Anil Dash did an excellent job of describing that time period in his post The Web We Lost. It’s well worth a read—and his talk at The Berkman Istitute is well worth a listen. He described what the situation was like with APIs:

Five years ago, if you wanted to show content from one site or app on your own site or app, you could use a simple, documented format to do so, without requiring a business-development deal or contractual agreement between the sites. Thus, user experiences weren’t subject to the vagaries of the political battles between different companies, but instead were consistently based on the extensible architecture of the web itself.

Times have changed. These days, instead of seeing themselves as part of a wider web, online services see themselves as standalone entities.

So what happened?

Facebook happened.

I don’t mean that Facebook is the root of all evil. If anything, Facebook—a service that started out being based on exclusivity—has become more open over time. That’s the cause of many of its scandals; the mismatch in mental models that Facebook users have built up about how their data will be used versus Facebook’s plans to make that data more available.

No, I’m talking about Facebook as a role model; the template upon which new startups shape themselves.

In the web’s early days, AOL offered an alternative. “You don’t need that wild, chaotic lawless web”, it proclaimed. “We’ve got everything you need right here within our walled garden.”

Of course it didn’t work out for AOL. That proposition just didn’t scale, just like Yahoo’s initial model of maintaining a directory of websites just didn’t scale. The web grew so fast (and was so damn interesting) that no single company could possibly hope to compete with it. So companies stopped trying to compete with it. Instead they, quite rightly, saw themselves as being part of the web. That meant that they didn’t try to do everything. Instead, you built a service that did one thing really well—sharing photos, managing links, blogging—and if you needed to provide your users with some extra functionality, you used the best service available for that, usually through someone else’s API …just as you provided your API to them.

Then Facebook began to grow and grow. I remember the first time someone was showing me Facebook—it was Tantek of all people—I remember asking “But what is it for?” After all, Flickr was for photos, Delicious was for links, Dopplr was for travel. Facebook was for …everything …and nothing.

I just didn’t get it. It seemed crazy that a social network could grow so big just by offering …well, a big social network.

But it did grow. And grow. And grow. And suddenly the AOL business model didn’t seem so crazy anymore. It seemed ahead of its time.

Once Facebook had proven that it was possible to be the one-stop-shop for your user’s every need, that became the model to emulate. Startups stopped seeing themselves as just one part of a bigger web. Now they wanted to be the only service that their users would ever need …just like Facebook.

Seen from that perspective, the open flow of information via APIs—allowing data to flow porously between services—no longer seemed like such a good idea.

Not only have APIs been shut down—see, for example, Google’s shutdown of their Social Graph API—but even the simplest forms of representing structured data have been slashed and burned.

Twitter and Flickr used to markup their user profile pages with microformats. Your profile page would be marked up with hCard and if you had a link back to your own site, it include a rel=”me” attribute. Not any more.

Then there’s RSS.

During the Q&A of that 2006 dConstruct talk, somebody asked me about where they should start with providing an API; what’s the baseline? I pointed out that if they were already providing RSS feeds, they already had a kind of simple, read-only API.

Because there’s a standardised format—a list of items, each with a timestamp, a title, a description (maybe), and a link—once you can parse one RSS feed, you can parse them all. It’s kind of remarkable how many mashups can be created simply by using RSS. I remember at the first London Hackday, one of my favourite mashups simply took an RSS feed of the weather forecast for London and combined it with the RSS feed of upcoming ISS flypasts. The result: a Twitter bot that only tweeted when the International Space Station was overhead and the sky was clear. Brilliant!

Back then, anywhere you found a web page that listed a series of items, you’d expect to find a corresponding RSS feed: blog posts, uploaded photos, status updates, anything really.

That has changed.

Twitter used to provide an RSS feed that corresponded to my HTML timeline. Then they changed the URL of the RSS feed to make it part of the API (and therefore subject to the terms of use of the API). Then they removed RSS feeds entirely.

On the Salter Cane site, I want to display our band’s latest tweets. I used to be able to do that by just grabbing the corresponding RSS feed. Now I’d have to use the API, which is a lot more complex, involving all sorts of authentication gubbins. Even then, according to the terms of use, I wouldn’t be able to display my tweets the way I want to. Yes, how I want to display my own data on my own site is now dictated by Twitter.

Thanks to Jo Brodie I found an alternative service called Twitter RSS that gives me the RSS feed I need, ‘though it’s probably only a matter of time before that gets shuts down by Twitter.

Jo’s feelings about Twitter’s anti-RSS policy mirror my own:

I feel a pang of disappointment at the fact that it was really quite easy to use if you knew little about coding, and now it might be a bit harder to do what you easily did before.

