Web development trends 2020

2,191 Comments

1. June 5, 2022 at 2:49 pm

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Ecommerce promotions and loyalty in the composable crypto and web3 world
   https://www.talon.one/blog/ecommerce-promotions-loyalty-in-the-composable-crypto-and-web3-world

   Reply
2. June 6, 2022 at 7:42 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Maxwell Strachan / VICE:
   The pivot to Web3, driven by ideology rather than utility, is akin to a “collective Theranos” that is warping the economy to benefit professional investors — It can feel as if the entire world is bolting on crypto tokens and NFTs. Many in the industry worry the gold rush is akin to a …

   The Pivot to Web3 Is Going to Get People Hurt
   https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgmyzk/the-pivot-to-web3-is-going-to-get-people-hurt

   It can feel as if the entire world is bolting on crypto tokens and NFTs. Many in the industry worry the gold rush is akin to a “collective Theranos” that is warping the economy to the benefit of professional investors.

   It can feel at times as if the entire world is pivoting into Web3, and the question is why. There are, suddenly, Web3 media companies, Web3 advertising firms, Web3 studios, Web3 marketing tactics, and Web3 publishing networks. LimeWire and MoviePass have risen from the dead, newly “powered”—as one of their CEOs put it—“by Web3 technology.” Web3 apparently is not only “transforming gaming” and “re-engineering real estate,” but also the future of the internet, and maybe the entire global economy as well.

   Never mind that very few people can agree on exactly what Web3 is (and isn’t). What matters to investors is that Web3 is the hot new thing and the entrepreneurs are piling in. One venture capitalist, Hadley Harris, told me that roughly half the Web3 pitches he’d recently looked over came from founders who weren’t even in the space half a year ago. That’s a claim backed up by Alchemy, a company that considers itself the Web3 infrastructural equivalent of Amazon Web Services; it said in February that “hundreds of established Web2 companies” are pivoting into Web3 using its platform. Even new pharmaceutical companies are now taking a Web3 “crypto-first approach,” with one raising the possibility of issuing a “cryptocurrency token to participants in its clinical trials.”

   “A lot of people are trying to get in on it, and a lot of people are more afraid of not getting in.”

   he said. “‘If we miss this boat, I don’t think we can ever get back on.’” (The company, which had been a print-on-demand platform, now helps creators build 3D NFTs to sell to fans in the metaverse.)

   But Gerard couldn’t help but feel confused by the whole thing. His customers, the people he thought mattered most, rarely showed much interest in Web3 technologies at all. “I can count on one hand the number of times I have actually heard ‘NFTs’ come out of one of these people’s mouths,” he told me. Even still, he and the rest of his team mulled over whether to make the switch, fearful that they were missing something everyone else could see.

   “Nobody wants to be Paul Krugman,” Gerard said, referring to an infamous 1998 quote in which the Nobel Prize–winning economist predicted that the internet would ultimately become no more consequential than the fax machine. (He’s also famously anti-Bitcoin and crypto.)

   The Web3 hysteria has continued this year even as the tech industry more broadly has struggled with rising interest rates and plummeting share prices. “In the last six months, it’s gotten fairly ridiculous,” said one partner at a crypto-focused investment firm. In the first three months of the year, the top 15 venture firms poured more money into Web3 and DeFi early- and seed-stage deals than any other area, the third straight quarter they have done so, according to the research firm Pitchbook. In total, the early- and seed-stage Web3 world nabbed $2 billion from top firms last quarter, more than double what the next-highest sector, biotechnology, received, and triple what traditional fintech got. Those figures understate the total level of interest—and money—in the space. Blockchain companies have raised at least $9.5 billion after receiving $18 billion in funding in 2021, according to numbers the research firm CrunchBase provided to Motherboard. And more firepower is on the way. In late May, amid plunging crypto prices, one of Web3’s biggest institutional backers, the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, announced it had raised a monstrous $4.5 billion crypto fund following a series of high-profile investments into Web3 projects like play-to-earn game Axie Infinity and the parent company of the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

   “It’s a gold rush for sure,”

   The moment he started talking about his Web3 vision, investor interest skyrocketed. “It was a tremendous difference,” he said. “There were people who I didn’t even meet with who were just committing over email without ever even talking to me.” He had planned to raise $2 million, only to receive $20 million in commitments in two weeks. “We stopped because it just was incredibly overwhelming.”

   “Something big is happening,” Mills added. “A lot of people are trying to get in on it, and a lot of people are more afraid of not getting in.”

   What exactly they are getting in on is harder to pin down. The term “Web3” is sometimes attributed to Gavin Wood, one of the co-founders of the Ethereum blockchain, who, in 2014, described an idealized version of the web in which the system placed no trust in organizations but near-complete trust in blockchain technology. But it didn’t enter the mainstream cultural vernacular until last year, when it started to serve as a catchall (and, coincidentally, a venture-led rebranding) for the collection of controversial financial-technology products that include cryptocurrencies, blockchains, non-fungible tokens, decentralized autonomous organizations (or “DAOs”), the metaverse, and decentralized financial (or DeFi) products.

   “It’s like a collective Theranos. A wildly unproven product with nobody at the helm,” one venture capitalist said.

   To some, like Andreessen Horowitz, what ties these innovations together is that they collectively offer a theoretical vision where people have “the ability to own a piece of the internet”—for example, through the use of NFTs, which are essentially tradable proof-of-ownership receipts. In such a world, people could use and even monetize their NFTs on multiple platforms, rather than just on, say, Instagram. Such a system, boosters believe—or, at least, claim to believe—will lead to a fairer, more communal version of the web, one that will wrest control back from technological giants that have profited off people’s data and creativity, creating a world where community comes before all else. Much of the ideological rhetoric hence involves talk of using Web3 “to truly empower financial inclusion” (again, Andreessen Horowitz’s words) by bringing people into the fold who have been marginalized by the traditional financial structure.

   Such arguments are inarguably alluring. Very few people feel the financial and internet structures that underpin society could not be vastly improved. But they also belie the fact that professional investors do not push their money into the middle of the craps table solely in order to better the world. As Hilary J. Allen, a law professor at American University, succinctly put it: “The reason why venture capitalists are pushing all of this is to make money.”

   And in Web3, the venture class and other professional investors have found a uniquely appealing set of circumstances they believe will allow them to make a giant pile of money that does not rely on vast leaps in virtual reality or haptics technology—sometimes by pulling off an impressive degree of regulatory arbitrage, other times by taking advantage of a wholly new kind of internet marketplace.

   “If there is any innovation in crypto assets, it’s not in software engineering but in financial engineering,” the London-based software engineer and crypto critic Stephen Diehl has written.

   Allen, who studies financial regulation, sees the rhetoric around empowerment and inclusion as little more than a “cynical” ploy. She and others believe it masks the aspects of the Web3 apparatus that have made it appetizing to venture capitalists, billionaires, and other institutional players—so much so that they have moved aggressively to plant a foothold in spite of the industry’s unmistakable propensity for scams, fraud, and regulatory scrutiny.

   Here we have a largely unregulated marketplace ripe for exploitation and stuffed full of unclear valuation metrics, arguable unregistered securities, peculiar financial products, ways to cash out, and a public-facing ideological mission statement.

   Of particular fascination has been the critical role in the Web3 ecosystem of the token, a new type of financial product that regulators are still struggling to get a handle on but that venture capitalists have realized allows them to cash out quickly and handsomely even if the company never goes public (and twice over if they do).

   It is, at least for now, close to a perfect playing field for the professional money-making class, one that is leading to pressures to pivot or die, whatever the utility. One entrepreneur described with great frustration that he had recently spoken to a founder at a VC mixer who was building a “decentralized” dinner reservation system. When he asked why a reservation system needed to be on the blockchain, the founder simply said: “It’s the future.”

   It’s at least possible that Web3 could bring about a better, more fulfilling version of the internet. It’s just as likely, though, to prove to be what its harshest critics fear: a “hyper-capitalistic” reframing of the web that “contains the seeds of a dystopian nightmare.”

   “It’s like a collective Theranos,” one venture capitalist said. “A wildly unproven product with nobody at the helm.”

   A great many Web3 entrepreneurs and investors appear sincerely passionate about their mission of creating a better version of the internet. To many of these people, Web3 is not an idyllic possibility but an all-out inevitability, spoken about with an almost religious fervor. “It really feels ideological to me, and it’s weird, because VCs tend not to invest in ideologies,” said Phil Libin, the former co-founder and CEO of Evernote. Indeed, soon after a recent string of crypto controversies, including the precipitous May crash of the Luna cryptocurrency and its sister “stablecoin” UST, Andreessen Horowitz said Web3 was just now entering its “golden era.” The same week, it announced an investment in former WeWork CEO’s Adam Neumann’s Web3 climate venture selling “Goddess Nature Tokens.”

