In case you are a first-time reader, or you forgot that you signed up for this newsletter, this is The Torment Nexus (you can find out more about me and this newsletter — and why I chose to call it that — in this post.)
Those exciting early days of the Web and the public Internet. I had a daily phone call with the president of Netscape Canada for several weeks – starting at 11pm, because only then could he and I expect to have everything else out of the way! We were figuring out the licensing terms for what was about to be Netscape's largest sale by volume (not dollars): hundreds of thousands of copies of Netscape Navigator (bundled with some other Internet software) for the users of the world's first mass-market Internet service, Sympatico. (That sale was eclipsed when AT&T reverse-engineered the Sympatico starter kit – I could tell that they'd done that after I got a copy of their own starter kit and looked inside it – and did their own deal with Netscape for the first mass-market Internet service in the US.)
Anyway, I too am sad that corporate interests have largely taken over what users have available and replaced open by closed. Currently I'm personally affected because, as you mention, I can't easily send Instagram users to my website OutDancingHamilton.com: I can't link from Instagram posts at all, and although I can link from Instagram Stories the link opens in an embedded browser that doesn't display the site very well, so I have to label the link "best in external browser" and hope that users act on that.
Those exciting early days of the Web and the public Internet. I had a daily phone call with the president of Netscape Canada for several weeks – starting at 11pm, because only then could he and I expect to have everything else out of the way! We were figuring out the licensing terms for what was about to be Netscape's largest sale by volume (not dollars): hundreds of thousands of copies of Netscape Navigator (bundled with some other Internet software) for the users of the world's first mass-market Internet service, Sympatico. (That sale was eclipsed when AT&T reverse-engineered the Sympatico starter kit – I could tell that they'd done that after I got a copy of their own starter kit and looked inside it – and did their own deal with Netscape for the first mass-market Internet service in the US.)
Anyway, I too am sad that corporate interests have largely taken over what users have available and replaced open by closed. Currently I'm personally affected because, as you mention, I can't easily send Instagram users to my website OutDancingHamilton.com: I can't link from Instagram posts at all, and although I can link from Instagram Stories the link opens in an embedded browser that doesn't display the site very well, so I have to label the link "best in external browser" and hope that users act on that.