The cover story from this month’s American edition of Wired magazine has caused quite a stir among some of the internet/web chatterati. So what is it all about?
Well, the basic premise is that use of the web is in decline as the internet is being used increasingly by applications to gather data in a structured and coordinated way on behalf of the user. We don’t want to search for stuff any more –we want it delivered to whatever device we are currently using and we want it delivered automatically.
To understand this you have to know the difference between the web and the internet. And many people don’t, using the two terms interchangeably.
So, lets fix that.
The web is a subset of the internet.
The web is that ‘stuff’ which, in the olden days was all you could usefully access through a web browser – i.e. pages coded in HTML. Those pages are named according to a protocol – indicated by the HTTP that sits in front of their name.
The internet is the network of computers and protocols that allow data to be shared and exchanged between them.
There is lots of this data. HTML encoded data is just part of it. For example there is material you can stream to specialist applications such as video and sound to the BBC iPlayer or Spotify, files you can access via FTP, email that comes into applications designed specifically to manage it.
These days you can access a great deal via browsers, not just HTML content. But that just shows that the web has expanded to take on some more of what the internet has to offer.
Right, back to Wired, then. The Wired story has a graphic based on data from Cisco which shows how different uses of the internet/web have ebbed and flowed between 1990 and the present time. It shows the Web in freefall from a high in 2000, with peer to peer data also on the decline and video experiencing exponential growth.
It is an interesting graphic.
But it doesn’t tell the whole story. If I spend half an hour reading newspaper content delivered via HTTP in my web browser and half an hour streaming music to the Spotify player on my desktop I am consuming more bandwidth the latter than the former.
So, on the graph’s proportional representation where usage is shown as a percentage of total internet traffic, my Spotify usage would take up a larger proportion of space than my newspaper reading. But I am spending the same amount of time on each activity, and, incidentally deriving different benefits which can be tricky to compare.
And there are classes of data I can access either way. Twitter has a web page, but I choose to use Tweetdeck instead as I prefer the way it presents data.
Tweetdeck and Spotify are examples of apps (we have to call them ‘apps’ these days and not ‘applications’) which access internet content but not via a web browser and there are plenty more on the desktop and increasingly on smartphones too. The Wired article authors thinks apps are the future in part because they can offer targeted content and in part because they offer business the opportunity to charge for content.
It is an interesting and complex story, and it has long twisted tentacles in both the consumer and business worlds.
What is your experience and preference? Apps or web browser? And where do you think the internet and the web are headed?
Check out
www.wired.com for the full story and then let me know what you think.