Another noise on the net introduced

Don't you hate it when your search result is polluted with irrelevant things? You may be blamed for not having the knack of putting together good search terms, but sometimes, there's just no helping it; the information you're looking for just don't have enough distinctions to allow it to be siphoned from all the junks. Here's to hoping that this blog won't become another one of those mess.

"Blogging is sooo last year" or so says somebody who think Facebook will lead the way to internet future. I'm not sure how to reply to him, telling him that most of this is just old technologies piled on top of one another, with extra interface polishing to make it look shiny. This piling up, also known as mash-up, makes up the theme central to Web 2.0.

Recycled technology

How can something that looks as cool as a blog, complete with sidebars which contain links to past articles, and equipped with commenting system, be considered built on old technology? In the past, there were people who maintained their own public journal published on homepages (which, in this context, were just personal pages. The one you go to after clicking the home button is also called the homepage. This can be confusing) of which the content is updated by source (all you needed was a simple text editor). There wasn't RSS yet though, people had to revisit the same site next time to check for updates. Nevertheless, this can be considered a primitive kind of blog.

Then, along with advancements in HTML which allows author to insert extra presentational values in their pages, server-side scripting was becoming mainstream, making way for dynamic content generation. Then, homepages started featuring guestbooks, the primitive form of the comment system we have today.

How futuristic is Facebook?

The SNS shrinks the journal part of the blog to make it easier to post updates, and focuses more on interaction with inner circles through comments. Such fad is called micro-blogging. It's like a password protected blog, but SNS makes it easier. There's also direct messaging, but this actually duplicates the functionalities of e-mail, making it redundant. Another one would be in-site chat, which is not unlike any other IM.

Twitterrible noise

As micro-blogging allows people to post very short updates quickly, people start posting almost every mundane minute of their life whenever possible, creating junk information we call noise. In a way, Facebook handles this gracefully, as the public is shielded from the noise due to the privacy layer. OTOH, Twitter, another micro-blogging product of Web 2.0, defaults to being publicly visible. Which means, it can be scraped. Now, though Twitter itself is not likely to have tweets listed on search engines, the ad-laden greedy scraping sites will give their all to ensure they get exposure.

The future of internet

The growth of internet traffic is properly supported by improvement in hardware: increased bandwidth, reduced storage cost, improved desktop processing performance. A scenario of major traffic jam due to overuse of the services may not be likely yet. But I can't help but feel concerned about the growing percentage of crap that will fill the internet space. The technology is evolving too fast, and majority of the people have trouble reeducating themselves in order to adapt.

These days, most of these technologies are even misused. Some people use Twitter for chatting, hoping a bystander will join in the fun, which hardly happens. Not to mention the trend of using web apps to replace their desktop counterpart. Using Facebook messages as e-mail, using Facebook chat as IM, who knows what else have been reinvented.

That being said, it's not like I want people to stop using Facebook or Twitter, or whatever other Web 2.0 stuff there is out there, at all costs. It's just that I hope users spare a tiny bit more consciousness when utilizing them.