First it was the net, then there were newsgroups. Does anyone remember newsgroups? What about IRC? Newsgroups, well they had …groups and IRC had channels, you could log in and post anonymously to you hearts content, lurking behind your “handle”. The original internet news may be slowly dying but have a look at any newsgroup server you can and it is still churning out millions of new posts every day endlessly storing and forwarding stuff around the internet. IRC once the cool thing has strangely lost its way but there is a big element of IRC in twitter.
The failure of news and IRC to prosper in the web2.0 world is simple, they were not commercially friendly and you needed a specific computer application with various setting to connect. The user difficulties were often resolved by ISP’s offering helpful howto pages but the big failure was commercial. Essentially, like email, these two internet applications put the onus for functionality onto the shoulders of the ISP. Both news and IRC became a service that ISP’s had to offer. Then the big money came and invested in faster networks so the acceptable face of the internet, webpages, could prosper. You can make money out of web pages, just look at Google, but how the hell would you monetise IRC or a plain text news message about someone’s political opinion?
Yet strangely the two pioneers of the web were immensely social places, restricted by narrow bandwidths real people engaged in real time in a variety of creative and amusing ways. Both news and IRC allowed you to link to web pages and a curious multilayered internet evolved where html web content was dissected plainly and without fanfare. Essentially the only tools available to users were words and punctuation. Email played its part and these three internet1.0 tools birthed lol’s and brb’s and of course the very friendly 
However what both of these applications and, to a lesser extent email, did, was steal your time. Hours could be spent chatting online or posting and reposting opinions into a newsgroup of your choice, it all seemed like so much fun. A critical difference with today’s web2.0 tools is that most people who grew up with news and IRC conducted their alter egos in private space, separate from their day to day existence although clearly taking place in the real world.
So I stopped ircing a long time ago and my isp doesn’t even run a news server anymore. Now I have a facebook page and today I got a twitter account but as I sit here enjoying the beautiful winter sun I wonder whether or not I can really be bothered with investing more of my precious time online particularly when online is rapidly becoming just another marketing tool for vested interests. All the more concerning is that the one fundamental privilege web1.0 offered, anonymity, is no longer a given. My privacy on the net is gone and I must now be a good netizen. There’s my photo and my verified email address, oh and a webpage too. Sure I could fabricate it all but the whole point now is that your public net identity is also your private self.
And the time…do they have the afterlife wired as well?
