It’s crazy to think how close humanity was to having pretty nice stuff right before Facebook came along. I don’t think it was obvious at the time but in retrospect, just before Facebook there was:
- RSS/atom for notifications without requiring an account
- Creative Commons for establishing a legal framework to choose how you wanted your stuff to be shared
- IRC for real time messaging
- Wikipedia for knowledge
- Craigslist for local
Admittedly it still wasn’t easy for everyone to have their own website, but if we had built off these things I think the web itself could have been the platform.
I know in the last few years some of these have come back in popularity (eg RSS/atom), and for me it’s been an absolute revelation experiencing what the web could have been.
- RSS/atom for notifications without requiring an account
- Creative Commons for establishing a legal framework to choose how you wanted your stuff to be shared
- IRC for real time messaging
- Wikipedia for knowledge
- Craigslist for local
Admittedly it still wasn’t easy for everyone to have their own website, but if we had built off these things I think the web itself could have been the platform.
I know in the last few years some of these have come back in popularity (eg RSS/atom), and for me it’s been an absolute revelation experiencing what the web could have been.