Thursday, August 16, 2012

Stop Publishing Web Pages

Anil Dash reporting:
Most users on the web spend most of their time in apps. The most popular of those apps, like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Tumblr and others, are primarily focused on a single, simple stream that offers a river of news which users can easily scroll through, skim over, and click on to read in more depth.
Most media companies on the web spend all of their effort putting content into content management systems which publish pages. These pages work essentially the same way that pages have worked since the beginning of the web, with a single article or post living at a particular address, and then tons of navigation and cruft (and, usually, advertisements) surrounding that article.
Users have decided they want streams, but most media companies are insisting on publishing more and more pages. And the systems which publish the web are designed to keep making pages, not to make customized streams.
It's time to stop publishing web pages.
Obviously, I've written this in an old-style content publishing system, and this piece lives on my website as an old-fashioned HTML page. But if I had my preference, I'd write up an article like this, and it'd seamlessly glide into a clean, simple stream of my writing, organized by topic and sorted with the newest stuff on top. Blogs have always worked this way, but they were shoehorning this stream-like behavior into the best representation possible under the old page model.
The vast majority of advertising online is dependent on a page-view model that users have overwhelmingly decided to abandon. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and others will succeed by making in-stream advertisements that fit in with the native content of their networks. Meanwhile, page-based sites are cramming every corner and bit of white space on their sites with ads that only ever decrease in effectiveness until they are made even larger and more intrusive every few years...http://dashes.com/anil/2012/08/stop-publishing-web-pages.html?utm_source=Daily+Buzz+from+eMedia+Vitals&utm_campaign=4138d53523-_nl_DB_08-16-2012&utm_medium=email

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