Saturday, April 30, 2016

WORLD WIDE WEB THE NEXT GENERATION
~ OR ~
WHAT I LEARNED AT SAN DIEGO STARTUP WEEK


Startup Funding Milestones from Startup Garage (artwork by Nicole's Design)
nicolesdesign.com/evolution-of-audience
    Web 2.0 describes World Wide Web sites that emphasize user-generated
    content, usability, and interoperability. The term was popularized by
    Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty at the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conference
    in late 2004, though it was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999.

      — "Web 2.0" Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I wish I'd written this last summer when the events were fresh in my mind, and when the news I have was less stale, but life intruded.

A Paragraph With Footnotes About Hypertext


image from user.xmission.com/~fozz/
features/GuideToWWW/ChapterOne

Ah yes, hypertext. We get the concept from Ted Nelson [1], who mostly drew comics [2] about his ideas. The first widely-distributed implementation was Hypercard [3] and then the first Internet-based implementation was the World Wide Web (WWW).

It makes sense to say that the Web 0.0 began with Tim Berners-Lee [4] at Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) [5] in Meyrin, Geneva, Switzerland, and his simultaneous invention of these protocols:

  • the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) [6],
  • the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) [7],
  • the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) [8],
as well as these programs:

  • the first prototype web browser, WorldWideWeb [9],
  • the first prototype web server, HTTPd [10].

His browser did not include the ability to embed images in a page; you had to click a link and the image opened in a separate window. His web server did not allow the creation of any dynamic content, serving up only static pages.

Marc Andreesen [11] improved upon this with the creation of the Mosaic web browser [12], while at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) [13] in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, which did allow images on a page — an innovation I have compared to the photonovela [14] in Spanish language publishing.

Add in the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) [15] which allows dynamically generated content, and you have all the pieces of what many call Web 1.0.

And of course Andreesen and some investors and associates formed Netscape Communications [16], and productized Mosaic as the Netscape Navigator browser, and then added the JavaScript language [17] to it — an event which I'm pretty sure no one at the time realized would lead to the popularity of JavaScript today, and all the tricks that programmers have learned to do with it as the web has evolved.

This section is a metalogue, in that it both explains and illustrates a concept. The original "spec" for the WWW was basically clickable footnotes, like you see here.


image from
mamund.site44.com/talks/2014-apidays-paris/talk.html

Notes:

Onward


image from onlinemarketingscoops.com

Wikipedia tells us above that "Web 2.0 describes World Wide Web sites that emphasize user-generated content, usability, and interoperability." This includes sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr, social sites such as Facebook and Snapchat, collaborative sites such as Yelp and Wikipedia, and other innovations like multiplayer games and sites where you can caption cat pictures, crowd-sourcing everything from music curating to mate selection.

The pundits then predicted that Web 3.0 would be the "semantic web."

I think they're wrong and I'll tell you why. I have found that when people break a problem in language processing down into "syntax" and "semantics" what they really mean is "the part we know how to automate" and "the part we don't know how to automate." Whenever we make a breakthrough in the semantics column it moves over into the syntax column. You see the problem.

A more pressing problem is that the whole Semantic Web field is foundering in academic doldrums, and the chances of getting the billion web sites in the world to add some kind of "semantic sugar" to make the semantic web work seem slim to me.

Instead, it is clear to me, and some other self-appointed experts, that Web 3.0 is the mobile web, running on mobile devices, GPS-enabled, and inter-operating with the ecology of mobile apps, especially on Android and iPhone.

As for the challenge of getting billions of websites to add some "mobile sugar" it turns out that Google is accomplishing that with economic coercion — more on that later.

One of the best examples I've seen of a "killer app" for web-enabled mobile devices is the restaurant wait system from Waitlist.me, which my wife and I experienced on our last anniversary at a charming outdoor restaurant on Mission Bay called the Barefoot Bar.

The hostess asked for my cell number, and then texted me a link to a smartphone-friendly page to track our progress.


6/21/15 iPhone screen shot from the
Waitlist.me mobile-enabled web app

Instead of giving us a bogus wait time estimate, since who really knows how long each table will be full, we were shown a list of the parties ahead of us, their size, and how long they had been waiting, so we could form our own conclusions. There's something refreshing about not being lied to. I realized we were seeing the way of the future — single-function web ecosystems with very well-solved problems presented with excellent user experiences.