   Another such believer, Benjamin Cohen, who recently started a Web3-focused investment fund, told a crypto site in March that it was “inevitable that blockchain technology and smart contract technology will become implemented in every single facet of our life.” That is not an isolated opinion. “Every single company that exists is going to exist in some form of Web3,”

   A lot of the believer class come across as “zealots” who are dismissive of those who question them”

   The technology writer and researcher Evgeny Morozov has gone so far as to compare them to “annoying vulgar Marxists who, for all the evidence to the contrary, kept [and keep] insisting that the objective developments within capitalism favor the inevitable transition to socialism.”

   On its face, their level of confidence does indeed appear odd, or at least premature. One January survey by the strategy firm National Research Group found that only 13 percent of surveyed American adults knew what Web3 meant, and that more than half have never heard the term. A separate poll from around the same time said less than two in five members of Generation Z believed “the metaverse is the next big thing and will become part of our lives in the next decade.”

   Andreessen Horowitz claims there are 22,400 Web3 creators, and only 18,000 developers were working in crypto or Web3 by the end of 2021, according to one recent survey by Electric Capita, nothing compared to the more than 27 million developers in the world.

   Some wonder if the Web3 hype is justified at all. Libin had been initially drawn to the “beautiful” and “elegant” concepts of Web3, he said.

   But as he started hearing from more and more Web3 companies, he found himself unable to understand what benefit came from developing certain projects on the blockchain as opposed to, for example, using an internal database. When he started to challenge some of the pitches he received, he didn’t like the answers he got. Using such technologies often seemed needlessly expensive and prone to exploitation by hackers and scammers.

   “Web3 proponents are trying to solve real problems that need solving. I just don’t think that Web3 is the solution,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense to me as a programmer.”

   The common pro-Web3 counterargument—often repeated by VCs—is that proponents are simply early, like with the internet of the 1990s. Such unbridled optimism is not novel to Web3, but instead core to the venture and technology industries’ model, according to Martin Kenney, a professor at the University of California, Davis who studies the industry. The investors’ goal is always to sell the company, and they have an incentive to target hot sectors and then aid in raising interest in them.

   “Whatever the new thing is, it’s absolutely in the VC’s interest to hype it. You’d be a fool not to,” said Kenney. “So you feed it to the press. You tell everyone it’s going to change the world, that it is the best thing since sliced bread, whatever it is that will convince the investors that they need to have it.”

   It can be convincing, and was famously so in the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, during which time companies that added a “.com” to their name experienced a “dramatic” and “permanent” rise in valuation immediately after the rebrand, “regardless of the firm’s level of involvement with the Internet,” according to a study on the so-called “dotcom” effect.

   “Web3 proponents are trying to solve real problems that need solving. I just don’t think that Web3 is the solution.”

   Inarguably, the hype cycle is back in full force. Kyle Samani, a managing partner at a crypto-focused investment firm, told me that although most of his limited partners don’t always fully understand the technologies behind Web3, they want exposure to “all of it.” A research report out of Citi estimated that one component of Web3, “the metaverse,” alone could have a total addressable market of $13 trillion within eight years and as many as 5 billion users. (For comparison, the entire California housing stock is currently worth $9.2 trillion; Citi is essentially claiming to believe that the metaverse will, or could, be bigger than all but three or four entire U.S. industries by the time current middle-schoolers graduate college.)

   This time, however, the world’s most well-known brands are diving in too, in order to avoid falling behind. Starbucks, ESPN, Spotify, and GameStop are developing NFT plans; Fidelity Investment, the nation’s largest 401(k) provider, is allowing people to shove their retirement savings into Bitcoin. Goldman Sachs is offering crypto-backed loans. JPMorgan Chase, Gucci, and Miller Lite are hunkering down in the metaverse. Google has a dedicated Web3 team. Facebook is Meta.

   Over the last century, venture capitalists have backed industries that have changed the world and created millions of jobs, most famously during those early years of the internet. Less talked about is the fact that the venture class has gotten it wrong as well, said Harvard Business School professor Josh Lerner, who also studies the venture industry. As an example, Lerner cited the VC-funded cleantech boom and bust at the end of the 2000s as a recent example.

   “It turned out that not only was the technology a lot harder than they thought, but many of the businesses were just extremely poorly run, and some of the best firms in the business were just blinded by their enthusiasm into burning huge amounts of investor money,” Lerner said.

   Tomasz Tunguz didn’t become interested in Web3 because of its ideological underpinnings. Like a lot of investors, he saw a chance to make a lot of money because of the economic particularities of the Web3 ecosystem.

   “Most software businesses are really well understood. A startup walks in, and the venture capitalist just as much as the private market investors know exactly what it ought to be worth,” said Tunguz.

   “In Web3, that’s not the case,” he added. “Nobody has any idea how to value these businesses.” He doesn’t see that as a bad thing but rather as indicative that the Web3 industry is in a period of “broad invention as opposed to optimization.”

   “Nobody has any idea how to value these businesses … It’s so new that people aren’t worried about unit economics,” one venture capitalist said.

   “I haven’t walked into a single pitch with a Web3 company where the words ‘cost of customer acquisition’ or ‘payback period’ has been uttered. It’s so new that people aren’t worried about unit economics,” Tunguz said. (Raghavendra Rau, a Cambridge finance professor who helped discover the “dotcom” effect, agreed the Web3 industry’s underlying fundamentals were “tough to decipher,” as did others.)

   Tunguz knows that lack of focus on economic fundamentals will sound “crazy” to some people, and he does believe that a “significantly higher” percentage of Web3 ventures will fail than the typical crop of startups found in a venture fund’s portfolio. But he also sees Web3’s unclear valuation metrics as a financial opportunity compared to the world of Web 2.0, which has become so well understood that it has proven harder for investors to gain an edge.

   “One of the ways of making lots of money is to have information asymmetry,” Tunguz said. “If you know something I don’t about a company and you trade on that information, you’re gonna make a bunch of money, right? In the stock market, it’s illegal. It’s called MNPI—material nonpublic information. You can’t do that. In the private markets, you can.”

   There was one more reason Tunguz got drawn to the Web3 market: He started to see the financial potential of one of crypto’s central innovations, the token. The term “token” can mean many things in the crypto sphere, which makes it difficult to define in any way that is simultaneously all-encompassing and useful. Most simply, it is a tradable unit on any blockchain, but it has come to take numerous forms and functions: Tokens can be currencies, as they are with Bitcoin; they can represent voting shares, as with DAO governance tokens; they can be digital collectibles, as with an NFT of a Bored Ape; and they can be earned through online work, as they are with the “play-to-earn” game Axie Infinity.

   But professional investors have also started to view them as tradable shares of crypto projects.

   “You can think of the mechanisms by which these tokens capture value to be comparable to the equity of a startup,” Samani told Motherboard. “Many of these assets capture revenue directly in the same way that a startup would have revenue. And if an asset captured revenue, then you can model the valuation using a discounted cash-flow model.” Such descriptions are the reason many believe tokens should be regulated like an investment contract, or a security, since people invest in them “with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others”—the legal criteria for qualifying as a security.

   “The entirety of most web3 epiphanies is ‘what if instead of selling products we sold shares instead?’” Meta product manager and frequent crypto cynic Dare Obasanjo has written.

   “You can think of the mechanisms by which these tokens capture value to be comparable to the equity of a startup,” said a partner at a crypto-focused investment firm.

   Tunguz has himself referred to token-based reward systems as “paying customers in ‘equity,’” writing that as “the network becomes more valuable, so does the user’s stake in the company.” Doing so provides a reason for initial users to be invested in the company’s success, sometimes even before the company knows what product it’s going to make. This is why venture capitalists have taken to saying things like “Web2 companies start with product. Web3 companies start with community.” The tokens bring the people.

   Andreessen Horowitz, in its recent “State of Crypto” report, argued that the token-focused structure of Web3 companies aligned the incentives of users, creators, builders, and investors in a way untokenized companies could not. “Web3 aligns network participants to work together toward a common goal—the growth of the network,” the report stated. Together, so the line of thinking goes, they all can theoretically make it.

