I was reading Chris Shiflett's blog and he mentioned a blog post about the web the way it used to be before Facebook and Twitter. I almost tweeted it. Then I thought, nah, a good old fashion blog post that linked to it was way better.

The Web We Lost - Anil Dash

The tech industry and its press have treated the rise of billion-scale social networks and ubiquitous smartphone apps as an unadulterated win for regular people, a triumph of usability and empowerment. They seldom talk about what we've lost along the way in this transition, and I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be.

It is a good read for all us "old timers". He ironically uses Facebook for comments. One really good one that I can't actually link to afaik because... Facebook said:

No sarcasm here.. I legitimately miss the "web-rings" of old. With niche interests, it was a great way to find like minded sites, and I found many of my still bookmarked favorites with those old crappy left and right arrows :)

Yeah, you know, Web Rings weren't that bad. I had sites on a couple of those things. I think they are still around. And I think you could still pull them off and not worry about Google juice and all that. 302 redirects don't pass that crap. Maybe I should write up some quick javascript that indexs the Planet PHP blogs and adds a Planet PHP web ring to your page. Hmmmm.