That’s the thing. It’s not like RSS is a great format—it isn’t. But it’s just good enough and just versatile enough to enable non-programmers to make something cool. In that respect, it’s kind of like HTML.

The official line from Twitter is that RSS is “infrequently used today.” That’s the same justification that Google has given for shutting down Google Reader. It reminds of the joke about the shopkeeper responding to a request for something with “Oh, we don’t stock that—there’s no call for it. It’s funny though, you’re the fifth person to ask today.”

RSS is used a lot …but much of the usage is invisible:

RSS is plumbing. It’s used all over the place but you don’t notice it.

That’s from Brent Simmons, who penned a love letter to RSS:

If you subscribe to any podcasts, you use RSS. Flipboard and Twitter are RSS readers, even if it’s not obvious and they do other things besides.

He points out the many strengths of RSS, including its decentralisation:

It’s anti-monopolist. By design it creates a level playing field.

How foolish of us, therefore, that we ended up using Google Reader exclusively to power all our RSS consumption. We took something that was inherently decentralised and we locked it up into one provider. And now that provider is going to screw us over.

I hope we won’t make that mistake again. Because, believe me, RSS is far from dead just because Google and Twitter are threatened by it.

In a post called The True Web, Robin Sloan reiterates the strength of RSS:

It will dip and diminish, but will RSS ever go away? Nah. One of RSS’s weaknesses in its early days—its chaotic decentralized weirdness—has become, in its dotage, a surprising strength. RSS doesn’t route through a single leviathan’s servers. It lacks a kill switch.

I can understand why that power could be seen as a threat if what you are trying to do is force your users to consume their own data only the way that you see fit (and all in the name of “user experience”, I’m sure).

Returning to Anil’s description of the web we lost:

We get a generation of entrepreneurs encouraged to make more narrow-minded, web-hostile products like these because it continues to make a small number of wealthy people even more wealthy, instead of letting lots of people build innovative new opportunities for themselves on top of the web itself.

I think that the presence or absence of an RSS feed (whether I actually use it or not) is a good litmus test for how a service treats my data.

• Instagram doesn’t provide an RSS feed of my uploaded photos.
• Twitter doesn’t provide an RSS feed of my tweets.
• Facebook doesn’t provide an RSS feed of my band’s updates

It might be that RSS is the canary in the coal mine for my data on the web.

If those services don’t trust me enough to give me an RSS feed, why should I trust them with my data?

Tagged with api rss web technology culture startup data information business twitter facebook google open

Remember when we were all publishing documents on the web, but then there was that all-changing event and then we all started making web apps instead? No? Me neither. In fact, I have yet to hear a definition of what exactly constitutes a web app.

I’ve heard plenty of descriptions of web apps; there are many, many facets that could be used to describe a web app …but no hard’n’fast definitions.

One pithy observation is that “a website has an RSS feed; a web app has an API.” I like that. It’s cute. But it’s also entirely inaccurate. And it doesn’t actually help nail down what a web app actually is.

Like obscenity and brunch, web apps can be described but not defined.

I think that Jake gets close by describing sites as either “get stuff” (look stuff up) or “do stuff”. But even that distinction isn’t clear. Many sites morph from one into the other. Is Wikipedia a website up until the point that I start editing an article? Are Twitter and Pinterest websites while I’m browsing through them but then flip into being web apps the moment that I post something?

I think there’s a much more fundamental question here than simply “what’s the difference between a website and a web app?” That more fundamental question is…

Why?

Why do you want to make that distinction? What benefit do you gain by arbitrarily dividing the entire web into two classes?

I think this same fundamental question applies to the usage of the term “HTML5”. That term almost never means the fifth iteration of HTML. Instead it’s used to describe everything from CSS to WebGL. It fails as a descriptive term for the same reason that “web app” does: it fails to communicate the meaning intended by the person using the term. You might say “HTML5” and mean “requires JavaScript to work”, but I might hear “HTML5” and think you mean “has a short doctype.” I think the technical term for a word like this is “buzzword”: a word that is commonly used but without any shared understanding or agreement.

In the case of “web app”, I’m genuinely curious to find out why so many designers, developers, and product owners are so keen to use the label. Perhaps it’s simply fashion. Perhaps “website” just sounds old-fashioned, and “web app” lends your product a more up-to-date, zingy feeling on par with the native apps available from the carefully-curated walled gardens of app stores.

In his recent talk at Port 80, Jack Franklin points to one of the dangers of the web app/site artificial split:

We’re all building sites that people visit, do something, and leave. Differentiating websites vs. web apps is no good to anyone. A lot of people ignore new JavaScript tools, methods or approaches because those are just for “web apps.”

