JackTLadd
Andy Baio20 years ago today.
Also 20 years ago this week, on March 17, 2006, Ze Frank posted the first episode of The Show. https://youtu.be/VxyiRMcNIVo
Zefrank 031706877
Ze Frank's The Show was self-hosted QuickTime videos on a blog with comments and an RSS feed. A community forum, wiki, and series of interactive web pages tied it all together. Social media was a bunch of blogs linking to each other. Facebook opened to everyone in September of that year, Google bought YouTube in November, Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone in January 2007. Twitter blew up at SXSW in March and iPhone came out in June, the beginning of the end for the dominant open social web.
Viss
sullust@andybaio yeah, I’m old enough to remember when AOL added this mysterious section called “the internet” with 4 areas of unknown use: gopher, ftp, news groups, and something called the World Wide Web.
The “open social web” was like a bunch of small towns. Wonderful if you were born in the right one but if not wandering the random human connections was hard and many gave up on the way. Early Twitter/Reddit made that discovery a lot easier.
So what we have now is rotten and terrible, but let’s not over romanticize our past silos.
bk
oscarfalconI loved ZeFrank, And Rocketboom and MoBuzzTV...
Evan Prodromou@andybaio remember when Ze Frank joined Twitter and said "We should have a Color War here like at summer camp" and it burned up Twitter for like a week and a half?
@andybaio he spoke at a conference called NXNE in Toronto that I was also speaking at (about distributed social networks) and he talked about what an amazing high it is to get viral growth on the Internet, and how once it happens you're always going to be chasing it for one more big score, and it really hit home.
Norgg
Dave Winer ☕️@davew my blog 20 years ago, I'd just gotten a C&D from Bill Cosby's lawyers https://web.archive.org/web/20060314164125/http://www.waxy.org/
Cory Doctorow
Gab B
Keith
Tony “Abolish ICE” Arcieri🌹🦀@andybaio sports racers! Racing sports! Show me your power move!
I’ve still got my ducky. Ze Frank was amazing at the time.
Who likes the little little duckies in the pond? I do I do I do chika quack quack!
Andy McMillan@andybaio I will never forget the one time I met him after he spoke at an event in Dublin and I told him Wagamama was better than any ramen in L.A (I had never been to L.A) and he immediately stopped talking to me and walked out of the bar
@andymcmillan After going to Wagamama in London, I probably would've had the same reaction.
@andybaio This is probably why he never came to XOXO.
Greg Knauss
🇪🇷Götterdämmerung@gknauss @andybaio
imagine future archaeologists, brushing dust off the fossilized servers, discover this primordial tweet the way we once discovered cave paintings.
Instead of bison & spears they find someone proudly announcing that they've begun... whatever.
And like all beginnings, it contained its endings in embryo.
A civilization doesn't collapse due to a tweet, of course. It collapses cuz millions read it, nodded, & thought:
yes, I, too, shall announce my existence into the void.
amenome
Renalia - #1 pizza downloader@andybaio and it was all downhill from there
Ketakater
Chinga la migra! 🍉🌈@andybaio who would've thunk in just 20 short years from this post the very same platform would become the worlds largest child porn creation and dissemination website. How time flies.
fulanigirl@andybaio
and he is still a jackass! Go figure.
and he is still a jackass! Go figure.
Magnus Ahltorp@andybaio I remember when I had no Twitter account and was really confused when people linked to tweets, and there was just this short text, with no context, just some large font text on a blank background. Something that seemed like a reply to something else, but no link back to that text.
And there was a page (the frontpage?) with every tweet made, in real time.
hendrikstier
Court Cantrell does not comply@andybaio That's too bad.
Simon Dückert@andybaio My first tweet was 1.5 yrs later 🤗 https://simondueckert.github.io/tweetbook/2007-09-01-Tweet-Archive-2007-09/
Scoll
Herr Hochhaus