s why…
…the open publishing nature of the web, and the requirement that information be accessible, will inherently cause it to lag behind other platforms. The success of the web, the success of this impossibly huge network of information is because of the open, universally accessible, cross-platform, cross-device nature of web content. Cross-platform user interface sucks. It’s a nightmare of inconsistency and wrong, momentarily obsoleted assumptions. But cross-platform content? Well that is content. It’s articles and poems and pictures and movies and music, everywhere! How brilliant is that!
We’re talking about two very different things: The web of information and content, and a desire for a free, cross-platform Cocoa or .NET quality application framework that runs in the browsers people already use. The latter cause is louder, and risks stomping over the more valuable, more important, more culturally indispensable part of the web.
There exists on the web a collective memory problem. It’s a famous fault in software engineers to instinctively favour reinvention over reuse, not just because they are unfamiliar with what came before, but because they misunderstand why it came before. This is a rule that is important to understand, so that it can be broken. It is not well understood, yet it is regularly broken.
