Facebook and the Media: United, They Attack the Web

This post from Baldur Bjarnason hits the nail on the head when it comes to the web vs. platform-specific development. If you work on the web (as I suspect you do since you’re reading this blog), convert “you” and “your” to “we” and “our”:

The web doesn’t suck. Your websites suck.

All of your websites suck.

You destroy basic usability by hijacking the scrollbar. You take native functionality (scrolling, selection, links, loading) that is fast and efficient and you rewrite it with ‘cutting edge’ javascript toolkits and frameworks so that it is slow and buggy and broken. You balloon your websites with megabytes of cruft. You ignore best practices. You take something that works and is complementary to your business and turn it into a liability.

The lousy performance of your websites becomes a defensive moat around Facebook.

Of course, Facebook might still win even if you all had awesome websites, but you can’t even begin to compete with it until you fix the foundation of your business.

This article is long and full of choice quotes and embodied wisdom. You should read it. Twice.

Note: I no longer use “native” in this context, but it remains in quoted material.