Personally I think we shouldn't move away from the concept of: URI <=> resource, just for some short-term gain. I think that metaphor will be a lot more useful in the long term.
What we may do, and to be honest it's starting to happen already, is to get rid of the address bar as an always-visible user interface feature. It could just be an overlaid window for those times when you actually want to type in the url (or if you jus want to check its value) that disappear once one click enter. And to be honest this is already happening in mobile phones where space is limited.
The breadcrumb idea, especially if as customisable as the author suggest, should be done in the site... which we already can do.
he he... I do that often for Wikipedia... even though I don't get why Wikipedia hasn't implemented a nicer looking URL (in particular removing the middle /wiki/). :(
What was the historical reason? I know that originally the actual domain name was written from "largest" to "smallest": com.google, for example.
I find my perfectionist side slightly annoyed by the current form, but then if we ever change it we should move to year-month-day too, and putting the currency symbol after the number, and use decimals everywhere (no more hours but centi-days ^_^)... oh well, I guess the world is nice because it's imperfect. :)
For a start we should try to get rid of all those www: that will be the greatest help. The rest should be pretty easy: a website can always set a forwarding link so that, say:
www.cocacola.com/offer
goes to the page of the actual offer.
I am not sure about that. Though I do think there is a certain feeling of elitism within Google, like all the brightest people are inside (which to be honest it's probably a pretty good assessment). So I am not sure how much they can get the very real but very (intellectually) shallow world of social networks.
Googlers seem to love to tackle hard problems (e.g. Wave and Instant search) but social networks are not a hard problem from an engineer point of view.
"Googlers seem to love to tackle hard problems (e.g. Wave and Instant search) but social networks are not a hard problem from an engineer point of view."
So the mentality goes: there's no motivation to come up with the next best social network, unless it can also simultaneously calculate the interconnectedness of every human being on this planet...
True... though "clone it and eventually users will come" was Microsoft strategy, wasn't it? :D (ah, Microsoft, if you had only patented it! ;P ).
But I'd be careful to consider Google vs. Facebook a done deal. Yes, Facebook has only one service... but Google gets all its money from ads, a Facebook could potentially have a much better profile of its users than Google. If Facebook starts chipping at Google's ads de-facto monopoly, it will really hurt Google.
Personally I am more worried of a big company dominating more than one space. Say, I'm happy with PS3 to beat Xbox 'cause Sony is not a threat anywhere else, but Microsoft got the Windows/Office monopolies.
I am happy with Apple being strong in iPod/iPhone because they are weak in PCs. And I am happy with Google being strong in search, and Facebook and Twitter having the social network market.
If we got a Facebook killer from Twitter I'd love it. But from Google? I think they got enough fingers in enough pies for the time being. :)
At least Google has a policy of you owning your data, and of making it easy to grab all your data so you can move to other services.
So if they ran something like Facebook it would be much easier to compete with them outside of their ecosystem, unlike Facebook which tries to dominate all data submitted into their system.
I feel a bit sad for Rails (yes, I know he will continue contributing, but I doubt it will be anything close to what he did in the last few years, when that was his main job).
But he seems a great guy and he deserves all the best. Good luck in your next endeavour.
In Italian it is true that the last letter is not a perfect indication of gender... even for people's names (e.g. Andrea should be a male name). But it works pretty well. Not sure if Spanish is similar (i.e. there are exceptions) or not.
There's a certain irony in hearing someone from the Reagan government talking about China's fast train. If you so much as suggested something like that in the USA you'd be billed as a socialist and the program will be immediately scrapped.
Once the USA wasn't like this. Once it had a big government who looked after its citizens and did what no private investor could or would do.
In Australia the government is building fiber optics to all houses. In Europe governments are building a network of fast trains. In China government is building pretty much everything.
Are the Americans sure that they are backing the right politics?
Well, the US is richer (PPP adjusted) than nearly every single one one of those countries (the sole exceptions being Norway and a couple of city states). In the one case where I've seen good data (US vs Sweden), the disparity gets even bigger if you compare Swedes to Swedish Americans.
Nobody is arguing that American companies can't compete, or that America isn't a great country. But the UK was an innovator once, and so was Italy before it.
