More on Streams vs. Pages

Lots of nice responses to my plea to stop publishing web pages yesterday! Here’s some highlights:

  • Dave Winer said I should credit him for a lot of the ideas in the post. I’m eager to grant his point, so please do know: Dave articulated a lot of the ideas like the river of news and other concepts that I mentioned well before anyone else. I care more about the ideas succeeding than whose name is attached to them, but I never want to deny people the credit they desire.

(For reference, it’s easier for me to give you credit if you don’t block me on Twitter while simultaneously insulting my friends.)

  • Hacker News had a skeptical but overall pretty thoughtful conversation about the piece. I really liked it!
  • Lots of people had more questions about advertising; I deliberately didn’t try to be comprehensive in the piece, but there’s certainly a big reckoning coming with regards to the transition away from old display ads to in-stream ads. The key transition here is not a technical one, but in getting the business-side infrastructure of ad sales to move to new units, new metrics and new sales processes, as Om Malik pointed out.
  • What about permalinks?! I love permalinks, and the more geeky sort were worried about what happens to permalinks in an all-stream world. The way I see it, there are two possible evolutions to the permalink: They can either be a link to a particular point of information within a stream, or (more interestingly) they can be a link to a representation of how a stream looked at a particular moment in the past. I’ll be excited to see how those things evolve.
  • Last but not least, CHOIRE SICHA HIMSELF weighed in at the Awl:

Now one beloved troll, I mean, VISIONARY (totally same difference, no?), is calling for the end of web pages. This is an appealing notion! “Most users on the web spend most of their time in apps,” begins our pal Anil Dash. (He promised a citation on that stat later. I’m sure it’s true, if you count Facebook!) And: “Most media companies on the web spend all of their effort putting content into content management systems which publish pages.” Anil’s sort of right, but he’s also boosting an idea about business who act like—and design like—they have no interest whatsoever in being businesses. Producing a “feed” subsumed in the apps of our time is not a business. It might (SORRY) own the means of its production but it won’t own the means of its revenue.

I disagree! But you should read it for yourself. I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for more examples of media sites that are transitioning from pages to streams; If you find good ones, let me know!