I’ve been thinking about the parallels between the development of small web applications and old-school unix command line programs.
The philosophy of unix (linux, and all command line interfaces) is to have lots of little programs that all do one task really well. ls lists files, grep finds text within files, sort sorts lines in files, and so on. There are thousands of these programs available, each with dozens of option flags. This was fine when only programmers were using computers, but ordinary folk found all these options to be daunting.
A similar sort of philosophy existed in the early days of post-bubble “web 2.0”. Photo sharing sites, bookmarking services, newsreaders, and blogging platforms all did one thing really well. And you could tie them all together using RSS and REST and other API acronymns. The ontology of files, lines, and ports gave way to posts, tags, and URLs. The people thriving here weren’t all programmers, but still not “the masses”.
In both cases, this chaos of anything-is-possible utilities eventually paved the way for bigger programs/services that included the most useful features and wrapped them all together in an easy-to-use package. Wordperfect and Word (and even Emacs) are much easier to use than grep and sort. MySpace and Facebook are much easier to use than coordinating your wordpress, flickr, and delicous accounts.
In both cases, the users of the old system decry the loss of power that comes with the new all-in-one package, but ultimately it means that millions more people can benefit. Just as the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows opened computers to the masses, are Facebook and MySpace opening social media to the masses?
And more importantly, what will be the consequence if one emerges ‘victorious’ as Microsoft did with Windows? On the one hand this led to anticompetitive behavior and crushing of many little guys, but it also let to interface unification. (As I’ve said before)
Back in the 90’s Niel Stephenson extended this idea out to popular culture, arguing that Disney (and other bits of our visual western culture) performed the same function (with the same dangers) in the world of human culture. “In the Beginning was the Command Line” is a classic essay.
We have no choice but to trust some nameless artist at Disney or programmer at Apple or Microsoft [or Facebook] to make a few choices for us, close off some options, and give us a conveniently packaged executive summary.
Has technology always followed this pattern of chaotic empowering innovation followed by dumbed-down mass-market consolidation?