Monday, October 15, 2012; 9:43:48 AM Eastern
Dark social web history
I read Alexis Madrigal's piece about the Dark Web with a bit of sadness, in a way -- that so much time had passed with so much history being rewritten, and it's happening again. Not due to any malice, I'm sure. We all have the experiences we have. - Madrigal was a teen during the huge initial growth of the web, and was an instant messenger, chatroom, ICQ and Usenet person. But in the blogging world, which was the precedent for Twitter and Facebook, we were constantly developing ways to surface the new and interesting content. Blogrolls, weblogs.com, RSS were all about that. And Live Journal had the social features of Facebook long before Facebook.
- Just saying I agree with Madrigal, but we're still waiting for a serious history of this stuff to be written so we're not all blind men looking at the elephant and discovering alternate theories about how it all came to be based on looking at this part or that.