Stephen Downes

Why do I still use (and pay for) Flickr? As Brian Lamb says, "For all of the missteps that Yahoo! has made since acquiring Flickr, that service embodies many principles from what I now think of as the bygone happy-hippie era of Web 2.0... Wow. Having a little nostalgia rush here… Tagging. RSS. Embedding. Open APIs. The web as platform." Yeah. "Isn’t it amazing how much 'old' functionality the 'new wave' of apps hasn’t bothered to support? And amazing how most professional technologists haven’t seemed to notice nor to care." Yeah. I was trying to show people in Ibague how to find their RSS and was astonished and concerned about how hard it is to find now - the feed subscription button has been completely depreciated from all browsers, and in some services (like, say, Google+ or even Prezi) RSS feedsa are not provided at all. Oh - and I don't have an Instagram account, nor will I get one; if I want bad digital photos I'll just use the Dolphin mini-cam I bought in 2001. See also Anil Dash, The Web We Lost, on the same topic.