Entries RSS · URL as a metric for social object’s value (Weekend rambling)
A part in the series of just writing out an idea and rambling on it on this blog.
One of the core architectural big ideas of the web is that each resource, or web page has an URL or a link, and other pages can link to them. However, in the “social media” reiteration, these links are called “permalinks” in a strange doublespeak way as the ordinary Web 0.1 links were meant to be permanent as well and, instead, “link rot” seems to be more prevalent as ever with short-url services and other strange URL schemes.
I am of the opinion that we make a great injustice to discussion on the web by calling those things that hang on the bottom of web pages (and hence do have URLs) “comments” and, as non-entities of the web, only rarely have URLs of their own (even of the hash-variety). This is the second injustice. It is often that in these “comments” there are real gems, but you can’t refer to them with any direct link.
The worst offender, unsurprisingly, is Facebook, which from a cultural-historical viewpoint is going to be a huge black hole. It is in a stark constrat to Twitter, where each tweet has an URL. There are many social “objects” on Facebook that are completely inactionable and this is completely against the very nature of the Web. Technically, with stuff like Activity Streams, it’s possible to “like” a “like” and so on, but this isn’t possible from most social network tools’ user interface.
From the Web point of view, having URL for each tweet might be one reason why Twitter is gaining more steam and Facebook is struggling. Twitter is actively becoming a part of the Web, while Facebook is actively trying to turn the Web into Facebook (see Open Graph and Wikipedia-entry Pages) – this walled garden -strategy has always failed on the web, but it hasn’t stopped businesses from trying.
My thinking might be biased because I’m a firm believer in the open web and the idea that the web promotes openness and sharing of ideas, but not in the way Facebook has recently tried to open its users’ identities and “life streams” to the world. I believe the web is a great platform for collaboration and it’s a shame that while (as Tim Berners-Lee has pointed out) there is no shortage of URLs, we don’t give them out to all objects that live on the web.
However, the one exception that I’m willing to make are YouTube comments, which in number exceed the amount of information (with a loose definition of “information) in the library of Alexandria, but loss of which absolutely no-one would cry over.
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Tags: activity streams, Facebook, link rot, rants, semantic web, social media, Twitter, web
More weekend ramblings, please!
In any case, I think you're undermining your argument by crticising YouTube comments, though you probably meant that more jokingly.
Philosophically speaking, I find it hard to call a "like" equal to a URL, though you can share your likes from Facebook, or not, thus translating it to some kind of URL?
If you ask me, we should just *think* destinations and surf to them in our minds, eliminating the need to ever have to type http://www. ever again. What is this, 1992?
Yeah, the last paragraph was meant as a joke.
It's quite odd how quickly the discussion about URLs, URIs and the Semantic Web turn into discussions about philosophy and existentialism. Anyway, in a way, many web application use Twitter as a way to make "likes" and other actions into URLs by tweeting the actions. You've probably seen those "@username just favorited http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R-7ZO4I1pI on YouTube" tweets. Technically the URL points to the tweet and not to the "favorite"-action… that's why, in an ideal world, the "favorite"-action doesn't have a URL in the sense that you can point your browser to it, but a URI that does identify the action on the web (so that other pages can talk about the action by referring to it by that URI).
Yeah, I agree that writing out http://www. is something that would be great to eliminate and I'd love if we could get to a point where the machines were smart enough (or were given enough information through the Semantic Web) that they could handle all the URL/URI/URN/IRI stuff behind the scenes. It'd be great that you could just say to the computer that "go to the front page of Tech IT Easy" and it could infer everything it needs and open up "http://www.techiteasy.org". Writing "Tech IT Easy" to the Google Box is quite a caveman approach =)
Re: philosophy. Don’t you think the concept of URL, HTML, and other code stuff is pretty alien to normal people? 6/10 (stat pulled out of hat) of people browing sites are normal people.
My philosophy is one of a one-man parent PC support company. I want things to work better and better, my definition being that the underlying complexity this requires is more and more removed from normal users, incl. the crashes.
This has little to do with the point of your post, except that I’m sure my parents can handle a facebook ‘like’, but I’ve had to explain URL structure to them once too often.
Yes, I think the current web exposes its plumbing a bit too much for normal users. In a way, this has been web's strength as everyone could participate in developing it, but of course, most people on the web don't really care about that.
To carry on the discussion in regards to what you are REALLY talking about, I too believe in a URL per piece of content, again philosophically. The perfect example of this is a comment, or a retweet, or a like. Why should that be any less valuable than what is being commented on, retweeted, or liked?
Philosophical in the sense that it's about ownership really. By liking something on Facebook, I publish this information onto my newsfeed, which others read. While I didn't produce the content that I like, I produced the like itself, and the consequences thereof. Same with a comment or a retweet.
I don't know if that is a question of attributing a URL to everything, or more a question of design. How important is a comment? The same question could be asked of how important is the item being commented on. Philosophy 101 should be in the curriculum of any webdesign class.
And, conversely, you can see how important "social media" sites consider your actions if they don't have an URL for them.
It also boils down to human behavior and our way of communication. The use of "likes", "stars" and "favorites" may be completely different from what the designers intended as people's communication evolves on a lossy medium like the web. Did you "like" an entry on Facebook because you actually like it, or because you wanted to bump it onto your friends' newsfeed (because you wanted to share it)? This of course has nothing to do with URLs, but the interaction with the social objects with limited "verbs". A bit like how you played Farmville, I guess.
If you go browse the Semantic Web docs at W3C, you'll notice they turn quite quickly into discussions about ontology and other fun subjects that you couldn't guess at first. Philosophy 101 is quite essential =)
I am really looking forward to the dream of Tim Berners-Lee: the semantic web. Use date from all the websites across the world.