The Web has always been social (lamentations of Internet curmudgeon)
So I work on a social media team and I love it. The other day, one of my co-workers said to me, “How long have you been on Facebook? Your ID is really low, you must be a real O.G.”
Suffice it to say, that was the first time anyone referred to me as an O.G. It feel kinda cool. Aside from the short-lived feeling of hipness, it got me thinking about just how long I’ve been hanging around the whole internet thing. It kind of made me feel a little bit like Grandpa Simpson on my way to Morganville with an onion in my belt, as was the style at the time.
Admittedly, I was not one of the original BBS users, nor was a heavy user of Gopher or Archie servers. I did hand-code my first web page for Mosaic 1.0 on a Digital Unix workstation between marathon Fortran sessions. That’s right, Fortran. You think Twitter’s 140 characters is restrictive? You only get 72 per line in Fortran, so choose your variable names wisely.
So, if you don’t mind, I’m going to kick it old-skool on y’all. You see, the Web, as long as I’ve known it, has always been social. It’s always been about connection, advocacy and community.
For starters, Jeffrey Zeldman, as far as I’m concerned, is the alpha blogger. Zeldman.com was a blog before blogs were called blogs. He wrote a new page of content every day. I waited for his latest dispatch with baited breath. What would he discuss today? A new series of articles on alistapart.com giving me key insights into how the Web’s wunderkinds were building their sites?
Maybe he would give us an update on the Web Standards Project that was fighting tooth and nail for some modicum of standardization across browsers. Without this movement, building sites with a consistent UI, fancy AJAX and all the whiz-bangery of “Web 2.0″ would be completely impossible.
On a more aesthetic bent was the designer community hand-crafted and cultivated by the boys at www.k10k.net. Without Michael Schmidt, Token Nygaard and Per Jorgenson, I would never have imagined what was possible with just HTML and persistance with javascript. K10k taught me that the unit of measure on the web is the pixel, not a pica or point. They taught me to embrace the constraints of designing for the screen and that people would flock to a site where the world’s hippest designers posted all the super-cool sites that they found sprinkled all over the web. This was the first real community I embraced online.
My first experience with co-creation and collaboration on the web was with a little game called Photoshop Tennis. One person would find an image online. They would add a layer in photoshop, flatten the file and forward that file in an email. Back and forth the images went spinning into weird and wonderful art that was completely random and unplanned. Beauty meets fun.
Viral marketing? Nothing sickened the internet (in a good way) faster than the incomparable All Your Base Are Belong To Us (below). A quirky send up of a poorly translated Japanese video game, a brilliant electronica remix of the game’s intro and about a trillion forwarded email. A friend of mine even played the song at the Inferno Night Club on techno night. It was hillarious and infectious.
So as I step off my soap box, let me leave you with this: none of these ventures made anybody rich. They are pure examples of what makes the Web so great. Approaching the Web with a spirit of play, embracing its constraints and a profit-be-damned attitude is what makes it such a great place to be.
“Get of my lawn!”
Credits: cartoon courtesy of www.toothpastefordinner.com.
All Your Base Are Belong To Us
