By the time the Javavaders applet has loaded into my browser, I’ve had time to count every one of the alien attackers arrayed against me in this low-resolution “Space Invaders” clone. The game’s finally about to begin — but where am I? As the aliens begin to advance, I panic and hit the keyboard. My spaceship (or gun or whatever it is) appears on screen; now I can play. But the delay between keystroke and response is maddening, and you can’t really aim at all. Fifteen seconds later, my screen freezes. That’s Java — time to reboot.
the hype for Java — “it’s cool and hot!” — is omnipresent. A year ago, at a San Francisco trade show awash in dry-ice smoke and overamplified “Star Wars” music, Sun Microsystems launched the Java juggernaut — promising that its new cross-platform programming language would change the face of the Web, bring “true interactivity” to Web sites and generally usher in the millennium.
Since then, every major computer company has promised to incorporate Java into their products and systems (although Microsoft’s enthusiasm remains notably half-hearted). Fortunes have been won and lost, alliances made and broken. Thousands of Java books have been sold — and a few have even been read. Career prospects for the Java-savvy have soared.
Still, wander the Web today with your Java-capable browser and it’s hard to see what’s changed. A quick tour of the state of the Java art reveals a paucity of imagination and innovation. There’s little to show from Year One of the Java revolution beyond a few snazzy navigation aids and a little bit of animation. Your reaction may well be a peevish, “My browser went all the way to Java-land and all I got was this stupid scrolling line of type!”
The NYU Stern School’s Edgar Ticker uses Java to create a moving banner on your page providing up-to-the-minute reports on new stock offerings. It moves awfully slowly, though, and its little “Stop” button doesn’t seem to work. You’re supposed to be able to click on any offering’s name to get further info, but that feature doesn’t seem to be “enabled” yet. At least the ticker doesn’t crash my browser.
It’s easy to get lost discussing Java’s technical genesis. All you really need to know is that Java’s a full-fledged programming language that’s at home on the Web. As such, it should be able to do just about anything. Right now most of the applets — the small programs that make stuff happen inside your browser window — are games, animations or Java programming helpers. But you could someday work with a Java word processor or spreadsheet, use a Java program for your email, or keep a calendar in Java. Sun’s HotJava is a Web browser that’s written in Java itself.
Java programs are designed to be relatively small, so they don’t take forever to get to you over the Net. And Java’s architecture means that programmers don’t have to write different versions of their code for Windows, Mac and Unix computers; one program fits all. This is cool. And hot.
In the Java visionary’s scenario, it will cease to matter whose computer you use. Your browser will take over many of the operating system’s functions (like the Windows Program Manager or the Mac Finder), and you’ll do most of your work with little Java applets you can download and upgrade as needed. The applets could even upgrade themselves.
Still, if you think Windows or System 7.5 crash too often, wait till Java and Netscape start dancing their little system-freeze tango on your desktop.
I have now tried out 50 of the Java applets listed on the “What’s New” and “What’s Cool” pages of Gamelan, EarthWeb’s Java directory. 34 applets have crashed my Mac. Okay, many of these programs are just the homework exercises of computer-science students. (See the Shoot Mike Game: “The object of the game is to repeatedly shoot Mike in the face.”) And, to be sure, Netscape’s Java-capable Mac browser is a pre-release “beta” version. Then again, the “final release” version of the Netscape 2.0 browser crashes nearly as often, so you can’t blame all the bugs on beta.
So what is it exactly that Java is going to change? Skeptics argue that, like so many previous technologies, Java is a solution in search of a problem — that the reason there aren’t any really valuable Java applications yet is that there’s no true need for the capabilities Java offers. That’s almost certainly a short-sighted view. Since Java is “object-oriented” — meaning that chunks of code become reusable modules — programmers can build on one another’s work, and there’s a natural evolution underway from simple building blocks to more elaborate projects.
But right now, Java is all hyped up with no place to go and little to do. For one thing, it’s still not really fast enough; if you’re connected to the Net by modem, you’ll wait for most applets.
When you point a Java-smart browser to a Web page that contains an applet, you’ll probably see a message telling you that the applet’s loading, and a gray square on the page will gradually fill in as the data arrives. This creates a bit of a problem for
< href="http://www.suck.com">sites that are using Java as a navigation tool: the information you want to receive first, about what’s on the site and where you are in relation to it, actually arrives on your screen last.
