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If you’re like me, you don’t go to the grocery store very often.  You’re usually left with a few odd ingredients.  What to do?  Consult Snacksby.  If you’re hungry and are too lazy to make a trip to the grocery store (or your local Chinese restaurant), type into Snacksby’s search engine a list of whatever you have lying around the kitchen, and the site will list all the recipies people have contributed.  Discovered that mustard and peanut butter sandwiches are actually pretty tasty?  Add the recipe to the engine.  This is a fantastic application, and a good use of social networking principles.

There is quite a bit of talk about the “Web 2.0″ and the “next generation of internet services” floating around lately, especially among the popular media. All this talk has, for whatever reason, made me nostalgic for internet technology of yesteryear. Many of these old technologies were simple, effective, and certainly useful today.

For example, I think that the old Gopher protocol died an early death. For those who never played around with a university computer connected to the Internet back in the late 80′s or early 90′s, gopher was a menu driven internet application. While it was sometimes difficult to find things, gopher had the advantage of being efficient, especially when modem speeds were measured in bits per second (and there weren’t many bits per second). Gopher was also nice in that it worked well for small viewing displays. Today, a gopher-like technology would be ideal for cellular phones, since they suffer from both low data bandwidth and limit viewing capability.

Another technology that seems to have fallen by the wayside is Usenet. Long before the word “blog” was being abused by the media, Usenet was the place to go for online collaboration. It was also the original file sharing system, and today it largely serves the same function. While Usenet technically is in use today, it has been all but eliminated by more interactive, feature-rich, and web-driven applications. Usenet had quite a culture surrounding it, and the purists claim web-driven forms of Usenet, such as Google Groups, as having killed the system. Despite all of this, Usenet does have a very strong, albeit small, following, mostly among old techies and younger geeks.

The beauty of these and other internet technologies is their simplicity. The modern internet seems to be moving to a completely web-based system. While there are independent protocols for many applications, it is possible to run almost any user-application in a web-based interface. While this does lead to great convenience, it does add to the complexity. And while websites have gotten much more attractive and approachable (take my site), the element of content is often overlooked (again, take my site). Not having a flashy patina was an advantage, since the only thing to look at was the content of the medium.

The one oddity in the evolution of internet technology is email. Email, for whatever reason, has survived longer than any other internet application. It does represent the simplest use and purpose of the internet: communication. I’m not sure why it is that email survived and other internet technologies, such as gopher, did not.

The internet will continue to evolve, but I’m not sure what will happen. It is easy to say that the web will continue to dominate the application of the internet, but I think that might be a bit shortsighted. After all, recent technologies like Bittorrent have become quite successful. The key to innovation is, however, freedom to innovate. Web browsers as we know them today came from the University of Illinois (aside: the funding for this project came from a bill sponsored by Senator Al Gore, ultimately leading to the “invented the internet” misquote). Gopher and Usenet, too, were graduate school projects. Modern technologies, Bittorrent and RSS, are pet projects. These projects represent the ultimate power of the internet: as a medium for innovation. The developers of these applications found a use for the internet, and others found it to be fun or useful. We cannot limit what the internet can do, and we should not try to put restrictions on its usage, for fear of losing out on future innovation.

Rest in peace, gopher. You have served us well, but now it is time to move on. Perhaps we can learn from you and your success.

UPDATE (5 Aug 06): The BBC has posted a nice article about Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s original code for the web. The article also has a nice discussion about the state of internet technology in 1991.

My site has been attracting a lot of content spam lately. Most of it has been caught by my filtering software, so, until recently, there has not been any real problem.

Yesterday, I wrote about the issue of network neutrality. That post, it seemed, attracted a lot of attention. I received several comments, but something struck me as odd. As the comments continued to come in, it hit me: all the comments were from the same point of view, opposing network neutrality.

I noticed on my administration screen today that my blog was linked to by another blog. This blog accuses the commentor “Net Chick” of being an astroturfer, a fake blog posting created by a PR company to give the appearance of “grassroots” (grr…) support.

I have removed the comments until I can better figure out what to do with them. I will not repost them. Furthermore, I will hold all comments in moderation until I can better decide how to handle my website. I may try writing a plugin that automatically holds from free email accounts in the moderation queue. I may play with captcha systems. I will most likely implement any number of systems.

Perhaps the most impressive technology to evolve in the 20th century is the internet. The internet has evoked a number of great metaphors about being the great democracy, the only true free press, and so on. However, the internet is also a business, and once Al Gore finished “inventing” the internet, the money began to flow. Everyone wanted to connect, everyone had something to say, and everyone wanted to make a buck.

Living in Washington, I am often subjected to political adverts and lobbying efforts. One of the more recent causes to garner the attention of K Street is the issue of network neutrality. I hate to say it, but I’m not sure what the big deal is.
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The website This is Broken seems to suffer from one flaw: it, too, is broken.
The site is dedicated to those things that “just don’t seem right” and that are poorly designed. The problem is that most of the submissions on the website are not terribly broken; rather, the submissions are broken because somebody is nit-picky.

Take, for example, the post regarding a Belkin optical mouse. The site claims the packaging is “broken” because it contains a lead-contents warning label. This isn’t broken. This is mandated by statute, the same as anything else that contains lead.

Or, another example, where the buttons in an elevator were listed in a different order. This is not broken; it is an interface design decision.

The only thing broken at This is Broken is thisisbroken.com.

While decompressing from studying for my civil procedure final, I came across Last.fm, the self-proclamed “Social Music Revolution.” I must say, I’m impressed.

Similar to other social networks, last.fm relies heavily on user tagging to categorize and locate music. This quickly develops into a wealth of music that, ordinarily, I would not have found.

The system is easy enough to use. It consists of two major components: a plugin for your music player to link it to a list of what tracks you listen to, and a radio player, which allows you to listen to new music. It generates a list of what you have listened to and, based upon your tags, recommends new music. Thus far, it hasn’t done well to find new music for me, but I have to spend some time getting data in the system first, I think.

I’m hopeful that this system will work well for me. I’m certainly willing to give it a try.