That’s a good point. A lot of tools, frameworks, and libraries pitch themselves as being intended for web apps even though they might be equally useful for good ol’-fashioned websites.

In my experience, there’s an all-too-common reason why designers, developers, and product owners are eager to self-identify as the builders of web apps. It gives them a “get out of jail free” card. All the best practices that they’d apply to websites get thrown by the wayside. Progressive enhancement? Accessibility? Semantic markup? “Oh, we’d love to that, but this is a web app, you see… that just doesn’t apply to us.”

I’m getting pretty fed up with it. I find myself grinding my teeth when I hear the term “web app” used without qualification.

We need a more inclusive term that covers both sites and apps on the web. I propose we use the word “thang.”

“Check out this web thang I’m working on.”

“Have you seen this great web thang?”

“What’s that?” “It’s a web thang.”

Now all I need is for someone to make a browser plugin (along the lines of the cloud-to-moon and cloud-to-butt plugins) to convert every instance of “website” or “web app” to “web thang.”

Tagged with website webapp webthang language terminology

Last week, an interesting little device showed up.

I had no idea who sent it. Was it a gaming device ordered by Anna?

The packaging was all in Chinese. Perhaps some foreign hackers were attempting to infiltrate our network through some clever social engineering.

It turns out that Rich had ordered it, having heard about it from Chris Heathcote who mentioned the device during his UX London talk.

It’s an S18 Mini Pad. You can pick one up for about £30. For that price, as Chris pointed out, you could just use it as an alarm clock (and it does indeed have an alarm clock app). But it’s also a touchscreen device with WiFi and a web browser …a really good web browser: it comes with Chrome. It’s an Android 4 device.

It has all sorts of issues. The touchscreen is pretty crap, for example. But considering the price, it’s really quite remarkable.

We’ve got to the point where all the individual pieces—WiFi, touchscreen, web browser, operating system—can be thrown together into one device that can be sold for around the thirty quid mark. And this is without any phone company subsidies.

Crap as it is, this device really excites me. A cheap mobile web-enabled device …I find that so much more thrilling than any Apple keynote.

Tagged with devices access mobile

Tickets for dConstruct go on sale at 11am on Tuesday, May 21st.

That’s just eight days from now. In some previous years, tickets went very quickly. I don’t think we’ll see a repeat of those heady days of selling out within 24 hours this year, but it’s still worth grabbing your ticket nice and early. At £135+VAT, it’s a steal (as usual).

If you want to be all set next Tuesday, the Eventbrite page for tickets will be dconstruct2013.eventbrite.com. Speak, friend, and enter.

If you’re wavering about whether or not to come this year, dispel your doubts. Just look at how much people enjoyed last year’s dConstruct—it was truly awesome, as you can hear for yourself on the dConstruct archive. This year’s line-up continues the tradition of blowing minds with brilliance.

On the subject of this year’s line-up, it is now complete with the addition of Simone Rebaudengo who will share his tells of neurotic network-enabled toasters. He was a huge hit at this year’s UX London and it became clear to me that I had to have him for dConstruct. I mean, the theme is “Communicating With Machines”, for crying out loud!

I’ve also been rounding up the finest and brightest teachers for full-day workshops that will precede the conference. The workshop tickets also go on sale next Tuesday. A workshop costs £395+VAT and that includes a complementary ticket to the conference day as well. Your choices are:

• Seb: CreativeJS,
• Aaron: Planning Adaptive Interfaces, and
• Luke: Designing Mobile to Multi-Device Experiences.

(Speaking of workshops, if you fancy a full day of responsive design with me, I’m doing a workshop on a workshop right before Ampersand in June and you can grab a 20% discount before the end of this month—‘twould be lovely if you could join me.)

In case you can’t tell, I’m getting very excited indeed about this year’s dConstruct. It’s going to be a lot of fun! Hope to see you there.

Tagged with dconstruct conference brighton dconstruct2013

By the way, there are still tickets available. I suggest you grab one if you haven’t already. It’s a great gathering but for some reason it’s not selling as well this year, which means this could be your last chance to attend.

I’ve really, really enjoyed the previous two Mobilisms, and I always get a kick out of moderating panels so I’m pretty chuffed about getting the chance to host a panel for the third year running.

The first year, the panel was made up of Mobile browser vendors (excluding Apple, of course). Last year, it was more of a mixed bag of vendors and developers. This year …well, we’ll see. I’ll assemble the panel over the course of the conference’s two days. I plan to choose the sassiest and most outspoken of speakers—the last thing you want on a panel is a collection of meek, media-trained company shills.

