I miss this era of the Internet. It represents a period of time where average people used the open Web to publish, rather than post on a corporation's platform.
Obviously there's been plenty of development since then that I would not give back, but people favoring publishing their own sites rather than posting on social media is not incompatible with those developments. That part didn't need to be lost.
When talking about this, people often like to joke about the webdesign back then. But the personal websites had personality. Facebook profiles feel like government forms to me... "here, fill in this standardized array of fields with your personal data."
I think MySpace ultimately represented the final form of the essentially unlimited customization of the early web. The terribleness of MySpace pages was, I believe, the catalyst that pushed the design trend in the opposite direction, resulting in the "standardized array of fields" as popularized by Facebook.
That said, given the cyclical nature of design trends, I strongly suspect that we'll eventually start to see a gradual shift back toward customization, hopefully avoiding the ridiculous excesses of the MySpace era.
I think MySpace ultimately represented the final form of the essentially unlimited customization of the early web. The terribleness of MySpace pages was, I believe, the catalyst that pushed the design trend in the opposite direction, resulting in the "standardized array of fields" as popularized by Facebook.
The end of next neutrality may help here as the big players will get worse and worse as the telcos start taking them. I'm off Facebook and any other large centralized social platforms. With this website if I decide to publish articles or blog posts then I'm going back to the personal web page.
I'm no longer blogging at buildmaestro.wordpress.com, but you can still find my older posts there if you're interested in reading about software deployment, automation, and release engineering from that era.
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