That said you could very well end up with a future with very powerful and very competitive american companies... in a country with no middle-class and a strong divide between managers and those with money, and the labour force with little privileges.
Edit: I think USA got to where it is for a certain pragmatism that it seems to have lost. Now ideologies (free market, socialism, God, etc...) seem to be all that matter, and society is suffering for it. GDP is not a good indicator of the society's wellbeing and even less is current GDP for tomorrow's society's. At the end of the day the richest man in the world is Mexican, but Mexico is hardly a first world country.
I agree the problems you're referring to are real, but it seems to me Americans are more aware of them than you might think (BTW, I live in NYC but I'm not American).
They elected a president who's decidedly a pragmatist (I think McCain would have been one as well, though not his VP candidate..), and one of the most talked about issues here is the disappearing middle class. My view is that they ultimately do have a good system in place to discuss and hopefully improve on these problems.
Their core strength is flexibility. I still remember talk of Japan overtaking the US in the 80s, and Japanese companies are still strong in the markets they dominated at the time - but the Americans have moved on to lead in software/Internet industries. That's not coincidence, in my opinion.
Yep. I surely had high hopes on Obama. What's worrying me is how much opposition he has found and how much power he lost.
It was enough to talk about socialism and having a bigger governmental role, and people (on both parties) seemed to start distancing themselves from Obama.
If he doesn't succeed, I am not sure there will really be another chance in time to make a real difference (i.e. to keep USA as no.1... I have no doubt USA will continue being a rich country for a long time to come).
It is no more true that Obama is unpopular because people call him a "socialist" than it was true that Bush was unpopular because people called him a "fascist." You are confusing cause and effect.
I think foreign observers think that the American public is atavistically motivated by invocations of "socialism" because they view the US through the lens of their own politics. In reality, Obama is unpopular because the economy is in the shitter and unemployment is running near 10%. It doesn't matter whether that's fair or not.
My impression of cause and effect was that it started pretty much from the beginning, when Obama tried to push for economic stimulus first and universal health service later.
And now the teaparty are a force to be reckoned... and their whole point is to have a small government, and they don't want stimuli or similar (as well as no health service).
But please tell me more. American politics is quite interesting. :)
Why are SS and Medicare the biggest drivers? Didn't Clinton leave you with a surplus? And didn't he have to pay for SS and Medicare too? What's changed since then and now?
Anyway I am not arguing that big government are always the best. I am arguing that big government sometimes are. Or to put it another way I am arguing that SMALL government isn't always the best.
I'm confused, what does Clinton have to do with these programs? Worth noting that Bush Jr. signed a prescription drug bill that will cost $550 billion between 2006 and 2015 [1].
SS and Medicare are programs intended for older people which are funded by current workers. As time has passed and SS/Medicare eligibility has increased, more SS/Medicare taxes from current workers are paying for fewer people's benefits. This problem has worsened as baby boomers have reached retirement age--we've never seen SS/Medicare enrollment like this before.
Point being: my generation is paying a large chunk of taxes that it will probably never benefit from, as SS/Medicare will likely occupy too large a portion of the budget and would thus need to be scaled back (or closed down).
That suggests his successors weren't very good at finishing the job he started. It's only natural for governments to become more and more corrupt as decades pass. When someone like that appears on the scene and reboots the system, their work should be acknowledged and refined before the corruption kicks in again.
This isn't a matter of corruption--it's an issue of public choice (or public economics, whichever you prefer).
What politician would scale back SS/Medicare when retirees are one of the largest voting blocks in America?
Governments also don't necessarily experience more corruption over time. Just look at overthrown dictatorships. If you said democratic governments, like the US, I'd agree with you, since the accumulation of wealth shifts power around.
What we may do, and to be honest it's starting to happen already, is to get rid of the address bar as an always-visible user interface feature. It could just be an overlaid window for those times when you actually want to type in the url (or if you jus want to check its value) that disappear once one click enter. And to be honest this is already happening in mobile phones where space is limited.
The breadcrumb idea, especially if as customisable as the author suggest, should be done in the site... which we already can do.