Mind you, Dan has managed to buy his way onto the panel through some kind of sponsorship deal, but I’m hoping he’ll be able to contribute something useful about Firefox OS.

Apart from that one preordained panelist, everything else is up in the air. To help me decide who to invite onto the panel, it would be really nice to have an idea of what kind of topics people want to have us discuss. Basically, what’s hot and what’s not.

So …got a burning question about mobile, the web, or the “mobile web” (whatever that means)? I want to hear it.

If you could leave a comment with your question, ‘twould be much appreciated.

Tagged with mobilism conference amsterdam panel mobile

I can’t see it myself. But I can’t guarantee that we weren’t somehow unconsciously influenced by these guys.

Just to set the record straight, I gave them a call.

Update: a few points of clarification:

• Garry from Kent Web Host is totally cool with me publishing our conversation.
• I’m not publishing this out of any spirit of schadenfreude. I’m publishing it because it was a fun conversation and Garry handled the situation like a true gent.
• Garry is a really nice guy. If you want to say unkind things about him on Twitter when you’re linking to this, don’t: you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Tagged with clearleft phone inspiration influence design audio

Personally, I had the time of my life. Literally. The one-two punch of Brighton SF and dConstruct was one of the best couple of days I’ve ever had in my life.

But the day after dConstruct 2012 I remember waking up and thinking “ah, shit …how am I ever going to top that?”

Well, clearly, I can’t. But I can still do my damnest to put together a fantastic line-up for dConstruct 2013 …so that’s what I’ve done:

• The funny and geeky Adam Buxton,
• The cyborg anthropologist Amber Case,
• Hacker and tinkerer Dan Williams,
• Security cyberpunk Keren Elazari,
• The future-friendly Luke Wroblewski,
• My favourite writer on the web, Maciej Cegłowski,
• The queen of CSS, Nicole Sullivan, and
• Friend to the robots, Sarah Angliss.

I think you’ll agree that’s not your typical conference line up. It’s going to be great! And it’s going to be a lot of fun. Trust me.

Trust is something I feel I’ve earned after last year’s tour-de-force. Last year’s line-up was pretty unusual too, but it worked superbly. Now I’ve got to make sure that I don’t squander the trust I earned.

So if you came to dConstruct last year, I don’t need to tell you why you should come back this year.

If you didn’t make it to last year’s dConstruct, you can make up for it this year. You don’t want to miss out two years in a row now, do you?

Tickets will go on sale in a few weeks time. I’ll announce the exact date soon. I’ll also be updating the information about the workshops we’ll be running this year.

And if you’re planning to come to Brighton for dConstruct, make sure to stick around for the weekend. The Brighton Digital Festival is happening again this September. That means a Maker Faire, meetups, hack events, and art shows all around town.

See you on the first Friday of September!

Tagged with dconstruct conference brighton dconstruct2013

The Twitter account for the open device lab in Nuremburg pointed out that it’s been one year since I wrote a blog post about the open device lab I set up:

Exactly one year ago @adactio started the #ODL movement with his blog adactio.com/journal/5433/ – wow, what a huge impact! Thanks for that! (y)

— Open Device Lab NBG (@ODLNuremberg) April 30, 2013

Much as I’d love to take credit for the idea of an open device lab, it simply isn’t true. Jason and Lyza had been working on setting up the open device lab in Portland for quite a while when I flung open the doors of the Clearleft test lab. But I will take credit for the “Ah, fuck it!” attitude that I introduced to the idea of sharing test devices with the community. Partly because I had seen how long it was taking the Portland device lab to get off the ground while they did everything by the book, I decided to just wait for the worst to happen instead of planning for it:

There are potential pitfalls to opening up a testing suite like this. What about the insurance? What about theft? What about breakage? But the thing about potential pitfalls is that they’re just that: potential. I’m treating all of them as YAGNI issues. I’ll address any problems if and when they occur rather than planning for worst-case scenarios.

It proved to be a great policy. So far, nothing has gone wrong. And it also served as an example to other people thinking about opening up device labs at their companies: “don’t sweat it; I didn’t!”

But as far as anniversaries go, the one-year birthday of the Clearleft device lab is not the most significant event of April 30th. Today is the twentieth anniversary of the publication of one of the most important documents in technological history: the document that officially put the World Wide Web into the public domain.

Open device labs are a small, small part of working on the web but I like to think that they represent the same kind of spirit of openness and sharing that Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues demonstrated at CERN:

I really, really like the way that communal device labs have taken off. It’s like a physical manifestation of the sharing and openness that has imbued the practice of web design and development right from the start. View source, mailing lists, blog posts, Stack Overflow, and Github are made of bits; device labs are made of atoms. But they are all open for you to use and contribute to.

