Eight great, simple ways to hack the Web
Free services from Google and other companies mix and mash nicely — You may not feel the urge to microblog your every thought using Twitter, and not every news story that tops the list at Digg.com adds value to your life.
Context & Ripple Effects
By August 2007 Computerworld's listicle sits at the tail end of a pattern the corpus has been tracking since late 2005, when bloggers discovered you could read most of O'Reilly's Hacks series for free through Google — the same reuse-the-free-service instinct, just pointed at books instead of maps and feeds. Google's own Google LatLong blog picked up the story on the same day under a YouTube-style 'embeddable maps' framing, which tells you the company treats third-party mashing not as leakage but as distribution.
The social layer gets more skeptical treatment: the piece concedes you may not want to microblog every thought on Twitter or trust that whatever tops Digg adds value, a wariness that tracks with CNET's December 2006 reporting on the big Digg rig, where the front page proved gameable rather than purely meritocratic.
First-order effects
- Google gains free reach: every embedded map or mashed-up service spreads its footprint onto sites it does not operate, converting hobbyist tinkering into distribution at zero incremental cost.
Second-order effects
- Social services like Digg and Twitter compete to be the filter layer over these building blocks — and Digg's demonstrated vulnerability to gaming means the filtering position carries a quality-assurance burden, not just traffic.
Third-order effects
- If hosting data and embed codes becomes the norm, value migrates toward the platforms whose services others recombine, pushing smaller sites from owning functionality to orchestrating someone else's.
The trend: Free hosted services are turning the mid-2000s Web into a kit of parts, with Google's embeddable outputs and APIs making third-party mashing a mainstream publishing habit.