Those of you who are using the web since long enough can recall the crazy years of Flash. This new technology was so cool that every site owners wanted to have a Flash animation. This over enthousiasms lead us to the dark age of Flash and the invention of the infamous Skip intro link. Time has pass, and now every site owner want social features.
Nowadays, social is the new magical ingredient. Social networks can double your trafic, stimulate conversations and make you famous. Social is the new promise land which drive maximum attention and innovation. In consequence to this social madness, social buttons and widgets started to invade web sites. The small Send to a Friend link has been replaced by a deluge of sharing features (Like, tweet, +1...)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 will experience social pollution. I wasn't aware of this phenomena until this summer: Browsing through my news reader and opening multiple pages in background with the hotel lobby's WiFi was a nightmare, the kind of nightmare I experienced fifteen 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, can someone explain to me why I have the feeling to regress?
The worst part in this sad story is that those unacceptably long loading times cannot be avoided with a larger bandwidth since they are the consequence to multiple API calls to social platforms. If content pages are soooooooooooooo long to display, it is not because of your bandwidth, it is because of social platform's IT structures overload. You might argue that we have much greater problems to face in this economy, but big social platforms are aware of this issue and are trying to fix it (The +1 Button: Now Faster).
What drives me mad is the paradox of this situation: In 2011, text content has never been so long to load. Sometimes I find myself screaming internally "Skip all this social crap and give me that goddam content". To tell the truth, the best thing which could happen is to have a Skip social button. But when you think about this, you can easily figure out we already have this feature: First with the print version and second with the mobile version. 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 let me sum up the situation: Content editors, which business model rely on ad banners, are trying to gain audience by using social buttons and widgets, slowing down the loading time, which generate frustration from users which turn to mobile applications. By trying to raise their revenue (more banners displayed = more revenue), content editors lowers them (slower loading times = more readers using applications which does not display ad banners).
You might find 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 became dependent from third party reading applications.
What is your opinion: Am I overreacting or social pollution is a real pain in the ass?
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