At UX London I had dinner with a Swiss entrepreneur who was showing off his proprietary native app on his phone and proudly declaring that he had been granted a patent. He seemed like a nice chap, but his attitude kind of made my skin crawl. It seemed so antithetical to the spirit of sharing and openness that I’m used to from the web.

James Gleick once described the web as the patent that never was:

Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web and the Web browser — that is, the world as we now know it — pretty much single-handedly, starting in about 1989, when he was working as a software engineer at CERN, the particle-physics laboratory in Geneva. He didn’t patent it, or any part of it. On the contrary, he has labored tirelessly to keep cyberspace open and nonproprietary.

We are all reaping the benefits of Sir Tim’s kindness and generosity.

It’s not so much that Tim Berners Lee invented WWW, it’s that he gave it to the world as a gift. Supreme kindness as well as innovation.

— Chris T-T (@christt) July 27, 2012

Tagged with web history www cern devices testing opendevicelab testlab sharing patents

It’s not just that I consider A Dao Of Web Design to be part of the canon of great writing and thinking for web designers and developers. I’m also continually amazed by its longevity. Thirteen years is a very, very long time on the web, and yet just last week Richard referenced John’s article when he was describing how best to approach designing for the web today.

The only other article I can think that matches its importance is Ethan’s unveiling of Responsive Web Design three years ago, also on A List Apart. It’s no coincidence that Ethan’s article references John’s article from a decade before. Both pieces are essentially making the same rallying cry: stop fighting the flexible nature of the web. Embrace it.

I think that finally, finally we’re beginning to do just that.

Tagged with dao web design development responsive writing

Andy did a great job curating the line-up. It had a bit of a dConstruct-y feel, and not just because we had old friends like Marty, Peter, and Hannah back: Genevieve Bell, Simone Rebaudengo and Richard Seymour all broke our brains in different wonderful ways.

Hats off to Kate who worked her ass off to make sure that everything ran smoothly. Seriously, you wouldn’t believe the amount of work she did. The change of venue and format for this year resulted in at least twice as much work as usual.

In the middle of UX London’s three days, I ran a workshop called Responsive UX. As I told the audience that morning when I was pitching the workshop, I got the title by taking the term “responsive design” and doing a find-and-replace on the word “design” with the phrase “UX”. After all, what’s the difference? Right, Peter?

Seriously though, this workshop was a little different in that I wasn’t covering any HTML or CSS or JavaScript. It was much more about planning for the unknown and good ol’-fashioned content priority and hierarchy.

I wasn’t entirely pleased with how it went. It was a workshop of two halves. The first half had far too much of me talking (and ranting), probably preaching to the choir. But I felt I had to lay the groundwork first. The second half—when everybody got hands on with paper-based exercises—was much better.

I learned my lesson: show, don’t tell. I’ll be doing a full day responsive workshop at Ampersand in June. I plan to make sure that there’s less of me talking and more making and collaborating. Also, because it’s a full day, I’ll be able to get down to the nitty-gritty of markup and style sheets.

And don’t forget; if you want me to come to your company sometime and do a workshop there, no problemo.

Some people at the workshop asked about me publishing my slides. The slides by themselves really don’t contain much information but I’ve published them on Speakerdeck anyway. But what’s more valuable are the URLs to articles and resources I mentioned along the way. So here’s the structure of the workshop together with links to examples and further reading…

Introduction

• Long Live the Web by Tim Berners-Lee
• A Dao of Web Design by John Allsopp
• Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte
• A Richer Canvas by Mark Boulton
• Fit to Scale by Trent Walton

Myths

• St. Paul’s School
• Huffduffer
• Map Tales
• The Mobile Context by Mark Kirby
• There is no Mobile Web by Stephen Hay
• Noise-to-Noise Ratio by Merlin Mann

Progressive Enhancement

• Responsive By Default by Andy Hume
• Do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser? by Dan Cederholm

Planning

• Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski
• Content First
• APIs First
• The DRY Principle
• URL Design by Kyle Kneath

Conditional Loading

• dConstruct 2012
• Conditional Loading for Responsive Designs

Visual Design

• Time to stop showing clients static design visuals by Andy Clarke
• Style Tiles by Samantha Warren
• Element Collages by Dan Mall
• Matter
• Pattern Primer example
• Pattern Primer source

Navigation

• Clearleft (navigation first)
• The Session (content first, navigation second)
• Fix My Street (display: table)
• Hack Farm (progressive disclosure)
• Wellcome Library (off-canvas)
• Yaron Shoen (separate URL)

Tagged with responsive workshop uxlondon