Media Blog

Yahoo is shutting down its free web hosting site Geocities later this month. The company recently sent out a final notice to Geocities users telling them the service will shutdown October 26 and offering to port their data to Yahoo’s site hosting service. Yahoo charges $5 per month for its simple hosting plan.

While we have a bit nostalgia for the days of free Geocities accounts, let’s face it, most of that content is pretty outdated and often downright ugly. Most of us aren’t worried about Geocities disappearing. But there’s a larger issue we should be worried about — yet another once-popular service is disappearing from the web. What’s going to happen in ten years when the Googlehoo of 2020 decides to close down its aging Facebook website?

Even if the web services we use and rely on today offer a way to export our data when they disappear in the future, there’s a whole other component to those sites that’s currently nearly impossible to export — the relationships we’ve formed with other users.

It’s precisely those relationships that have led some to suggest, as Chris Messina does in a recent talk at the MindTrek conference, that identity is the real web platform — that the real value of social websites is not necessarily the data (though that can be important too), but connections between people.

Sadly, when sites disappear, whether they’re artifacts like Geocities or more modern examples like Pownce or Ma.gnolia, there’s never a way to recover the lost connections between people. Even when services return, as Pownce recently did, they don’t bring back the human connections.

The problem, as Messina points out in the video of his talk (embedded below) is that rather than focus on identity, most of today’s web services focus on the platform — whether it’s sharing photos on Flickr or broadcasting messages on Twitter.

That means not only is the majority of the service’s development effort expended toward improving the platform, the majority of export options are also geared toward the platform — export your photos or back up your blog posts. Very few sites concern themselves with backing up your friends and relationships.

But if the central focus of the web was identity, rather than specific platforms, we might see a far different set of strategies emerge. As WordPress developer Lloyd Budd writes on his blog, “If you really love your customers, the exported data (you offer) will be richer than the raw material they originally entered.” In other words, there would be a way to take not only your data, but your metadata as well.

Making identity into the platform is something OpenID is supposed to help do. However, thus far, it has largely failed to deliver anything of the sort. As Messina points out in the video, OpenID is improving, but it still has a long way to go.

In the mean, we’ll watch Geocities and other services disappear without being able to give back half of what their users gave to them.

Identity is the Platform from Chris Messina on Vimeo.

Photo by Sage/Flickr, CC

See Also:

• Six Apart Resurrects Pownce With New ‘Motion’ Microblogging Platform
• Google’s New Design Helps Eliminate OpenID Confusion
• OpenID Is Here. Too Bad Users Can’t Figure Out How It Works

Culture news site Boing Boing recently tried a daring experiment — redesign its immensely popular website using some largely untested tools of the open web.

Unfortunately for Boing Boing, its ambitious plan resulted in a small disaster.

The team decided to use CSS3’s @font-face rule in its recent site redesign, which would enable it to use a custom font to display its text. However, far from delivering the look BoingBoing was going for, @font-face fell flat on its face; when the changes went live Tuesday, not only were the fonts Boing Boing wanted to use not legally available for the web, the font it settled on — specifically BPreplay — ended up looking terrible for most users.

The result was hordes of angry Boing Boing fans complaining that the new headline font was “ugly,” “an abomination” and “plain nasty.” Of course, the culprit wasn’t really the font, but rather how different it looked depending on which browser and operating system the viewer was using.

Web designers have long been pining for open source tools that would afford them more control over site designs, including the ability to create animations, complex layouts and — probably the biggest wish-list item — the ability to use original typefaces and proprietary fonts in their designs. Many of these things are currently being written into into HTML5 and CSS3, two next-generation open standards for building well-formed web pages. We’ve even praised CSS3’s font-face rule and talked about how you can legally use it today.

The problem is that while modern browsers, like the latest versions of Safari, Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome, all support @font-face, the Windows XP operating system often doesn’t have anti-aliasing turned on by default. The rule, which is still part of CSS3’s draft specification, is also not supported by any version of Internet Explorer. So, as cool as your font might look when properly anti-aliased, on Windows XP it looks, as Rob Beschizza, head of Boing Boing’s redesign puts it, “like ass.”

Beschizza, who like many Boing Boing contributors used to work for Wired.com, spoke to Webmonkey over e-mail shortly after the redesign launched and after the feedback started pouring in.

For those using Windows Vista or Mac OS X, Boing Boing’s redesigned headline fonts looked just fine. Indeed much of the experimentation so far with @font-face is happening on designers’ blogs and portfolios — sites where the audience is likely to be using a modern browser and a modern OS.

If your audience is limited to people who live on the web’s cutting edge, then @font-face works pretty well.

However, for sites like Boing Boing, which has much broader audience, Windows XP and older browsers are still a significant portion of daily traffic. And while browsers that don’t understand @font-face (such as Internet Explorer) were fed a typical web font, in this case Verdana, the combination of modern browser and older OS proved disastrous.

But even practical issues like improper font rendering weren’t the only problem Boing Boing faced trying to use @font-face.

The font BoingBoing ended up using, BPreplay by the design group backpacker, wasn’t its first choice, but rather, because of licensing issues, its only legal choice.

“Our first pick for that headline font was VAG Rounded, which Mark (Frauenfelder, co-founder of Boing Boing) had used in his first mock-ups for the design,” says Beschizza, but the foundry didn’t offer a license for web display.

In fact the design team went through a whole list of font choices before they found one that was legal and fit their design.

Given the outcome, it isn’t hard to see why some foundries don’t want to license their fonts. Forget about @font-face making the actual font files available for download — if the fonts look terrible, no one will want them anyway. In fact, the foundry that makes one font Boing Boing tried to license cited appearance as the main reason they were declining to license the font.

So does that mean there isn’t going to be a way to use @font-face until Windows XP is a dim memory? Well you could always use JavaScript to detect the operating system and selectively applying @font-face to an OS that can render it. That (among other things, like licensing complexities) is one of the potential problems startups like the TypeKit project are hoping to solve.

Of course there’s always another option — just ignore Windows XP users. For smaller sites that may be a viable option, but for sites the size of Boing Boing the only real alternative is to do what Boing Boing did — revert to good old Helvetica and call it day.

Eventually web fonts will work, but for now they remain well out on the cutting edge. So, if you’re working on a large site, tread with care.

Photo: healthserviceglasses/Flickr

See Also:

• Use @font-face Today With Free, Legal Fonts
• Typekit Hopes to Become the YouTube of Fonts
• The Future of Web Fonts Looking Brighter