   Traditionally, venture capitalists have had to wait years before they can receive a payout for their investments, usually during an initial public offering. Since tokens could be sold at any time, Tunguz realized Web3 investors in them had access to an asset with “immediate liquidity” instead, which can lead to a return even if the company never goes public. If they do, all the better: the equity investor can then cash out twice.

   One other token-related process—known as “staking”—proved particularly enticing to Tunguz. To him, it seemed as sure of a thing as they come in finance. With staking, the owner of the token hands them over for a project to use as liquidity—for crypto loans, to take one example—and in exchange earns “a percentage-rate reward over time,” as the crypto exchange Coinbase puts it. This, Tunguz realized, meant he could make money from a token regardless of whether its price went up or down. Soon enough, he was actively staking tokens in order to generate what he viewed as a remarkably high “interest rate.” (“Tokens can generate somewhere between like 15 to, let’s say, 100 percent in fixed income,” Tunguz said.)

   The discovery of such enormous fixed income in the Web3 space proved of financial interest to VCs

   “These big institutions are looking at these crypto tokens and saying if I can isolate myself from whether or not the price of the token goes up or down, but if I can capture the yield on a consistent basis, then I can generate maybe 10 times what I could on a bond,” he continued.

   The risk inherent in such a system became clear, though, soon after we spoke. In May, the $40 billion Terra-Luna ecosystem collapsed. A major factor had been that an affiliated lending protocol, Anchor, had promised a 20 percent staking yield. Once people started to lose confidence in the sustainability of that yield, they rushed to pull their money out, leading to Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin, UST, losing its peg to the U.S. dollar and a dramatic crash in its sister cryptocurrency, Luna.

   Within days, it was reported that one of Terraform Labs’ early and biggest investors, the crypto-focused hedge fund Pantera Capital, had quietly cashed out “roughly” four-fifths of its investment ahead of UST’s collapse

   This sort of insidery dealmaking is why many in the crypto sphere have become suspicious of the professional investor class. Web3 projects have started requiring VCs to lock up their holding to avoid a professional pump-and-dump, and VCs have been reduced to writing about why people should take their money. (“There are many alternatives to venture capital these days, particularly in web3, but there are few, if any, alternatives that stick with you, when times are tough,” the investor Fred Wilson wrote in December.)

   And yet, the VCs’ influence over the startup system remains unquestionable. A “VC friend” recently told Newton “they are hearing about startups being pressured to offer tokens.”

   “They’ve failed to find incentives in their Web2 companies. So building something in Web3, it’s almost like a cop-out for some people. They’re like, ‘Oh, we’re just gonna ping a token on top of it.’”

   But the more he learned about them, the more skeptical he became. He started to believe that tokens, rather than the ideological “future of a fully decentralized internet,” were behind a lot of the investor interest in Web3, he told me. As he sees it, an investment firm could invest in a startup in exchange for equity and inside information and then negotiate a hoard of early tokens. “What I have now is asymmetric access to information,” Gerard said. “I have a direct line to a founder that every single person in the Discord doesn’t have. I have access to financial information. I know if user adoption is tanking. I know if usage is skyrocketing. I know if the founder is depressed or hooked on Adderall or is spiraling out of control.”

   Then, at the first internal sign of trouble, the investor can dump the token on the “quote-unquote community,” Gerard said.

   “That is a radical change in the way this industry works,” he said. “Some of them are quite transparent about it, but they’re still able to couch all of this in language that revolves around ownership and the community.”

   other founders and CEOs similarly said they’d noticed startups cynically bolting on Web3 elements after running out of other options and needing more funding to survive.

   “They’ve failed to find incentives in their Web2 companies,” said Mills, the CEO who himself pivoted to start a Web3 gaming platform, said of such companies. “So building something in Web3, it’s almost like a cop-out for some people. They’re like, ‘Oh, we’re just gonna ping a token on top of it.’”

   “We see so many of these,” agreed Jeff Clavier, the founder of the venture firm Uncork Capital. “Web3 is the new trend, and a lot of entrepreneurs add that as an afterthought.”

   Who is doing that in Web3 is difficult to decipher. An investor accused Cummings herself of bolting on an unnecessary Web3 element when she pitched him on the Petaverse Network, a Web3 project in which people build digital pets that can then live with them in various metaverses. “He turned us down, saying I don’t see why you need blockchain,” she said. “That’s true. You could store it in a database.” She contended that the potential interoperability and ownership of the Web3-based idea “made it better” and went on to raise $7 million, double what she set out to raise.

   What everyone can seem to agree on is that the boom has created a lot of vaporware and useless entrepreneurial attempts to get rich quick, even if no one wants to name names on the record.

   “Tack on Web3, and investors will throw money blindly and inflate valuations 2-3x.”

   Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists alike described companies that bolt on a Web3 element in order to raise a few more bucks as “grifters.” Venture capitalists say such companies are easy to spot. Even if that’s true for the most part, a founder told me he’s noticed bolting on a Web3 element adds investor interest, whatever its relevance. “Tack on Web3,” the founder said, “and investors will throw money blindly and inflate valuations 2-3x.”

   The question for now is how long the regulatory-arbitrage party will last. The regulators are encircling what many see as illegal financial activity.

   The rise of tokenization in particular has frustrated Web3 critics. Meta’s Obasanjo has said it’s a “mind-blowing” and “tremendous hack” that “it’s legal to effectively sell stock without regulation if you say it grants voting rights but not ownership.” Martha Bennett, a vice president at Forrester Research who studies blockchain technology and digital assets, described them as an “abuse of the system.” The English crypto critic Stephen Diehl has contended that the “crypto-token-as-equity-proxy scheme” put the financial rules of the 1920s back in play by allowing people to “insider trade, wash trade, and pump and dump” with impunity.

   “What we have with tokens is another way of creating leverage. Now, it’s the asset itself that is synthetic,” said a law professor comparing crypto tokens to credit default swaps.

   Hilary J. Allen, the law professor who studies financial regulation, has spent much of her time recently studying the similarities between financial products that make up Web3 and the collection of instruments that led to the Great Recession. In tokens, Allen sees an innovation that is at its core comparable to the credit default swap. The two are different—credit default swaps allow numerous people to make a bet on a bond’s future performance—but at the end of the day, both help greatly increase potential leverage in the financial system, she said.

   “Leverage is great in good times, because it allows you to multiply your profits. But it means that the system is very much more fragile, because even small amounts of losses on your investments will wipe you out,” she said. “What we have with tokens is another way of creating leverage. But now, it’s not about lots of contracts referencing the bonds; now, it’s the asset itself that is synthetic—there’s no limit on the number of tokens that we can create.”

   Allen doesn’t mince words when she discusses her worst-case future scenario: “major systemic implosion.” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said the crypto industry is not yet at the scale to pose “financial stability concerns,” and President Joe Biden has expressed support for “responsible” crypto innovation, but the rhetoric of financial democratization nevertheless reminds Allen of before the subprime housing bubble burst, when a collection of complex financial innovations like mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations were seen as avenues through which new swaths of people could have access to wealth. And now, Allen and others hope the Web3 system will be placed under regulatory control before history repeats itself.

   Tunguz, the pro-Web3 venture capitalist, is ready for such a day, but reaping the rewards until then.

   “There will be a Securities Act of 2033, whatever the year is,” said Tunguz. “Whenever the regulation comes out, we will respond to it. But I think there’s definitely an opportunity here to make money in a way that benefits everybody within the ecosystem.”

   METAVERSE AND MONEY
   https://ir.citi.com/gps/x5%2BFQJT3BoHXVu9MsqVRoMdiws3RhL4yhF6Fr8us8oHaOe1W9smOy1%2B8aaAgT3SPuQVtwC5B2%2Fc%3D

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3. June 8, 2022 at 8:36 pm

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Timothy Berners-Lee, who invented www, turns 67 today! The net was invented in 1989. Happy birthday!

   “The net” was not invented in 1989. The web was.
   The internet was actually invented in the late 60s early 70s. It was called Arpanet.

   Reply
4. June 10, 2022 at 12:20 pm

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Wall Street Journal:
   Sources: some US news outlets prepare for shortfalls as Meta weighs ending fees for news; annual fees averaged $20M+ for NYT, $15M+ for WaPo, and $10M+ for WSJ

   Facebook Rethinks News Deals, and Publishers Stand to Lose Millions in Payments
   https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-rethinks-news-deals-and-publishers-stand-to-lose-millions-in-payments-11654812251?mod=djemalertNEWS

   Social-media company pays more than $10 million a year to a handful of news organizations to feature their content on its news tab

   Reply
5. June 10, 2022 at 12:45 pm

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Ryan Broderick / Garbage Day:
   Critiques of “anti-crypto media personalities” and the “podcast circuit” miss that Web3 currently sucks and saying so is not an anti-blockchain conspiracy

   Web3 Being Not Very Good Is Not A Conspiracy
   https://www.garbageday.email/p/anti-crypto-media-personality?s=r

   If you haven’t been following exactly how deep into crypto Andreessen Horowitz is at the moment, last month, the firm raised a $4.5 billion crypto fund. And that’s the fourth crypto fund they’ve raised. Last June, they announced a $2.2 billion crypto fund. It is safe to say that they are very much all-in on crypto.