Animation is a function that’s closely associated with Java in the public mind. Early this year, animations began to appear all over the Web — mostly in the form of rotating logos and flashing ads — and a lot of people thought they were seeing Java in action. In fact, most of these manifestations of Web-page mobility used a much simpler process known as GIF animation, which you can create, flip-book style, without needing to know how to program (it’s what we used for Keith Knight’s crashing coffee-cup above). If Java were only good for animation, there wouldn’t be much point to it, since there are so many other ways to animate a Web page (like Macromedia’s Shockwave).
Planetary Exterminator, a Java rewrite of the classic Lunar Lander game, sounds like it might be fun. But once it loads, its graphical elements — a bouncing eight-ball, some little robotic insects and what look like forests of toilets — have a mind of their own and barely seem to respond to the controls. So I try Star Wars With the Gipper instead. At last, a game that works! But it’s just a little photo of Reagan surrounded by dancing hammer-and-sickle signs. Click your mouse on one and red beams from Ronnie’s eyes will zap it to kingdom come. The game gets dull fast, but I spend a while trying to figure out whether it’s meant as a tribute to, or a satire of, our forgetful ex-President.
Today, Java delivers on its promise of interactivity chiefly with mediocre games and buggy chat applications. (HotWired is rumored to be unveiling one soon, and EarthWeb is beta-testing one now, but good luck getting through.) Down the road, lots of businesses and banks are hoping to use Java for electronic commerce. Trouble is, Java’s security remains a matter of heated debate.
It’s possible, it seems, to make Java pretty safe — to protect yourself from Java-borne viruses and “hostile applets.” As the Net community keeps hammering away at Java to find its every flaw, expect it to become fairly secure. But even once most of the loopholes are fixed, there will always be a tradeoff between Java’s safety and its power: the more stuff you want it to do, the more security you’ll have to sacrifice. That makes it no different from most other technologies — but somewhat less of a safe bet than originally promised by Sun.
One reason for the scarcity of impressive Java applets is that, right now, the only way to work with Java is down at the level of the code itself. Non-programmers need not apply. It’s as if graphic designers, instead of working with an easy-to-learn tool like Photoshop, had to write lines of code before they could touch up a photo.
As Java tools for non-programmers proliferate — and they will — expect to see the creativity of a much larger (and more diverse) group of people unleashed on Java. Such tools should also allay the justified fear that Java, by requiring demanding programming skills, hastens the end of the anyone-can-publish free-for-all that makes today’s Web so vital. At the other end of the spectrum, serious code-slingers will work on combining Java with VRML, the new standard for three-dimensional world-building on the Web, to create networked cyberspaces inhabited by avatars that can do more than just say “hi.”
I have fond memories of learning Basic — the Java of its day, about 20 years ago — by writing program routines for “The Game of Life.” “Life” is really just a set of mathematical rules for random little organisms to grow and die on a graph-paper grid over a span of time. So I wasn’t surprised to see more than a few “Life” programs turn up in Gamelan’s Java directory. Alas, the one I tried out drew a grid on my screen and then stopped. No signs of life.
Talk to analysts today and they’ll tell you that Java’s biggest impact won’t be in making Web sites cooler or more animated or more interactive. It will be in the booming “intranet” market, where big companies are setting up closed in-house networks based on Internet technology, that Java really comes into its own, allowing programmers to write all sorts of custom routines for corporate communications, project management and the like. It also could transform the jobs of “MIS” people, the computer-network managers who could use Java to simplify maintaining and upgrading the software everyone at their companies uses.
There’s nothing wrong with that — and if it gives Microsoft some competition in the business world, more power to it. But it’s strangely at odds with Java’s carefully promoted aura of hipness. How did a programming language that’s going to be used for mundane work like inventory and software management come to be considered so cool?
It can only be the name. If Sun had called it Omnix or WebC or Bytecode Pro, we might never have heard of it. But Java? Java means you can use a cool coffee-cup logo and give products names like Roaster and Kona and Joe. Java means you can make references to Indonesia. Java means you can pretend you’re doing something more romantic than writing code.
Way back when I joined Facebook I was under the impression that it was the social network where people play themselves. On Facebook, you were supposed to be “real.” So I figured: OK, this is where I don’t friend everyone indiscriminately; this is where I only connect with people I really know.
I stuck with that for a little while. But there were two big problems.
First, I was bombarded with friend requests from people I barely knew or didn’t know at all. Why? It soon became clear that large numbers of people weren’t approaching Facebook with the reality principle in mind. They were playing the usual online game of racking up big numbers to feel important. “Friend count” was the new “unique visitors.”