I later found out Waitlist Me was launched in 2012, founded by ex-Googlers, and financed by the Venture Capital (VC) fund Andreessen Horowitz among others. Remember Marc Andreesen (above)? Now he's picking winners for VCs.

Meanwhile Back at the Meetups


image from blog.meetup.com/press

I have been involved with a computer graphics society called SIGGRAPH

for almost thirty years, helping to run the San Diego professional chapter for a dozen of those years, and also attending local meetings in Los Angeles and a number of international conferences. I've also attended meetings of the Final Cut Pro user group in L.A.,

and the Kernel Panic Linux User Group (KPLUG) meetings in San Diego.

One thing that all of these events have in common is that they are mainly publicized by web sites and email lists. In our local SIGGRAPH chapter meeting attendence has been slowly declining for years. Then something interesting happened. We got a new chairman and he began holding workshops on building digital gadgets, and they were very well attended. I assumed at the time that the content was more interesting to folks, but one significant detail was that he publicized the meetings through the Meetup web site.

Only later did I begin to wonder if that was also a reason for the larger attendance.

In June of 2015 my friend Steve P. peer-pressured me into attending a meeting of the San Diego JavaScript Meetup. Now, I don't even like JavaScript. I've mostly ignored it since Netscape slipped it into the browser, except for a few small chores it was good for, but good golly Miss Mollie this language has exploded, and I learned a lot about its modern usages and associated tools from the meeting. But there were also some things in general that I noticed:

  1. incubators

    The meetings were in a corporate "incubator" called The Vine in the expensive heart of downtown San Diego. Now, I have seen startups in cheap spaces like warehouses, barns, and old factory lofts, but never before in a downtown high-rise.

  2. subsidized downtown space

    This lead me to the discovery that this incubator was sponsored by The Irvine Company, which I know well because my wife's job has them as a client. Apparently they are giving free space to some qualified startups. This caused me to wonder, what's in it for them? Are they getting future commitments of rent, or equity, or are they just trying to keep vacant commercial property from looking abandoned while trying to kick-start the San Diego startup economy?

  3. open plan

    I also noticed, and verified through other recent experiences, that the new way of office layout is the open plan, in which workers have less space than they would sitting at Starbucks. I've always worked in software jobs where an office with a door that closes was a perk, and a cubicle was what you got otherwise. These "open plan" workspaces, without even a place to hang a family picture, make cubicles look good to me.

Inspired by the high information value of this event, on a topic I didn't even care much about, I attended some more meetups in the next couple of months.

  • another JavaScript meetup, at which I learned that (according to a show of hands at two sequential meetings) the number of JavaScript jobs is increasing and exceeds the number of job seekers, which is decreasing

  • a Big Data meetup, at which I learned that it is a constant struggle for both employees and companies to be perceived as white collar tech and not blue collar tech

  • a Kickstarter meetup, at which I learned you need to have a thriving, professionally-managed social media presence before you launch your Kickstarter project

But the most important thing I learned, no doubt, was that in a few weeks and event was coming called San Diego Startup Week.

Startup Pub Crawl


image from sandiegostartupweek.com

My initial motivation in attending San Diego Startup Week was to search for a list of San Diego startups, to which I might pitch my consulting services. I did find that, on their web site — I actually didn't need to attend to get it! Out of 85 attendees who listed institutions, some were VCs, some were journalists, some were in academia, some sold consulting or catering, but a handful were small local startups. (By my analysis, the typical San Diego startup is Zesty.io.)

But there were things I learned by attending that were pure gold. A few things I noticed (and also at the above-mentioned meetups):

  • it was a young crowd, with more women and minorities than I have seen at tech events in the past

    That same summer I went to a Linux user group and counted 23 attendees, all male, most over 30 and Caucasian. That was an event about IPv6 packets. But here at SD Startup Week there were very many nationalities, many women, and a conspicuous absence of the "pointy haired boss" trope from Dilbert comics. For a long time there have been attempts to get more diversity into tech. I wonder why it's happening here and now.