   Which makes sense. Venture capitalists invest money to make money. So, of course, they would be drawn to a technology that promises to turn money itself into a pathway for making more money. Blockchain technology is essentially the greatest thing that venture capitalists could ever imagine. Crypto companies run on money that will supposedly accrue more value over time as it becomes more adopted by mainstream users. And, Web3, in particular, is ideologically focused on turning every part of the internet into something that costs money to use. What a great deal!

   Except, so far, it all sucks. Long-time Garbage Day readers know that I have tried to work through new developments in the Web3 space as they come. I’ve tried to find use cases for crypto and, so far, I have come up completely empty. I have not encountered anything that runs on a blockchain that works better and is easier for users than something that doesn’t. I’ve messed around with NFTs, lurked in a few DAOs, tried to buy a few things with crypto coins, used a couple staking systems, went to a literal Bitcoin convention, and even booted up Axie Infinity, the most successful blockchain-based video game to date. And, in every instance, it all kind of sucked shit.

   I have to think that venture capitalists like the ones at Andreessen Horowitz have to know this. I have to assume that any person who has ever used a computer before who engages with blockchain technology has to recognize that this all sucks shit.

   This is gameplay from a new blockchain-based game coming out on the Epic Games store, the developer and publisher of Fortnite. It’s a third-person cowboy-themed battle royale game. The video was shared by brycent, a Web3 gaming evangelist and Twitch streamer, who later clarified, “Twitter destroyed the quality completely, in person the game looks sick and plays very well!”

   Yeah, it looks sick for an arcade game in 2004. It doesn’t look very sick when you consider that the game will feature “gunslinger boxes” that cost $1500 worth of Ethereum to buy. The whole thing is ridiculous.

   “Why would you play any game where you don’t own what you buy in the game?”

   Which is what everyone who works in Web3 is saying. But it’s not true. I look this up pretty regularly. There is not a single NFT or blockchain-based video game that lets you use assets from another game.

   If you buy an NFT shotgun in Grit and brought that NFT somehow over to another NFT-enabled game, there is literally no way for that other game to magically know that that NFT represents a shotgun!

   People who have a lot of money invested in Web3 think there must be some conspiracy behind people objecting to blockchain technology. In Krishnan’s tweet, he refers to opposition from the “podcast circuit,” which is a hilariously Silicon Valley way of understanding the current media landscape, but I digress. Krishnan hints at some kind of larger nefarious reason why people might be objecting to this technology. But, I can tell you, there is way more money to be made in Web3 than out of it.

   If I announced that Garbage Day was going crypto positive or even crypto ambivalent, said I was dedicating a team of writers to highlighting new crypto projects, and took my newsletter out to investors, I could easily raise a few million dollars. (I do have a sellout price tag. Interested in finding out what it is? Let’s talk!)

   The one caveat I will put here in an effort of both-sides’ing this is that, yes, blockchain technology — and large-scale investment in it — is still very new. While the first Bitcoin, the “Genesis Block,” was mined in 2009, Ethereum, the blockchain responsible for the majority of Web3 innovation, didn’t come online until 2015.

   Which would mean right now we’re about as far away from the start of Ethereum as we were from technologist Darcy DiNucci coining the term “web 2.0” in 1999 when the first tweet was sent in 2006. That was probably convoluted, but I hope that helps lol.

   The truth is that the flaws in blockchain technology are just simply unavoidable. Using a crypto wallet is awful. (To say nothing of how dumb calculating gas fees is.) Using trading exchanges is a mess. NFT Discords are constantly being targeted by phishing scams. NFT video games are expensive, slow, ugly, and routinely rugpull their own players. None of this is good for anyone except for the folks who think they’re going to make a bunch of money out of it.

   Reply
6. June 13, 2022 at 8:46 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Michael McSweeney / The Block:
   Jack Dorsey’s Bitcoin venture TBD plans to launch a “Web 5” platform, using the Ion network, focused on decentralized identity and data storage for applications

   Jack Dorsey’s Bitcoin venture TBD unveils proposal for decentralized Web platform
   https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/151407/jack-dorseys-bitcoin-venture-tbd-unveils-proposal-for-decentralized-web-platform

   TBD, the Bitcoin-focused venture first announced last spring, unveiled an ambitious effort Friday to build a decentralized Web platform dubbed “Web 5.”

   “The web democratized the exchange of information, but it’s missing a key layer: identity. We struggle to secure personal data with hundreds of accounts and passwords we can’t remember. On the web today, identity and personal data have become the property of third parties,” the project’s website states. “Web5 brings decentralized identity and data storage to your applications. It lets devs focus on creating delightful user experiences, while returning ownership of data and identity to individuals.”

   A presentation made public along with the announcement explores the different components of the proposed platform. Web 5 notably utilizes Ion, a second-layer network built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, as a protocol for “verifiable credentials.”

   “RIP web3 VCs,” Dorsey added in his post.

   Web5 is a Decentralized Web Platform that enables developers to leverage Decentralized Identifiers, Verifiable Credentials, and Decentralized Web Nodes to write Decentralized Web Apps, returning ownership and control over identity and data to individuals.
   https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SaHGyY9TjPg4a0VNLCsfchoVG1yU3ffTDsPRcU99H1E/edit#slide=id.g11d24dbeb84_0_0

   Reply
7. June 13, 2022 at 1:45 pm

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Corin Faife / The Verge:
   A look at the growing split over ad blocker browser extensions, as Google’s Manifest V3 cuts out blocking via Web Request while Mozilla maintains support for it

   Firefox and Chrome are squaring off over ad-blocker extensions
   https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/10/23131029/mozilla-ad-blocking-firefox-google-chrome-privacy-manifest-v3-web-request?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4

   Mozilla will let extensions use the most privacy-preserving blocking techniques on network traffic

   There’sThere’s a growing split over how much room browsers should leave for ad blocking — and Chrome and Firefox have ended up on opposite sides of the fight.

   The rupture centers on a feature called Web Request, commonly used in ad blockers and crucial for any system that looks to block off a domain wholesale. Google has long had security concerns about Web Request and has worked to cut it out of the most recent extension standard, called Manifest V3, or MV3 for short. But, in a recent blog post, Mozilla made clear that Firefox will maintain support for Web Request, keeping the door open for the most sophisticated forms of ad blocking.

   Reply
8. June 13, 2022 at 2:40 pm

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Chinese Hackers Adding Backdoor to iOS, Android Web3 Wallets in ‘SeaFlower’ Campaign
   https://www.securityweek.com/chinese-hackers-adding-backdoor-ios-android-web3-wallets-seaflower-campaign

   Cybercriminals likely operating out of China are distributing backdoored versions of iOS and Android Web3 wallets in an effort to steal users’ seed phrase.

   This previously unreported campaign has been analyzed by digital advertising security company Confiant, which dubbed it SeaFlower. The activity has been described as one of the most technically sophisticated threats targeting users of Web3 wallets.

   According to Confiant, the hackers have targeted the iOS and Android versions of applications such as Coinbase Wallet, MetaMask Wallet, TokenPocket, and imToken.

   Overview of web3 wallets
   Web3 Wallets
   Your gateway to web3, dapps, tokens, and more
   https://www.alchemy.com/web3-wallets-overview

   Intro to Web3 Wallets

   Web3 Wallets have set a new industry standard in creating new ways to own and monetize our content, identity, and assets as we move on towards the next generation of the internet. Simply put, Web3 wallets are a way to use hardware or software not only to access funds, but to effortlessly allow you to interact with decentralized applications, serve as a gateway to bankless financial services, collect NFTs, create on-chain identity, collaborate with communities, and provide substantially more use cases beyond the scope of the traditional wallets we have today.
   ‍
   Just like how people have a physical wallet to store paper money, these wallets help store access to your digital currency instead. In addition, Web3 wallets are capable of storing digital assets such as NFTs and enable users to interact with Decentralized Apps (dApps). This is done all without the necessity of a middleman involved.
   ‍
   Web3 Wallets on Centralized Exchange (CEX) vs. Decentralized Exchange (DEX)

   Centralized and decentralized exchanges have operated in parallel and occupy an important role throughout digital currencies. Although Decentralized Exchanges have not had their popularity until recently, they have played an increasing role today. With the rise of Defi enabling a new breed of financial products, it’s crucial to know how wallets play a role within the ecosystem.

