Those of you on the web for a while can recall the crazy years of Flash. This new technology was so cool that every site owner wanted to have Flash animation. This over enthusiasm led us to the dark age of Flash and the invention of the infamous Skip intro link. Time has passed, and now every site owner wants social features.
These days, social is the new magical ingredient. Social networks can double your traffic, stimulate conversation and make you famous. Social is the new promised land, driving maximum attention and innovation. As a consequence of this "social madness," social buttons and widgets began to invade web sites. That small Send to a Friend link has been replaced by a deluge of sharing features (Like, tweet, +1...) and friend widgets. The promise is pretty (share with your friends), but the truth is ugly: social buttons and widgets are polluting web content. I am not talking about visual pollution, but bandwith pollution since every button or widget is attached to hundreds of lines of javascript and numerous APIs which can take tens of seconds to answer.
A simple article page which should load in 1 or 2 seconds can take a minute to display, even with a broadband connection! Just head to heavily socialized web sites like Mashable and you'll suffer social pollution. I only became aware of this phenomena this summer: Browsing through my news reader and opening multiple pages in the background with the hotel lobby's WiFi was a nightmare, reminiscent of the nightmare I experienced 15 years ago with my RTC modem: You just stare at your computer screen, waiting for text content to be displayed on the screen. Text content! If the future of web is social, please, someone, explain to me why I have this feeling of moving backward?
The worst part in this sad story is that those unacceptably long loading times cannot be avoided by installing greater bandwidth since they are the consequence of multiple API calls to social platforms. If content pages are soooooooooooooo long to display, it's not because of your bandwidth but, rather, because of social platform's IT structures overload. You might argue that we have much greater problems to deal with in the global economy, but big social platforms are aware of this issue and are trying to fix it (The +1 Button: Now Faster).
What drives me insane is the paradox of this situation: In 2011, text content has never been so long to load. Sometimes I find myself screaming to myself: "Skip all this social crap and give me the goddamned content." To tell the truth, the best thing that could happen is to have a Skip social button. But think about that and you can easily see that we already have this feature: First with the print version and second with the mobile. The best way to access content (articles...) without having to suffer social pollution is to bypass the web site's layout and to use the mobile or the print version. In many case, all you have to do is to change the URL (not very user friendly).
Fortunately, average users can also use an alternative access to avoid social pollution: Personalized magazines for mobile devices like Flipboard, Zite or Pulse. Not only those applications offer an improved reading experience, but they help you discover new content tailored to your interests.
So summing up: Content editors, whose business modesl rely on ad banners, are trying to gain audience by using social buttons and widgets, slowing down the load time, consequently generating user frustration, who then turn to mobile applications. By trying to raise their revenue with more banners displayed to trigger more revenue), content editors instead reduce their revenue with slower load times, sending readers to applications that don't display ad banners.
You might find my arguments pessimistic, but I strongly believe social pollution is a real threat to content editors. If they do not try to prevent it (by limiting the number of social buttons and widgets), they will drive readers away from their web site and become dependent on third party reading applications.
Am I overreacting? Or is social pollution a real pain in the ass?