Then Facebook started to get massive. And consultants and authors started giving us advice about how to use Facebook to brand ourselves. And marketing people began advocating that we use Facebook to sell stuff and, in fact, sell ourselves.
So which was Facebook: a new space for authentic communication between real people — or a new arena for self-promotion?
I could probably have handled this existential dilemma. And I know it’s one that a lot of people simply don’t care about. It bugged me, but it was the other Facebook problem that made me not want to use the service at all.
Facebook flattens our social relationships into one undifferentiated blob. It’s almost impossible to organize friends into discrete groups like “family” and “work” and “school friends” and so forth. Facebook’s just not built that way. (This critique is hardly original to me. But it’s worth repeating.)
In theory Facebook advocates a strict “one person, one account” policy, because each account’s supposed to correlate to a “real” individual. But then sometimes Facebook recommends that we keep a personal profile for our private life and a “page” for our professional life. Which seems an awful lot like “one person, two accounts.”
In truth, Facebook started out with an oversimplified conception of social life, modeled on the artificial hothouse community of a college campus, and it has never succeeded in providing a usable or convenient method for dividing or organizing your life into its different contexts. This is a massive, ongoing failure. And it is precisely where Facebook’s competitors at Google have built the strength of their new service for networking and sharing, Google+.
Google+ opened a limited trial on Tuesday, and last night it hit some sort of critical mass in the land of tech-and-media early adopters. Invitations were flying, in an eerie and amusing echo of what happened in 2004, when Google opened its very first social network, Orkut, to the public, and the Silicon Valley elite flocked to it with glee.
Google+ represents Google’s fourth big bite at building a social network. Orkut never took off because Google stopped building it out; once you found your friends there was nothing to do there. Wave was a fascinating experiment in advanced technology that was incomprehensible to the average user, and Google abandoned it. Buzz was (and is) a Twitter-like effort that botched its launch by invading your Gmail in box and raiding your contact list.
So far Google+ seems to be getting things right: It’s easy to figure out, it explains itself elegantly as you delve into its features, it’s fast (for now, at least, under a trial-size population) and it’s even a bit fun.
By far the most interesting and valuable feature of Google+ is the idea of “circles” that it’s built upon. You choose friends and organize them into different “circles,” or groups, based on any criteria you like — the obvious ones being “family,” “friends,” “work” and so on.
The most important thing to know is that you use these circles to decide who you’ll share what with. So, if you don’t want your friends to be bugged by some tidbit from your workplace, you just share with your workplace circle. Google has conceived and executed this feature beautifully; it takes little time to be up and running.
The other key choice is that you see the composition of your circles but your friends don’t: It’s as if you’re organizing them on your desktop. Your contacts never see how you’re labeling them, but your labeling choices govern what they see of what you share.
I’m sure problems will surface with this model but so far it seems sound and useful, and it’s a cinch to get started with it. Of course, if you’re already living inside Facebook, Google has a tough sell to make. You’ve invested in one network, you’re connected there; why should you bother? But if, like me, you resisted Facebook, Google+ offers a useful alternative that’s worth exploring.
The ideal future of social networking is one that isn’t controlled by any single company. But social networks depend on scale, and right now it’s big companies that are providing that.
Lord knows Google’s record isn’t perfect. But in this realm I view it as the least of evils. Look at the competition: Facebook is being built by young engineers who don’t have lives, and I don’t trust it to understand the complexity of our lives. It’s also about to go public and faces enormous pressure to cash in on the vast network it’s built. Twitter is a great service for real-time public conversation but it’s no better at nuanced social interaction than Facebook. Apple is forging the One Ring to rule all media and technology, and it’s a beaut, but I’ll keep my personal relationships out of its hands as long as I can. Microsoft? Don’t even bother.
Of the technology giants, Google — despite its missteps — has the best record of helping build and expand the Web in useful ways. It’s full of brilliant engineers who have had a very hard time figuring out how to transfer their expertise from the realm of code to the world of human interaction. But it’s learning.
So I’ll embrace the open-source, distributed, nobody-owns-it social network when it arrives, as it inevitably will, whether we get it from the likes of Diaspora and Status.net or somebody else. In the meantime, Google+ is looking pretty good. (Except for that awful punctuation-mark-laden name.)
Salon.com Wednesday announced plans to close Table Talk, the online discussion space and community that has operated continuously since Salon’s launch on Nov. 20, 1995. I was involved in Table Talk’s creation and management for its first several years, and when I read the news, I flashed back to my first day at Salon.