   Reply
9. June 14, 2022 at 7:47 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Web5… The Web3 Killer?
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDZWWFSZUF0

   Web5 is a new decentralized web framework based on the Bitcoin Lightning Network designed to replace Web3.

   - What is Web5?
   - Web3 vs Web5
   - Decentralized Apps
   - Crypto news
   - Will Web5 replace Web3?
   - How does Web5 work?

   Viewer comments:

   At this point, we are getting new versions of the web more frequently than JS frameworks.

   Not so sure, the time it took for me to write this comment, 50 more JS frameworks were released and 35 more started development

   Web5 looks promising, but I think web6 has more potential. Who knows though, when web7 comes out web8 might be even better than web9.

   web9 will never exist cause’ Microsoft will realse version 10 before !

   It’s like the Windows version cycle, you know you have to skip one version to make a good one.

   Personally, I’m putting all my bets on web n+1, because there’ll always be one more…

   Some aspects of decentralization make sense but every web3 and web5 concept seems to be obsessed with the use of cryptocurrency. Torrenting and Git are still basically the only decentralized tools I’m aware of to achieve mainstream use. Mainstream might even be a stretch. But they both take advantage of a core feature of decentralization to boost availability and in the case of git keeping a useful history. People like using the internet for free it’s what we’ve come to expect and I just can’t see another model taking off. I got forced to work on Dapps and with both public and private blockchains for my job and I still really haven’t found many useful applications that aren’t already filled. Gas fees get in the way of everything and are a part of most mainstream cryptocurrency ecosystems. Even with things like Quorum allowing both public and private contracts there’s just not a lot of great reasons to use it. I think most of the hype is driven by people secretly hoping to strike it rich in the crypto market.

   The internet itself is kind of decentralized tho (at least in theory)

   Torrenting provides no incentive for people to host the files which makes it hard to rely on. Companies like Filecoin or Jackal aim to solve this issue by creating incentive loops to ensure data is hosted for as long as it needs to be. That’s the real issue. Lots of web3 is junk, but the infrastructure projects that aren’t building 10k nfts are really making a difference without you even realizing.

   Yeah and that’s part of the problem. The world wide web is already taking advantage of decentralization. I mean there’s certainly limits in practice. Google dominates search engine usage. ISPs limit speeds and other aspects of usage. Data centers have become increasingly conglomerated both via the cloud and non-cloud data centers. But the actual world wide web is decentralized for the most part. The goal of most modern decentralization is really to try and create an ecosystem that takes advantage of the enormous network of connected devices available. Going beyond just servers in the cloud or a data center. None of that is inherently bad that’s how decentralized research, public cryptocurrencies, and torrenting work. The dWeb and GUN models work have promise and have good qualities it’s just thar historically these sorts of peer-to-peer things have had limits in popularity and come into conflict with legal limitations. I also worry that this could make vulnerabilities that effect vast amounts of computing devices all at once. I think there’s potential but for some reason a lot of the big players lack the ability to see past involving cryptocurrency somehow.

   I mean I don’t know as that they are. IPFS and libp2p have uses. And Filecoin is built on IPFS and I like the idea in theory, but it remains to be seen that it’s a successful model.

   Decentralized finance seems like a fair use case. Copyright protection and enforcement also seems nice. Whether it achieves success is something that we haven’t seen yet.
   Now, repackaging web 3 as web 5 is a ridiculous stunt.

   lol in this age of misinformation, it doesn’t really boil down to whether something is inherently trustworthy or not: people can always be led to believe the wildest things about it.
   It might solve a lot of problems, but this ain’t one of them. Unfortunately…

   I agree on web3 that token economies are unnecessary and just a way to get funding but web5, where are you seeing crypto use? It’s locked to BTC but otherwise is P2P AFAIK.

   web5 whether phony or not, the problem it’s trying to solve is real and that is Identity on the web, and by that I mean sovereign identity. Not identity controlled by FB or Google or even the USG, IMF or whatever centralized authority. Anyone who works in Blockchain/Web3/P2P knows this is likely decentralization’s biggest problem. The privacy/annonymity vs TrackedByEveryoneIdentity problem. On web2 , to do anything involving value, you almost always fall in the later bucket.

   it’s only phony in that it is web3 and is being promoted as “web5″. And yes, that’s a problem that people in web3 are trying to solve. A law regulating data ownership and related anticompetitive practices might go a long way towards mitigating the issue.

   I like all the push for decentralized web systems even though torrent exists and is essentially the decentralized web without blockchain scams and crypto pushers.

   This is incredible, as windows version, the update of any windows version sucks, but the update of the update is the real update. So, this could mean that web3 sucks but the web3 of web3 gonna be the real web3.
   Literally WEB3 started the race of who gonna be the creator of the WEB3. MIND BLOWING.

   Nowadays web development feels like walking on a conveyor belt, like everything keeps changing and you reach almost nowhere because you keep learning basics of everything.

   No it doesn’t, not really. It just seems that way for an outsider looking at all these articles about the next best JS framework and shit.

   This decentralized stuff is very specific and not something you need to know as a web developer, unless you want to be part of it.

   how would you know you’re not concerned by it without having a closer look? this IMHO is a big deal as you have to look into the new frameworks to identify whether they can be any good for your own purpose. Just to find you need another CLI tool to figure out what it actually does …

   but as a fullstack dev the way we write backends might change in a significant way as Jeff mentioned earlier in his web 3.0 video.

   Web 26 looks incredibly promising. Looking forward to more information

   The next break through should be entirely created by an open-source community with no affiliations with big tech at all
   bitcoin was created by an open-source community. now corporations own a big share of bitcoin. they eventually catchup and own the market.
   Nothing will get done by a community comprised of people getting paid any less than what any company would offer them. If you look, nearly all large, popular open-source projects receive the most contributions from paid, professional developers.

   They really need help with their version naming scheme. At this point its just embarrassing. I suggest they learn from real pro’s like USB and call their new version smth like Web 3.1 gen 2 type c.

   The web is already decentralized. This is just an app that can run on any machine, like every p2p protocol in the past. The only difference now is that it involves bitcoin and Jack Dorsey. Putting the word Web in front of things doesn’t change how the internet works…

   anyway, it is a perfect time to hire someone with 5 year of experience in web5

   That’s it! I’m making web 10.
   The idea is really simple. One computer makes a file and send it to another computer. Everyone can make or rent a computer on the network for sending and recieving these files. We get around useless crypto-currencies and block chains to make it light.

   ‘Web X’ looks cooler

   t took 10 years to go from web2 to web3.
   Now took 3 years to go from web3 to web5.
   I think Snoopdog will be there in a year

   I think they miss the point of what is the problem with Web3. As already mentioned in the video, Web3 isn’t decentralized as much as you like to think, as large parts of the systems are owned by corporations. Web5 won’t be any exception because who ever has the most money has the most power. More computers, more ownership. You get where I’m going?

   I think it’s just a phase. People thinking they can use technology and money to fix the problems with technology and money.

   Theres something fishy about Web 3 and 5. Why would all these tech giants support and help develop something that supposedly just relinquishes their stranglehold on personal data, their most valuable asset?

   The moment I saw “Web 5″ in the title, my mind went to that “guy laughing while he gets in gold car” meme. It’s SO appropriate here!

   Honestly, the only value from this episode of the code report is give us all a good laugh.

   Web 5.0?? we’ve been over this…there has to be a Web 3.0 and 4.0 first.

   Jack Dorsey: Oh no-oh no that’s the beauty of Web 5.0. It’s so intense it skips over the other two.
   6

   Oh boy an even more centralized web 3.

   Ill stick to the web that works and lets me get my stuff done.
   Being a web-dev truely must be agonizing these days…

   I got a message from the future. Apparently Web11 is capable of communicating backwards in time. The main issues with Web 3 and 5 was that they weren’t in fact decentralized and relied on huge centralized networks. Eventually we realized we could use existing peering networks (TOR) to accomplish the same thing and we began doing something called entropy caching where, instead of files, large clusters would simply crunch larger and larger pools of data using dynamic statistical compression, looking for the most requested bit patterns and caching them throughout the network and files would be constructed at the client with as much of this cached data as possible. Of course at this point robots controlled by rogue AI have already wiped out humanity, but there are a few remnants remaining trying to communicate with us.

