The End of the Web, Search, and Computer as We Know It
1) I left Twitter, which is exactly the kind of experience he advocates. And I don’t miss it. (Those who have seen me pop in now and again, it’s mainly to see if my archive is yet available.)
2) It won’t work. Has he never heard of spam?
3) It won’t work. Not even Twitter offers metadata for subjects. Metadata is the most important and most ignored topic on the web. Uncategorized information is just sludge.
4) It won’t work. Apple sees no need for sensible organization in its App Store, and without Apple and its iOS devices, that’s a big part of the user population left in the dark. There will be no tributary from Apple feeding into the stream.
5) It won’t work. Amazon doesn’t use the standard for books, ISBN, preferring to assign its own internal ID scheme for books. If we can’t agree on something librarians have nailed down to a precise science — books — forget it ever working for everything else.
6) Google Now and Siri are both nice but those aren’t the future. How do you compile a concise and relevant report in response to querying them? See metadata and spam.
7) Reputation matters. Gelernter dismisses sites, but sites have humans behind them and sites have track records. (Some even have explicit ethics.) A quantum of information is worthless without being able to trust the source. (See even those who seem trustworthy burn others on Twitter with lies.)
And that’s what I can think of immediately. I’m sure there’s much more. But without an underpinning of trustworthy and standardized metadata to begin with, nothing can work.
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