  • round portraits and first names

    Every web presence associated with this event seemed to have little round portraits of people and only their first names. The pages looked great on my iPhone.

  • beer-fueled

    Everything seems to happen over beer. Beer is served at meet-ups. There was a "startup crawl" involving beer. Pub crawls are common working/social events. San Diego's reputation for microbreweries probably feeds into this.

  • eager to help other businesses

    Many startups sell services of crafting business plans, getting funding and running social media to other startups, often as a sidelight to their original product plans. They also tend to give away free information as a lure. See the diagram at the top of this blog for an example.


One session I attended was called "Website Creation and Useful Tools" presented by Desiree Eleanor and Nicole Leandra of "Creators Ink." I thought this was going to be about web site programming, but instead it was about getting workable web sites up without programming. A few highlights:

  • almost everything can be done with web-enabled tools, often free

  • those round portraits I mentioned are part of a new mobile-friendly look for JavaScript-powered web pages, with expanding sections all in one page, vertical scrolling but no horizontal, all made possible by HTML5/CSS and increasing memory on most people's computers/phones

  • at the lowest level tools for this "new look" are often created with the Angular.js toolkit

  • most users are engaging at a higher level, with themes (templates) from web hosting sites like Wordpress

  • to be mobile-friendly a user must select a responsive theme for their web site, which is a code word for "mobile-friendly"

  • Google is "holding a gun to the head" of commercial web sites by down-ranking them if they are not mobile friendly, as of April 21, 2015

  • the response of the Venture Capitalists has been to aggressively fund start-ups that are solving this problem

Here as a public service are my raw notes from Design Ink's session: 


San Diego Startup Week notes 6/19/2015
Website Creation and Useful Tools

- DesireeEleanor@stcrnmdesire.com
- NicoleLeandra@nicolesdesign.com (http://nicolesdesign.com)
#hashtag: @creatorsink
bit.ly/CreatorCommunity

simple: GoogleSites, Weebly, Bigcommerce, Squarespace * (more robust)

bit.ly/CMSchart
justhost.com - hosting
check out zesty.io
{ theme forest }
PICK A RESPONSIVE THEME to make Google happy
{ crazy eggs }

** audience member: blitzmetrics.com/all "Facebook For a Dollar a Day"
   "growth hacking event"

* A/B split testing bit.ly/ABsplittest

nugget:
-------
image titles!  make your home page title full of keywords

tools:
------
* mailchimp
* google analytics
* bit.ly
* FB advertising
* IFTTT if this then than [zapier]
* click to tweet
* Wordpress Plug-ins -- SEO Ultimate, Woocommerce & Extensions, GA

Follow-Up


image from tympanus.net/codrops/2013/07/17/troubleshooting-css

Well, I've had most of a year to think about what this all means. I relate it to my experiences with HTML5 and CSS. I tried my hand at these core level tools after much study, and created some pages like this one:

They looked great on Mac and PC laptops with Firefox and Chrome, but on an iPhone with Safari they were kind of hinky. I looked on Craigslist for a consultant who could help me — preferably someone with graphics arts skills and CSS chops. Well, I didn't find such a person, but I found many organizations were looking to hire such a person. Things that make you go "Hmmm."

I recently explained my problem to friend and HTML5/CSS instructor Jodi R. She said I should be using a responsive theme at some site like Wordpress. Ah-ha. We talked about the bigger picture. Every little shop trying to use CSS formatting hit problems like I did, with having to test and debug on every platform. This created a "tier" in the market for the Wordpresses of the world, to hire the best CSS talents and create themes for the rest of us to use. So I guess I should go with the flow.

And meanwhile, Google has just tightened the screws yet again:

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1 comment:

  1. Matt from CaliforniaAugust 28, 2021 at 6:58 PM

    Excellent. Thank you.

    1. What developments of note have occurred since you wrote this? It seems that interactivity has increased, as well as cross-platform interoperability being generated automatically from a given Dreamweaver file.

    2. Can you please elaborate on your comments about the shortcomings of habitual reliance upon classification of phenomena across a syntax/semantics spectrum?

    Thanks, Matthew Dubuc

    ReplyDelete

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