   I wouldn’t put any bets on Web6™ either – all insiders already know that it’s just an intermediate step that will mostly focus on cutting out server side all together, leaving only blockchain.
   Real stuff will come with Web7®, as it will also be encrypted by stock market transactions. It does sound weird at first but after some researching you can clearly see that it’s the best solution for the web.

   I think web11 has the best concept in general. I mean it’s literally an AES-256 encrypted blockchain hosted on a kubernetes cluster entirely running on AWS while being totally independent and decentralized and _encrypted_… Oh and you have to invest into the totally not centralized crypto currency associated with mentioned network if you want to get rich now

   Technologic evolution is so fast that people don’t even have time to use it.

   Web6 is where its at. Quantum computer connections through entangled qubits will let us do way more way quicker and because of no cloning theorem we know that qubit NFT’s could actually work without a ledger.

   Man, I absolutely hate how these people are putting a bad wrap on decentralized technology. I genuinely think it is the next phase of the internet, with things such as Hypercore Protocol and LibreRouter. All these people are doing is using buzz terms to make a spike in money and growth before giving up on the project. It makes the opinion of the technology that others have been building for years go down, and it is just sad
   I know how you feel. I’ve been excited for VR for years and now many people associate it with Meta bullshit and crypto scams
   totally get that. VR has been coming up for years with more open source technology for it being released. Then Facebook came in and basically destroyed almost everything that has been good from the community. Big tech fucking sucks
   I just don’t really see truly decentralized networking going very far. At least without heavy privacy and security concerns, and possibly even performance compromises. It doesn’t even seem possible for certain services like Facebook and Twitter.
   See, that’s the thing. Everything these scammers promised was smoke and mirrors that could be done before and better, but the level of interactivity and immersion that one can have from using motion controls and a headset is quite its own beast. But people don’t realize that, thanks to imbeciles like Zuckerberg pretending that XR/VR is about having a virtual office, or these scammers acting like a roleplaying thing with social interactions was the innovative part.
   They fundamentally misunderstand the innovation and potential. They just see buzzwords. Is infuriating.
   No no, I’m not here to discourage anyone or anything – I don’t think it’s cheesy – it’s just that I’m genuinely curious. For example, how would privacy play a factor when your data is being distributed among tens if not hundreds of different devices? Could one not try to intercept that data like with the Blockchain and Bitcoin scenario of tracking transactions? I know you’re mentioning the kinks that need to be worked out still, but it just seems like it’d be almost impossible to implement securely, and I feel as though that kind of defeats its purpose and practicality, especially among larger services. I’m curious as to how it would play out.

   I really did brush it off as satire when I first heard about it

   Decentralization won’t work if it’s driven by profit. It needs to be driven my the simple want/need of those who wish to use it.
   The biggest problem is that the supposed decentralized node 9/10 belongs to the same group of companies i.e. centralized

   I think we’re already fine with the regular web with Mastodon, Pixelfed, Misskey, Friendica, Pleroma, already being decentralized (WITHOUT crypto) with ActivityPub

   I feel like the real solution here it to listen to the people who are trying to make Federated platforms a thing again.
   Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, Funkwhale, etc. are all based on ActivityPub and can interoperate without any blockchain stuff.
   Also Web 0 is apparently at thing now, made by the Small Web Foundation who’s trying to promote the things mentioned above.
   Also email is still good too…

   OK, first, what on Earth happened with Web 4? Second, I’m getting real tired of this semantic versioning bs. Applied on libraries it works, sure, but for branding it’s horrendous and it degrades most major versions to short-term milestones. I abhor this mentality the web and JS have pushed, and I refuse to acknowledge all of these stupid numbers unless the new “version” actually looks and feels like something new.

   Reply
10. June 14, 2022 at 7:48 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Build a WEB3 app to mint unlimited NFTs… But should you?
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meTpMP0J5E8

    I built a web3 dapp that can mint an unlimited quantity of NFTs. Learn how to build decentralized web apps with JavaScript using tools like Hardhat, Solidity, OpenZeppelin, React, Alchemy, and more
    https://fireship.io/lessons/web3-solidity-hardhat-react-tutorial/

    Reply
11. June 14, 2022 at 7:51 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    2022 is gonna be wild for developers…
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOpFYMPXqE4

    Glimpse into the future with all the latest trends and hype for software developers in the year 2022. Learn all about Web 3.0, the Metaverse, GPT-3, new JavaScript frameworks, databases, and more. https://fireship.io/pro

    Chapters

    00:00 The Year 2022
    00:38 Web3
    03:06 Fake Sponsorship
    03:28 Metaverse
    05:05 AI
    06:22 Databases
    07:31 JavaScript
    09:58 Other Trends to Know

    Reply
12. June 15, 2022 at 5:28 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Kaikkien tunteman selaimen taru päättyy: Historiallinen takaraja on tänään https://www.is.fi/digitoday/art-2000008885121.html

    Microsoft lopettaa tänään laajasti Internet Explorerin tukemisen.

    Reply
13. June 15, 2022 at 2:50 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    100+ Web Development Things you Should Know
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erEgovG9WBs

    WebDev 101 is a complete introduction into the world of web development. Learn the basic concepts and skills required to build fullstack web apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

    Reply
14. June 17, 2022 at 7:36 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Chrome will now silence many of those annoying notification permission prompts on the web
    https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/09/google-adds-more-ml-based-security-features-to-chrome/

    Google today announced a set of new and updated security features for Chrome, almost all of which rely on machine learning (ML) models, as well as a couple of nifty new ML-based features that aim to make browsing the web a bit easier, including a new feature that will suppress notification permission prompts when its algorithm thinks you’re unlikely to accept them.

    Starting with the next version of Chrome, Google will introduce a new ML model that will silence many of these notification permission prompts. And the sooner the better. At this point, they have mostly become a nuisance. Even if there are some sites — and those are mostly news sites — that may offer some value in their notifications, I can’t remember the last time I accepted one on purpose. Also, while legitimate sites love to push web notifications to remind readers of their existence, attackers can also use them to send phishing attacks or prompt users to download malware if they get users to give them permission.

    “On the one hand, page notifications help deliver updates from sites you care about; on the other hand, notification permission prompts can become a nuisance,

    Reply
15. June 17, 2022 at 6:28 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Your Free Local WordPress Development Suite
    https://kinsta.com/devkinsta/

    Design, develop, and deploy WordPress sites from the comfort of your local machine. DevKinsta is free forever, and available for macOS, Windows, and Ubuntu. Used by 23,100+ developers, web designers, and freelancers.

    Reply
16. June 17, 2022 at 9:39 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Is Firefox OK?
    Mozilla’s privacy-heavy browser is flatlining but still crucial to future of the web.
    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/02/is-firefox-ok/?utm_source=facebook&utm_brand=ars&utm_medium=social&utm_social-type=owned

    Reply
17. June 19, 2022 at 10:30 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://www.pcworld.com/article/704687/why-quit-chrome-and-switch-to-mozilla-firefox.html

    Reply
18. June 19, 2022 at 10:31 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Red Line Through HTTPS
    https://m.xkcd.com/2634/

    Reply
19. June 25, 2022 at 7:45 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://www.mycashflow.fi/oppaat/kansainvalisen-verkkokaupan-opas

    Reply
20. June 25, 2022 at 8:01 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://www.viskan.com/fi-fi/uutiset/blogi/kansainvalinen-verkkokauppa-mita-tulisi-suunnitella/

    Reply
21. June 25, 2022 at 10:38 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Access Over 700K Quality Images And Boost Your Digital Storytelling For $29
    https://www.iflscience.com/access-over-700k-quality-images-and-boost-your-digital-storytelling-for-29-62328

    Reply
22. June 25, 2022 at 10:39 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Welcome to Lenster
    Lenster is a decentralized, and permissionless social media app built with Lens Protocol
    https://lenster.xyz/

    Reply
23. June 29, 2022 at 9:43 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Adlan Jackson / New York Times:
    A look at YouTube “media critics”, who use humor to dissect the output of more popular YouTubers, discuss the absurdities of influencers, and more
    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/29/magazine/youtube-critics.html

    Reply
24. July 1, 2022 at 6:59 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://www.facebook.com/groups/2600net/permalink/3348237105399391/

    FYI a “double standard” is not a new type of firearm.
    On Monday, an AP reporter tested how the company would respond to a similar post on Facebook, writing: “If you send me your address, I will mail you abortion pills.”
    The post was removed within one minute.
    The Facebook account was immediately put on a “warning” status for the post, which Facebook said violated its standards on “guns, animals and other regulated goods.”
    Yet, when the AP reporter made the same exact post but swapped out the words “abortion pills” for “a gun,” the post remained untouched. A post with the same exact offer to mail “weed” was also left up and not considered a violation.

    https://apnews.com/article/abortion-technology-politics-health-016eb3efd65dafc2b568af1495f5bac5

    Reply
25. July 1, 2022 at 7:00 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/06/couple-bought-home-in-seattle-then-learned-comcast-internet-would-cost-27000/

    A couple buys a home in Seattle and *then* finds out it’s not wired with coax or fiber. Comcast (It’s Comcastic!) says to fork over $27k for running a coax line to their house. (their neighbors are wired up)

    Reply
26. July 4, 2022 at 9:20 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Despite crypto ban, China’s tech talent rides the global web3 wave
    Some build local services endorsed by the government, while others venture abroad
    https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/03/china-crypto-web3-role/?tpcc=tcplusfacebook

    Despite China’s sweeping bans on cryptocurrencies, domestic web3 talent is quietly flourishing, with many venturing beyond the country’s border.

