Before social media was even a twinkle in a programmer’s eye, there were the early days of internet, affectionately known now as Web 1.0. Nobody knows the exact date of when Web 2.0 started, but it is believed to have started some time in 2004, which at this point is five years ago (oh, how time flies..)
Many of you out there will remember these pre-2004 attempts at audience participation, all in its glorious lameness.
Guestbooks
There was a time when web sites were positively littered with these things. Imagine for a moment that there was a forum, but there was only one thread, and that thread was flat. And it also exposed your email address for the world and spam-bots to harvest. This was the guestbook.
Guestbooks were things that everybody had but nobody ever used. It was an island that connected to absolutely nothing, and most didn’t even notify the admin of new posts.
The guestbook was pummeled into obscurity due to lack of interest and for the fact spam-bots not only harvested email addresses as mentioned above, but also spammed the crap out of them. CAPTCHA? What CAPTCHA?
As insane as this sounds, guestbooks are still available. Bravenet offers one, for free of course, because nobody in their right might would ever pay for it.
WebRings
This was an attempt to create user-generated communities/directories by having owners of web sites/pages link together by category, hence the "ring." The only problem is that nobody ever clicked the links tacked at the bottom of the web pages they were on. Like guestbooks, many web sites were littered with these things as well – usually right after the guestbook.
Some WebRing services still exist. There is the original WebRing which appears to now have a broken web site. Yahoo! used to own this believe it or not, but wisely dropped it. There is also alt-webring.com, which does appear to be active and functioning well, and RingSurf. All do the same thing, but nobody cares about them anymore and haven’t for some time.
ShoutBoxes
This was the next generation of the guestbook. A simple box on a web page that allowed to to post a one-line phrase (your "shout,") hit Submit, and that was that, it was online.
ShoutBoxes were actually pretty cool and useful, but suffered from spam-bot infestation just like guestbooks did.
The original code for a ShoutBox required you to install a Perl script on your web server. These days if you want one, ShoutMix offers them for free – on their server. The feature set is decent, but the moderation options are simply too little to work with.
Using a ShoutBox is completely obsolete considering Disqus does the same job, except a whole lot better, completely for free, has threading, awesome moderation, etc. If you want to enable a simple comment area on your web site, want completely hassle-free code and full options, Disqus is it. The only other feasible option that’s as easy and feature-rich is HaloScan (odd name, good service.)
On-Site Chat
There have been many iterations of live chat over the years in respect to embedding it within a web page.
One of the earliest used a system (said loosely) called meta refreshing. This was a live chat, except not in real time. You would type in your line and hit submit, then the browser would refresh every 5 seconds or so to see not only your message but other messages other people in the "room" would be typing. The whole experience was just plain weird.
Another way was to embed an IRC channel right in the web page via Java using PJIRC. I actually installed this before years ago and it worked very, very well.
The latest and easiest iteration of chat-on-site is Meebo. It is by far the easiest of the lot.
There’s one inescapable problem with chat-on-site however, and that’s the awkward factor. Unless the "room" is active and you see chatting going on, few wouldn’t bother if the place is empty – which most of the time it would be.
These days, the only time chat-on-site actually works is if it is accompanied by a live video feed. Otherwise people simply don’t bother and will go use IRC instead – assuming they even use that.
Groups
A group is a version of a forum, and its singular largest advantage was that it has very good privacy options. The most popular of the lot which still exists is Yahoo! Groups. MSN had groups until 2008. Google’s offering is Google Groups.
What killed the use of groups was the way Yahoo! handled privacy issues. They did so very poorly. First they said at one point that absolutely nobody owns their content when it was under the assumption that users did retain content ownership, and second was the use of what’s known as "web beacons" that really ticked off people because of the way it was implemented. Many people dumped Yahoo! Groups after that and never went back, because the wonderful privacy options at that point were worthless.
There is no real reason to have a 1.0-style group system today when you’ve got things like blogs, forums that don’t use those beacon things, and so on.
What will possibly fall into obscurity in the future?
RSS
Per very recent events, there are those who say RSS is a dead horse.
Instant Messaging
Major IM offerings are very long in the tooth and simply don’t have features people want or need any longer, but are edging to fix that soon by the inclusion of social media connectivity. Yahoo Messenger 10 will have the ability to receive updates from Twitter. AIM 7 now has "Lifestream" with support for both Twitter and Facebook. But even with these updates, they will not be enough to sway people back to those bulky IM clients. Too little, too late. Nobody who uses Pidgin is going to switch back. Not a chance.
I don’t believe IM will ever truly go away, but it will probably never be in the top spot as the preferred method of communication ever again.
Discovery services
These are web sites like StumbleUpon and Digg. These sites are getting stomped by social media because they’re just not quick enough on the draw, and they’re both maligned with seriously dopey commentary from its users. You’ll find more interesting stuff from your friends on Facebook and Twitter.
And if you don’t believe me, try an advanced Twitter search, and enjoy how easy it is to search and zone in right where you live by location, mile radius, date range, etc. That’s a good discovery search.
Email is pretty long in the tooth, and is likely to be dead too in my opinion. Good post Rich! I am young so some of these I have never heard of
Email never dies, it just changes forms. The only difference between systems is whether it’s stored on-site (cloud) or locally.
I’m not sure I think IM and RSS are going to disappear. Especially in corporate environments, IM has become incredibly useful and a lot easier than email for some activities. Major corporations aren’t going to switch to Twitter for internal use.
I’m also not sure that RSS is going to disappear soon. Yes, I click on links from the people I follow in Twitter, but those are people, not necessarily blogs. For example, I just came to this post via RSS, not via PC Mech’s tweet. I like RSS in that I can get around to viewing that new blog entry when I feel like it. With Twitter, there’s a good chance a link will get lost in the huge number of tweets I receive before I can get to it.
Back in the day, my website had both a guestbook and was in a webring. The guestbook did work well enough, and the webring did lead to some traffic according to my awesome stat counter. So they weren’t entirely useless.
Well, what I was referring to was “consumer” IM, if you will. In corporate, IM with Lotus Sametime continues to have very widespread use and the client is nothing short of spectacular.
Some say RSS is a dead duck. I don’t think so either since the technology is so tightly integrated into all major browser offerings. I mean, you don’t just put in all that effort into coding RSS support into a browser only to have it yanked out a few years later. That just wouldn’t make sense.
Much as you say above that email just changes forms, can’t the same be said of a lot of these? For example, what is this forum but a form of a guestbook? Yes, it has more features, but the concept is the same.
It is true you can claim, “different name, same thing” with some internet messaging technologies, but what separates one from the other is in how it works, its features, accessibility, etc.
The guestbook is actually a very watered down version of a forum, as forums were first with systems like PLATO. That system in particular provided the foundation for many of the messaging technologies we use on the internet now.
Using a modern variant, Facebook is essentially nothing more than a huge multi-tiered forum system. It has profiles, flat discussions (”wall” posts,) private messaging and so on. The difference is that it can be extended thru the use of applications, which is something traditional forums don’t do on a user level.