As the tech-savviest of a not-tech-savvy-at-all gang of newspaper refugees trying to build a Web magazine, I got pulled over by our then-publisher. He’d been tearing his hair out trying to get a group of unruly Cornell students to write the software that would power Table Talk, which was going to be Salon’s big bid for being not just an online magazine but an “interactive” website worthy of the Salon name. Things weren’t going well. “I want you to project manage this,” the publisher said. I thought, “What do I know from ‘project manage’? I’m a critic!” Then I dove in, because, in a start-up with six employees, that was what you did.
For me it was the start of a deepening engagement with and affection for the excitement, complexity and pitfalls of building software-powered websites. (Salon itself was lovingly hand-coded then and for several years after.) We got Table Talk launched, sort of, though within weeks we had to ditch the version those Cornell kids had built and start fresh. Said kids took their software and built TheGlobe.com with it, which went on to an impossibly successful IPO at the height of the dot-com bubble before a spectacular flameout.
The original idea was that every Salon article would have a link at the end to a Table Talk thread. The articles would serve, in part, as discussion-starters and then our community would kick the ideas around. It wasn’t a dumb plan — story comments are now a Web standard. But the way we built it, modeled on the experiences some of us had had as members of The WELL, Table Talk was a separate space with threaded discussions that anyone could add. The conversations weren’t tied to the stories very well, and we quickly learned that the community members — who took to the project avidly — preferred to talk about what they wanted to talk about. Salon’s editors and writers rarely hung out in TT, and it didn’t take long before the TT members developed a dysfunctional relationship with Salon’s staff — simultaneously craving our attention and resenting our presence.
So TT went its somewhat separate way from Salon-the-magazine, which soon started running a simple, hand-coded letters-to-the-editor page to highlight actual responses to our stories. Mary Elizabeth Williams, its original and longtime host, managed the discussion space with great love and devotion for years. We all learned a lot about dealing with anonymity and trolls, personal authenticity and online performance art, technical woes and social dynamics.
What we never managed to do was find a way to knit the energy and talent of Table Talk’s remarkable community with the skills and money being invested into Salon.com itself. Instead, Salon tried over and over to find different models for tying community together with journalism. In 1999 it acquired The WELL. In 2002 it launched a blog program. In 2005 it transformed Letters to the Editor into a more Web-standard comments feature. In 2008 it launched Open Salon as a modern, social blogging platform.
As a result, Table Talk became, more and more, a separate entity. When we started Salon Premium in 2001 as a paid service that let users see an ad-free site and some premium content, we rolled Table Talk into it: Its pages were readable by anyone, but you needed to pay to post. That insured its survival but also assured its marginality. Over the years Salon’s management (which I was a part of until 2007) considered, over and over, whether to shut it down. It generated large numbers of page views from a relatively small number of users, and advertisers were not excited by that. Its WebCrossing software was increasingly out of step with the direction the Web was moving in. Yet TT’s community remained close-knit and vibrant. In the wake of this week’s announcement, its members, unsurprisingly, are already trying to figure out ways to continue their conversations after the site’s announced June 10 shutdown date.
I don’t second-guess Salon’s leadership for deciding to end TT today — I might well do the same in their shoes. I do think there’s a lesson here, though, not just for Salon but for all the other enterprises out there today that dream of doing what we tried for so long to do at Salon. (Hi, Arianna; hi, Tina.)
The lesson is simple: Don’t think of “conversation” and “community” as subsidiaries to “content.” They aren’t afterthoughts, add-ons or sidebars. They are the point of the Web. Here’s how I put it in “Say Everything”:
[Interactivity] is just a clumsy word for communication. That communication — each reader’s ability to be a writer as well — was not some bell or whistle. It was the whole point of the Web, the defining trait of the new medium — like motion in movies, or sound in radio, or narrow columns of text in newspapers.
Editors and publishers keep crossing their fingers and hoping to find some new platform that reverses this principle and puts them back in the comfortable realm of piping content out to consumers. They think this stuff will finally settle down. But change keeps accelerating instead. Today we are feeding one another stories, passing links around, telling friends what we’re fascinated by or excited about or steamed over. My Flipboard is more useful and interesting to me than the front page of the New York Times (sorry, Bill Keller). The conversation isn’t an afterthought. It’s interesting in itself, and it’s how we inform one another.
So Table Talk is dead: RIP. But Table Talk is everywhere, too — on Facebook and Twitter, all over the blogosphere, and in a billion comment threads. Table talk is what we do online. It’s not what comes after a publication’s stories. It’s what comes before.