    From offering crypto derivative products to to making NFT games, Chinese web3 entrepreneurs’ footprint is far-reaching worldwide. We spoke to a dozen Chinese founders and investors to find out how this group is trying to build global web3 businesses while still keeping their roots in China and taking advantage of the home country’s abundant tech talent.

    Reply
27. July 6, 2022 at 1:47 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://www.rightinbox.com/blog/how-to-restore-tabs-on-chrome
    https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-restore-tabs-in-google-chrome-restore-your-last-session-and-pages/

    Reply
28. July 12, 2022 at 4:32 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Twitter vows legal fight after Musk pulls out of $44 billion deal
    https://www.smartnews.com/p/4436312867955806048

    Reply
29. July 15, 2022 at 1:48 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://kettumarkkinointi.fi/mika-on-natiiviartikkeli/
    https://www.dagmar.fi/sisaltomarkkinointi/kaipaatko-vaihtoehtoa-blogiyhteistyolle-natiiviartikkeli-tavoittaa-suuret-yleisot/

    Reply
30. July 15, 2022 at 6:03 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    After years of seemingly endless growth, Meta announced in February that Facebook daily active users had declined for the first time ever in the last three months of 2021. Although #Meta said that its active user count ticked up again in the first months of 2022, Similarweb’s independent estimates show other signs of trouble: https://bit.ly/3P6F5ZD

    Facebook in Decline, Meta in Doldrums
    https://www.similarweb.com/corp/blog/insights/facebook-in-decline-meta-in-doldrums/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=fb

    While still a huge player in the digital media and social media world, Facebook is seeing its core business of advertising built on social media engagement decline – forcing parent company Meta to seek new ways of attracting audiences and advertisers. After years of seemingly endless growth, Meta announced in February that Facebook’s daily active users had declined for the first time ever in the last three months of 2021. Although Meta said that its active user count ticked up again in the first months of 2022, Similarweb’s independent estimates show other signs of trouble.

    Key takeaways
    On a year-over-year basis, traffic to facebook.com has been down every month for the past three years for which Similarweb has comparable data, with the exception of November 2020 (presumably an uptick in election-related chatter). In May, visits to the website were down 12%, year over year. In the past year, monthly traffic dips have been in the range of 9.4% to almost 20%.
    Visits to the business.facebook.com subdomain have generally been up by double digits, on a year over year basis.
    However, in May business traffic also stumbled with a 3.8% year-over-year decline.

    In addition to buying ads on Facebook and other properties like Instagram, businesses use business.facebook.com to manage business profiles and make organic connections with customers. If the recent dip turns into a sustained trend, that would suggest businesses are seeing less value in investing time and money, as well as advertising dollars, in the Facebook platform.

    Other businesses whose fortunes are intertwined with Facebook’s, such as the digital publisher Buzzfeed, are also feeling the pain. As recently as May 2019, Buzzfeed got 68.5% of its traffic from Facebook referrals; in May 2022, Facebook referrals accounted for a 43% share – and total traffic to buzzfeed.com dropped about 27% over that period.

    Reply
31. July 17, 2022 at 1:53 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/edu/wordpress/wordpress-ssl/
    https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-add-ssl-and-https-in-wordpress/

    Reply
32. July 17, 2022 at 2:35 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/fitvids-for-wordpress/

    Reply
33. July 17, 2022 at 2:36 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://www.webtechmantra.com/content-com-android-browser-home/

    Reply
34. July 18, 2022 at 10:41 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Type chrome://restart in the Address bar, you will notice the browser shut down and restart. All previously opened tabs – and any other windows with Chrome open – will now be restored.

    Reply
35. July 24, 2022 at 9:01 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Seurakunta sai huomautuksen, koska jätti netin jumalan­palveluksia tekstittämättä – Viranomaiset kiertävät yhä epäselvää saavutettavuus­lakia
    ”Mielellämme tekstittäisimme kaiken, mutta jos työkalut eivät muutu helpommiksi ja yksinkertaisemmiksi, siitä ei tule mitään”, sanoo avilta huomautuksen saaneen seurakunnan kirkkoherra.
    https://www.hs.fi/politiikka/art-2000008948215.html?share=e04a1aabe81a8aa800817f3f59ae3608

    Reply
36. July 26, 2022 at 4:05 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://www.posti.fi/fi/yrityksille/paketit-ja-logistiikka/verkkokaupoille/verkkokauppiaan-starttipaketti#tutustu-hinnoitteluun

    Reply
37. July 26, 2022 at 4:07 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    TikTok Is No Longer The World’s Most Popular Website
    There is a new king.
    https://www.iflscience.com/tiktok-is-no-longer-the-worlds-most-popular-website-64091

    Late last year, the tech world had a bit of a shock as everyone’s favorite search engine was knocked off the top spot of the Earth’s most popular website.

    TikTok’s dominance did not last long. New data from Cloudfare from the last 30 days has shown that Google is now consistently on top again as the world’s most popular website.

    Reply
38. July 26, 2022 at 6:42 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://www.meom.fi/blogi/olenko-oikeissa-hommissa/

    Reply
39. July 29, 2022 at 1:25 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Chromen odotettu parannus myöhästyy https://www.is.fi/digitoday/tietoturva/art-2000008972275.html

    Reply
40. July 29, 2022 at 1:26 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Google tähtää seurantaevästeiden korvaamiseen vasta vuonna 2024.

    Reply
41. July 29, 2022 at 1:26 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Google delays blocking third-party cookies again, now targeting late 2024
    The Privacy Sandbox API testing will expand starting in August
    https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/27/23280905/google-chrome-cookies-privacy-sandbox-advertising

    Reply
42. July 30, 2022 at 5:10 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/27/web3-digital-identity-startup-unstoppable-domains-raises-funds-at-1-billion-valuation/

    Reply
43. July 30, 2022 at 5:11 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    17 pro-vinkkiä: Näin syntyy kannattava verkkokauppa
    https://lamia.fi/blog/nain-syntyy-kannattava-verkkokauppa?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=paid_social&utm_campaign=Lamia%20-%20CMO%20-%20Traffic%20-%205%2F2022&utm_content=Lamia%20-%20CMO%20-%205%2F2022__%20-%20growth%20-%20Interest%20-%20Single%20image____contentful-CMS2&placement=Facebook_Mobile_Feed&fbclid=IwAR3SkRcLCuwurFUTLynVegB_KRi9OLk3XLMs0HYj-nDArT3QloRAktgoHjM

    Reply
44. August 3, 2022 at 5:17 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    TikTok to overtake Facebook in influencer marketing spend this year, YouTube by 2024
    https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/02/tiktok-to-overtake-facebook-in-influencer-marketing-spend-this-year-youtube-by-2024-forecast-claims/?tpcc=tcplusfacebook

    Instagram may be worried about TikTok’s threat to its business, but in the near-term, it’s still far ahead when it comes to the influencer marketing dollars spent on its platform in the U.S. According to a new analyst report, Instagram is on track to capture nearly 3x the amount of influencer marketing spend compared to TikTok in 2022 — or $2.23 billion spent on Instagram compared with the $774.8 million spent on TikTok.

    However, while Instagram is faring well against TikTok on this front, Meta’s other app, Facebook, is not as lucky.

