AOL to drop Usenet

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

_______________ Forward Header _______________
Subject:        Re: [IP] AOL to drop Usenet
Author: Brad Templeton <btm () templetons com>
Date:           28th January 2005 11:36:23 am

> AOL has announced that it's going to drop Usenet.  The AP wire
> story on the subject claimed that fewer than 1000 of its 23 million
> subscribers even used the service.

I will write in the future something more detailed on this history
of USENET -- I wrote a piece for Tim O'Reilly's site a couple of years
ago at: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2001/12/21/usenet.html

USENET's successes and failures teach a number of very interesting
lessons on technology.   USENET has seen a staggering failure of
innovation -- in spite of all the other internet innovations around it,
it still is technologically and structurally almost identical to how it
looked 20 years ago, with just a few relatively minor tweaks since then.

Yet remarkably, it also does some of its core tasks better than any
of its web competitors.  There is still no web message board I find
easier to use than a USENET newsgroup, or better able to handle large
volumes of traffic.  And the pre-feeding of articles, created in
a world of intermittent connections doesn't match today's always on
thinking but results in the lightning response time you get from local
data for which their is no substitute.

USENET teaches a lesson about a tragedy of the technical commons.
USENET became ubiquitous because nobody owned it, but that also killed
its innovation potential.   Adding a certain classes of new features to
USENET is extremely difficult.  You must get new client software out
to readers, sometimes new software out to all the sites feeding the
material.   And people may object to the feature even if they will
not be using it or reading the messages containing it.

Compare that to the web, where nobody owns the web but each web site
has an owner.  That owner is free to do what they want, and readers
can choose to go there or not as they please, at no cost to anybody
else.  The owner is somewhat constrained by what the browser can do
but is always free to write plug-ins, java, javascript flash or whole
new applications started from the web in order to innovate.  They don't
need buy in from anybody.

On USENET, some classes of innovations need buy in from _everybody_.
As such, they simply don't happen.  You will never get that.

To get around this question, I created my own hierarchy within the
USENET technical structure which was privately owned.  As such, when
I wanted to innovate, I was able to, though I remained constrained by
what software readers had, just as web sites are constrained by browsers.

This is not to put any discredit on Tom or Steve or any of the folks who
first built USENET.  It was brand new and world-changing.  And it is
a testament to it that USENET's "failure" is really a lack of growth
more than a shrikage -- the original design still has merit much later.

This is also important because, from the early 80s onward, USENET was
the center of community for the internet.  It was the "town square" the
place where people met and interacted.   It took over that role from
the arpanet mailing lists, which of course you (Dave) played a large
part in.   Today it holds that role in just a few niches, while blogs,
web boards and traditional media take over most of the others.  The
internet is too large to have a town square any more.

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