The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet

[n2doc]

By Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff August 17, 2010



You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service.

You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone.

This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen). The fact that it’s easier for companies to make money on these platforms only cements the trend. Producers and consumers agree: The Web is not the culmination of the digital revolution.

A decade ago, the ascent of the Web browser as the center of the computing world appeared inevitable. It seemed just a matter of time before the Web replaced PC application software and reduced operating systems to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers,” as Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen famously said. First Java, then Flash, then Ajax, then HTML5 — increasingly interactive online code — promised to put all apps in the cloud and replace the desktop with the webtop. Open, free, and out of control.

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http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/

[zipplewrath]

1. Recieving content, not generating

The upshot here is that the web is being used vastly more for one way communication, receiving content, not generating it. Twitter and facebook not withstanding, a tremendous amount of the content being passed around is being generated outside of the devices being used to view it. That is of course inevitable. However, what struck me when I was kinda forced into switching from a Palm Pilot to an i-touch is that the devices are being designed around receiving content, not generating it. Yes, there are notable exceptions, but the device is clearly set up as a content receiver. The palm was designed to EXCHANGE information, and that started out as with a "hot sync" PC, but began to expand into information being received via Wi-Fi. But the modern devices often have limited ability to actually interact with information being delivered. Again, I'm aware of the exceptions, but the focus is on receiving (and buying) information and vastly less so on generating it.

[glitch]

2. Excellent point.

And the few exceptions reinforce your point.

[sofa king]

4. Video is probably a much larger part of the total than at first blush.

I could have read the graph wrong, but if 23% of web traffic is peer to peer, and a huge proportion of peer-to-peer traffic is pornography and illegally copied films, then video traffic must already be a clear majority of all traffic.

When you consider that many people have cable Internet, and those same cables are used to carry cable television, then the proportion of non-interactive traffic increases further. And does web traffic include Youtube, the Internet Archive, Hulu, and Netflix?

Another thing to consider is that because video communication isn't widespread yet, most people generate only the smallest footprint of primarily text content. This post probably only takes up a few dozen K. A video of me speaking it, however, could take up megabytes.

How is the Internet going to handle videophones?

[caraher]

3. A great example of how to lie with a figure

To have it make any sense at all the internet would have to be a zero-sum game. This figure does not imply the web is shrinking, but that the use of the internet to move video data has exploded.

[Ready4Change]

7. Good point.

The graph could instead have been funnel shaped, narrower on the left, expanding to the right as total bandwidth increased. I wonder what the usage of Web would be viewed in that way, and whether video is taking away Web usage, or is just being layered on top of it?

[bananas]

5. Usenet takes up too much bandwidth!!!

[txlibdem]

6. They're going by percentage of traffic - number of megabits

That paints a false picture of the popularity, the number of actual transactions, involving each type of internet traffic. How many emails would it take to equal a single video on youtube or (even more egregious) Hulu.

The chart is a pretty picture, though.