The fire of Web 2.0 has finally burned out. The Web 2.0 consultants have risen from the ashes born again as Social Media Experts. A question I heard recently: “What’s the difference between a Social Media Expert and a large pizza?” The answer? “A large pizza can feed a family of four.”
In the sixties my input was first via card decks, and later via TTY terminals hooked up to the mainframe over phone lines using acoustic couplers. 300 baud, man.
In the seventies not much changed for me. I was sort of distanced from “big-iron” computing machinery. It was a decade that began with IBM word processing typewriters and then, while the mid-peninsula folk were wiring up their first personal computers, I was suffering a brief obsession with programmable hand-held calculators… Hewlett Packard 67 versus Texas Instruments 95, elegant versus affordable.
My information technology neighborhoods and niches in the eighties were data networking, IBM Systems Network Architecture, and document creation… from IBM’s GML to Wang’s VS word processing computers. Ethernet emerged into the public consciousness early in the eighties and put paid to ARCNET and IBM’s token ring architecture. The clusters of dumb terminals tied by a coaxial umbilical cord to a cluster controller and sharing the processing power of the IBM mainframe were replaced by PCs. The Macintosh emerged as an elegant little stand-alone device. The competition then between Microsoft operating systems and Apple was no different than it is now. The Mac’s were elegant. The PCs were affordable. Novell was the proprietary standard Network Operating System. Modem manufacturers like Racal Vadic, Racal Milgo, and Gandalf rose and fell. All traffic was textual and the speed varied from very slow to slow.
It was the time of USENET and Gopher, an emerging public use of the Internet. It was also the time of the rise of the great roach traps, the mass market online Network Service Providers—CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy, and GEnie casting long shadows over the small ISPs, the online Bulletin Board Services, and communities of interest such as the Well. Much more could be said about these private and public networks and services, but not here, not now.
Came the nineties and the rise of the world wide web. Browsers ruled. 56kbps modems weren’t fast enough. A lot of ISPs with money sunk in modem racks were going out of business by 1995. I was crafting crude brochure-ware web sites and hooking up web access to online banking and payment systems by day and web surfing by night. The number of AOL diskettes and CDs arriving in my mailbox quadrupled. Even today I have friends with @aol.com email addresses so I know the company didn’t go out of business. In the competition for sticky eyeballs, AOL may have been the winner. Who knows?
Came the naughts and the echoes of the old Cat Stevens song…
out on the edge of darkness,
there rides a cluetrain
Oh cluetrain take this country,
come take me home again
For the people came empowerment. For business came a time of instability and radical change. Markets became boogie. Personal web publishing and media creation took off. The google pretty much made the Yellow Pages irrelevant, and Craig Newmark single-handedly sank newspaper classified advertising with his list.
Well, so much for the reminiscence. Today we are locked into our networks, neighborhoods, and niches. We twitter, we hang out on facebook, share photos on Flickr, and videos on YouTube. We mark our passage with “lifestreaming” software. We catch every bookmark from del.icio.us, every status update on the facebook, blog entries, our tumblr stuff our stumbleupons and our diggs, and we extrude them through FriendFeed so no nuance of our interactive online life will be lost. The flavor of the month afficionados call these the tools of social media. The more cynical call them digital crack.
A lot of people have spiraled around the drain and been flushed out onto a beach in Second Life. Time moves differently there, but maybe that’s a ramble for a different day and a different blog post.
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