I feel very similarly. While the excitement of the developing mobile world has a lot of pull for me, I’m generally wary of putting much effort into building systems that might be displaced at that whim of an executive. That’s part of the reason I’m keeping a close eye on Android, even though the nay-sayers claim it won’t amount to anything.

From “wandering and word of mouth”
“We gained access through the twisted doorways of the tilde characters in the URLs”
Now “No one hand-hews raw HTML”
“Like a buyer of a Sears Craftsman house”
“uploading horrendous, hacky code”

Within the poetry are many keen observations, for example, of the move from page description to directions to many players. Players in the literal, i.e. technical, sense but also, as I read the line, in figurative and metaphoric senses. Or, “We needed the machines to not just blindly copy, but create.” I’m not entirely sure what is meant here, but it rings a lot of bells. Deep sub-harmonics resonate in the architecture of this piece.

Your meditation on “the evolution of the homepage” raises a few questions for me as an ethnographer of the early Web. For example, when you describe “ the AOLs, Earthlinks, Yahoos, and Googles” as “super-franchised spaces” that offer “only the illusion of a web-room of one’s own,” I wonder on what basis you, or I, can judge them as illusory, if those who live in these rooms feel otherwise? Even if we assume that I share the same sense that something meaningful has been lost in translation, the question I come to is how to a persuade those who didn’t know the pre-Web Internet, or pre-browser wars Web, that things were once otherwise? In what sense were they less of an illusion back in the day?

Yet these are not exactly objections, for how could (and why would) I object to a meditation. Raising questions is part of the point, no?

My last note is more like an objection, but I offer it in the spirit of dialog. I’m not sure how widespread the desire for a single “portal,” an umbrella URL one can put on a business card, is. That would seem to me a matter for empirical research. Anecdotally, I know several people who cherish the ability to have a number of distinct homepages, profiles, and sites—i.e., a number of different Web presences, some overlapping, some quite separate.

But that seems tangential to the keynote of my comment: joy and appreciation for your musings here on the evolution of the homepage.