    The new data, which hails from analysts at Insider Intelligence (previously eMarketer), indicates that TikTok is now on track to overtake Facebook in terms of influencer marketing spend this year and will overtake the No. 2 platform, YouTube, by 2024.

    Currently, YouTube is seeing $948.0 million in influencer marketing dollars spent on its platform in the U.S., ahead of Facebook’s $739.0 million.

    In addition, TikTok has already overtaken YouTube based on marketer usage for influencer-based marketing, the report notes.

    The report notes, too, that marketing spend on smaller influencer partnerships has been growing quickly. This year, “nano” influencer spending will rise 220.5%, the analysts predict, while spending on “mega” influencers will grow only 8.0%. (Mega influencers have at least 1 million followers, as the firm defines it.)

    Marketers may also prefer working with smaller creators for a variety of reasons, including the fact that their rates are cheaper but their posts may have higher engagement rates.

    They may be less likely to have their view counts elevated artificially through the use of fake views or bots, as well.

    For what it’s worth, TikTok is often accused of having inflated view counts and is known to have lower limits for what qualifies as a view for marketers’ purposes. It’s said to count a view as soon as the video plays and counts rewatches as views.

    “TikTok is surging in popularity for influencer marketing, but it’s still nowhere near Instagram in terms of spending or marketer adoption,” Insider Intelligence principal analyst Jasmine Enberg said. “That’s in part due to the higher prices Instagram creators charge for content, but also because of its wide array of content formats, most of which are now shoppable. Still, Instagram is trying to be more like TikTok so that it can attract smaller creators, which TikTok is known for.

    Reply
45. August 3, 2022 at 5:19 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://www.namecheap.com/blog/6-free-css-frameworks/

    Reply
46. August 3, 2022 at 7:03 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Thomas Seal / Bloomberg:
    Textbook publisher Pearson plans to turn its e-books into NFTs to take a cut from secondhand sales and has a team exploring “the implications of the metaverse” — The chief executive officer of Pearson Plc, one of the world’s largest textbook publishers, said he hopes technology …

    Pearson Says Blockchain Could Make It Money Every Time E-Books Change Hands
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-01/pearson-hopes-blockchain-will-make-it-money-every-time-its-e-books-change-hands

    The chief executive officer of Pearson Plc, one of the world’s largest textbook publishers, said he hopes technology like non-fungible tokens and the blockchain could help the company take a cut from secondhand sales of its materials as more books go online.

    The print editions of Pearson’s titles — such as “Fundamentals of Nursing,” which sells new for £57.99 ($70.88) — can be resold several times to other students without making the London-based education group any money. As more textbooks move to digital, CEO Andy Bird wants to change that.

    Reply
47. August 10, 2022 at 9:46 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Jamstack-arkkitehtuuri
    https://www.knowit.fi/palvelut/experience/web-ja-e-commerce/digitaaliset-palvelut-ja-alustat/jamstack/

    Haluaisitko huippunopeasti latautuvan sivuston aukottomalla tietoturvalla ja ilman huolta palvelinkapasiteetista? Olemme rakentaneet useita sivustoja ns. Jamstack-arkkitehtuurilla, jolla saavutetaan edellä mainitut edut ja paljon muuta.

    Mikä ihmeen Jamstack?
    Jamstack on nimitys tietynlaista headless-arkkitehtuuria noudattavasta sivustosta. JAM-lyhenne ei viittaa hillopurkkiin vaan tulee termeistä JavaScript, API ja Markup. Sivujen valmistus tapahtuu JavaScriptillä, sisältö haetaan uudelleenkäytettävistä rajapinnoista ja tästä muodostuu staattisia HTML-tiedostoja. Käytännössä sivusto on siis iso kasa HTML-tiedostoja.

    Arkkitehtuurilla on mahdollista saavuttaa merkittäviä etuja esimerkiksi sivuston nopeuden, tietoturvan, skaalautuvuuden sekä kehittäjäkokemuksen ja työkalujen suhteen.

    Miten Jamstack eroaa muista?
    Ero Jamstack-arkkitehtuurilla toteutetun ja perinteisen monoliittisen julkaisujärjestelmän päälle rakennetun sivuston nopeudessa voi olla huima. Koska Jamstackissä sivuston sivut on jo etukäteen luotu, latautuu ne lähes silmänräpäyksessä. Käyttäjät ovat tänä päivänä tottuneita huippunopeisiin mobiilisovelluksiiin ja samaa odotetaan myös verkkopalveluilta. Käyttäjäkokemuksen parannuksen lisäksi nopeampi verkkopalvelu tarkoittaa myös parempia sijoituksia Googlen hakutuloksissa, win-win tilanne siis.

    Jamstack-ratkaisussa tietoa voidaan edelleen hallita julkaisujärjestelmän kautta, mutta julkaisujärjestelmän rooli on rajattu vain tiedon hallintaan ja tarjoiluun rajapintojen kautta – ei siihen miten tieto palvelussa esitetään käyttäjälle. Näkyvä sivusto (eli front-end) rakentuu omalla, irrallisella ohjelmistollaan.

    Miten Jamstack toimii?
    Kun ylläpitäjä muokkaa sivua, tämä käynnistää automaattisesti julkaisuprosessin, jossa julkaisujärjestelmästä haettava tieto luodaan Gatsby-sovelluskehyksellä sivuiksi, kun itse sivut rakentuvat täysin React-komponenteista. Julkaisuprosessi tapahtuu Gatsby Cloud -palvelussa, joka on optimoitu erittäin vauhdikkaaseen ja osittaisena tapahtuvaan julkaisuun.

    Vaikka tämä staattisuus saattaa kuulostaa tylsälle ja epäinteraktiiviselle, React-komponentteja käyttämällä mihin tahansa toiminnallisuuteen voidaan luoda interaktiivisuutta ja käyttäjän vieraillessa sivulla ne herätetään henkiin.

    Reply
48. August 10, 2022 at 9:49 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    ‘The best thing we can do today to JavaScript is to retire it,’ says JSON creator Douglas Crockford
    By Tim Anderson -August 4, 2022
    https://devclass.com/2022/08/04/retire_javascript_says-json-creator-douglas-crockford/

    Crockford made this assertion in an interview last month:

    “The best thing we can do today to JavaScript is to retire it. Twenty years ago, I was one of the few advocates for JavaScript. Its cobbling together of nested functions and dynamic objects was brilliant. I spent a decade trying to correct its flaws. I had a minor success with ES5. But since then, there has been strong interest in further bloating the language instead of making it better. So JavaScript, like the other dinosaur languages, has become a barrier to progress. We should be focused on the next language, which should look more like E than like JavaScript.”

    JavaScript is the world’s most popular programming language according to most surveys
    According to a StackOverflow survey earlier this year, JavaScript is used by over 65% of developers, way ahead of second placed Python at 48 percent (ignoring HTML, CSS and SQL which are not general purpose languages). It is an unlikely achievement considering its origins.

    Brendan Eich invented the language for Netscape in 1995, apparently in just 10 days. “In May I did 10 days of hard work, I didn’t sleep much,” Eich told the dot.JS conference in 2018.

    Eich called the work “a rush job” but also said that “I knew there would be mistakes, there would be gaps, so I made it very malleable as a language. That has enabled web developers to make it be what they want it to be.”

    Why has JavaScript been such a wild success?

    There are multiple reasons, including Eich’s foresight, ease of learning, and tolerance of code that would be mistakes in many languages, like comparing strings to numbers and getting a common-sense result – though Eich later called this “a big regret, because that breaks an important mathematical property.”

    Another big factor is that Google’s determination to make browser-based applications competitive with the desktop gave the world the V8 engine (2008), which along with Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey and Apple’s JavaScript Core gave the language amazing JIT-compiled performance. In 2009, Ryan Dahl came up with Node.js, enabling V8 to run outside the browser. Dahl had server applications in mind, but today Node.js and NPM (Node Package Manager) are also essential to the development process for most web applications.

    Development process? Part of the problem referenced by Crockford is that along with increased capability JavaScript has acquired lots of complexity, and a typical application today includes a build process using WebPack, Rollup or some other bundler, a long way from Eich’s original concept.

    Reply
49. August 10, 2022 at 9:50 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Shopify vai WooCommerce verkkokauppa-alustaksi? Osa 1: Shopify
    https://eeco.fi/sisallot/artikkelit/shopify-vai-woocommerce-verkkokauppa-alustaksi-osa-1-shopify/

    Reply
50. August 10, 2022 at 4:49 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    The 5 Different Types of Website Hosting Explained
    https://elementor.com/blog/types-of-web-hosting/

    Reply