BONUS LINK: If you haven’t already, go read Paul Ford’s wonderful essay on the nature of the Web and its fundamental question — “Why wasn’t I consulted?”
There is much more to say, but I’m angry, and I want to say this quickly: We’re all on notice now. Keep your eyes open and your ears cocked. Public life is becoming a maze of entrapments, and the press is enabling the deceit.
Yesterday James O’Keefe, the conservative trickster who has previously targeted ACORN and other organizations with fraudulent schemes aimed at exposing what he sees as liberal bias and malfeasance, unveiled his latest act: his confederates impersonated Muslim donors and recorded a meeting with an NPR fundraiser, Ron Schiller. Schiller said some impolitic things, some of which were true, others of which were overstatements, none of which was that different from what you can hear in any bar and on any blog. (Unless you believe nobody has ever charged that there are racists in the ranks of the Tea Party, or that anyone has ever suggested NPR might be better off without the federal funding that conservatives are constantly threatening to cut.)
NPR rejected the bogus Muslims’ bogus contribution, but Schiller’s words got him suspended yesterday. And today we learn that NPR’s CEO, Vivian Schiller (no relation), has resigned too.
In a saner cultural moment, a serial liar like O’Keefe would not be taken seriously by the rest of the media or by a board of directors. Here’s why (courtesy TPM):
Previous tapes by O’Keefe’s group have later turned out to be misleadingly edited, including the video that launched them to stardom featuring O’Keefe posing as a pimp in front of ACORN offices, so it’s worth taking the overall footage with a grain of salt until further details emerge. Last year, O’Keefe’s credibility took another major hit when he reportedly tried to invite a CNN reporter onto his boat to try and seduce her as a prank, an effort that was revealed when one of his own colleagues blew the whistle to the press.
But just as the White House dumped Shirley Sherrod the moment Andrew Breitbart’s doctored video of her supposedly damning admission of racism surfaced, NPR’s board chose not only not to fight but to cave in immediately to O’Keefe’s tactics. By not fighting back, NPR has invited an open season on truth, and ushered us into a new age of mistrust.
You should go listen to O’Keefe’s tapes of Ron Schiller’s statements — first, to see that much of what he said is harmless and reasonable, but more important, to ask yourself whether you have any expertise or standing to determine the recording’s authenticity. How can we possibly trust O’Keefe’s reports when the essence of his technique is deception? Who knows how this recording was edited or doctored? Does the phrase “consider the source” mean anything any more?
Sting operations conducted by law enforcement officials have a dubious record themselves, but at least they require oversight and must meet court standards of evidence. For public actors like James O’Keefe, the oversight, we assume, is performed by the media. The press prides itself for serving as truth’s first line of defense, democracy’s bullshit filter. This week it failed in a big way.
The larger problem here isn’t Viv Schiller’s ultimate fate, and it’s not even the final disposition of congressional funding for NPR — an institution I admire in many ways but which, let’s face it, we’d survive without.
The problem is we are crediting creeps and letting liars take over our public discourse.
This is hardly a partisan concern. Roughly similar tactics caused major headaches for Wisconsin’s embattled Republican governor recently, when he got taken in by a caller impersonating conservative billionaire David Koch. (This led Wisconsin’s Legislature to start talking about outlawing prank calls.) Increasingly, public deception carries little apparent cost.
If a James O’Keefe can win attention and scalps by ruses and lies, why should he stop? And does any public figure have a big enough megaphone and a strong enough spine to say to him, “Have you no decency?”
BONUS LINK: Jeff Jarvis: “The stations’ interests and NPR’s interests are no longer aligned.”
A late Sunday night in winter and the surprise announcement of a big merger, with Kara Swisher one of the key people breaking the news: No wonder the Huffington Post/AOL announcement last night gave veteran tech and media-biz reporters a flashback to 2000 and the colossally ill-fated AOL/Time-Warner deal.
The events are similar in another way: Despite all the CEO happy-talk about synergy, we are once again watching two companies in trouble taking a big gamble that the other will solve its problems.
People think of Huffington Post as the leading popular liberal-Democratic news site. Huffington is now at least suggesting that the progressive point of view isn’t a part of what she’ll be pursuing at AOL. “Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business,” says the New York Times story. Really? This strikes me as strange, disingenuous, and about as credible as Roger Ailes claiming that Fox is not a partisan-driven institution.
One possibility is, Huffington is just saying what the corporate script requires and actually the plan is to position AOL as a sort of Democratic alternative to Fox News/Drudge — which I think would be a really interesting move. I have to assume Arianna has big TV ambitions; I have yet to meet a new-media empire builder who didn’t secretly yearn to do an Ailes (or an Oprah).
The other, more likely possibility is that this whole thing is about the money, the investors needed to cash out, HuffPo’s numbers weren’t looking good enough for an IPO, and Huffington is basically improvising. She’ll spend a couple years at AOL and then move on. This means that, in 2011, Huffington Post will be playing the same role in relation to AOL that AOL played in relation to Time Warner back in 2000: selling itself at the top of a market bubble, pocketing the profit from a sale that couldn’t be earned from customers, and leaving a bigger, older company with all the headaches.
I was one of the few outspoken skeptics of Time Warner/AOL back in 2000. This time around there are more — see Om Malik, who looks at some numbers; Dan Lyons, who’s funny; and Ken Auletta, who views the deal as AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s “hail Mary pass.”
Having all this company in doubt gives me a little pause. Maybe Huffington and Armstrong will prove a great team: The queen of low-cost SEO-driven content paired with the guy who built the Google ad machine that made SEO-driven content pay. But I still think this union is unlikely to end well. AOL remains a generic blandness factory when it comes to journalism. Huffington’s brand could change that; far more likely, it will just dissolve into the corporate miasma.
A decade ago, if you were a “digital” person — if you were interested in how computer technology was changing our culture and economy — then you were a Web person. The Web, built on top of the Internet and ultimately eclipsing its source, dispatched its competitors — the closed online services, the packaged-goods multimedia/CD-ROM industry — and became, for a time, the single face of the digital revolution.
This week’s launch of Rupert Murdoch’s iPad “newspaper,” The Daily, is a milestone: It’s the first significant attempt, since the Web conquered the digital world in 1995, to create a major new media product that embraces technology yet spurns the Web — and the public Internet, too. Chris Anderson’s Wired “Web is Dead” package was the warning shot for this phenomenon, but The Daily’s introduction puts it in front of us in palpable touch-screen form. It boldly declares: We’re digital people but we’re not Web people.
Why do I say that The Daily spurns the Web and the Net? I mean, beyond the obvious reason that there is no Web site that offers its contents in a convenient form each day. It’s not just that. The Daily also contains no links. (Some today see this as a plus; I do not.) There are no RSS feeds. No email addresses to contact the writers and editors. No email alerts or mailing list. Comments on the articles, yes, but not reachable through the Web. No, archives, back issue index, or search! (They’re on Twitter, however. They have a blog, too, and it’s not bad.)
In other words, most of the apparatus of two-way communication that every serious digital publishing venture of the past 15 years has taken as a given is missing from The Daily. They’re serious about this iPad-only thing! But they don’t seem to realize that they’re repeating the mistakes of the very recent past.
The Daily’s designers are eager to show off sparkling graphics, integrated video, and the swipe-ability that the iPad allows. Unfortunately, they are defining “interactivity” the way the lost pioneers of the 1994-era CD-ROM “multimedia revolution” defined it. They have built a gleaming but limited set of interfaces for users to interact with static, prepackaged content. The Web taught us that true interactivity was the interaction between people moderated by the network — along with the personalization you could build into the network based on those people’s behavior.
The Daily’s one concession to today’s Web is the mechanisms it provides for its readers to share individual stories via the usual routes — Facebook, Twitter, email. The recipient of your share notice receives a link to a URL that’s a Web page version of The Daily article. We don’t know how long these web addresses will be good for. But for the moment, at least, it’s pretty easy to assemble a set of links that points you to the Web-accessible versions of each article in the day’s Daily edition. That’s what Andy Baio has done.
How long will Baio’s index last? Will it still be easy to assemble after The Daily’s first-two-weeks-free period ends? Will the News Corp. folks ask him to take it down? We’ll have to wait and see.
The question is whether The Daily’s secession from the Web is a matter of convenience or ideology for its creators. Did they put their energy into spiffing things up for the iPad — the hard, fun, innovative part — figuring that they can circle back to beef up their Web offerings later? Or do they feel that it is their calling, their mission, to leave the Web behind?
My prediction: If they’re pragmatists about the Web, they’ve got a chance — they can adapt and evolve their product so it’s a little more up to date, less hermetic and more inclusive of the public that lives online today. But if they’re ideologues — if they really believe that what is essentially a magazine “pasted on a screen” is the future of journalism — then they’re in deep trouble, and The Daily will only be Murdoch’s latest and most spectacular digital money-sink.
James O'Keefe 