This is something I was thinking about last night. The internet is often associated with a large amount of change. You read articles where people say that things are "moving faster and faster." As if to imply that change is happening more and more frequently. However, I am curious how much we can maintain this level of evolution. Will there be a point at which we stop adding websites to the internet that will become "mainstays"? And are there websites that have already become mainstays and won't ever move, like utility companies in real industry?
Two examples of internet mainstays that come to mind are Google, and Facebook. Both of have functions that are integral to the way that users interact with the internet. Facebook has become a way for people to communicate with their friends interests through the internet, thus the integral function of Facebook becomes the social center of the internet. While this was still being fought out in the early internet phase, there was a chance that a messenger service, or e-mail, or myspace, could become this mainstay. However, right now it looks like Facebook has won that social war.
Similarly, Google has become the vehicle through which people interact with information on the internet. Facebook has a little of this, in its new "like" application. (Shameless plug, check press facebook like to the right if you like this post!) The like function makes it so that we interact with information socially. We find out what websites our friends like, rather than directly searching for information. However, Google allows us to directly connect with information and search out the information that we find useful in the most efficient means possible. And beat out early sites like askjeeves.com, yahoo.com, etc. in the early competitive phase of the internet.
Now, the question I wonder is if these websites, along with a few other will become mainstays of the internet. If, 40 years from now we will still be using these websites in (largely) the same fundamental ways that I identified above: Facebook as the core of social networking; Google as our fundamental connection to information. I feel that we will. They have permanent industries that the internet revolves around in many ways.
To me this signals the end of integral internet revolutions, websites that change the way we interact within the internet. I think there is still a lot of room for innovation and new ideas to come to fruition. But I feel like we have reached the point where those ideas have started to revolve around ideas that already exist. That in order for them to be successful they require these fundamental instruments (I like the name that I just came up with in my head "internet utility companies" or "internet utilities") to operate.
For example, the newest innovation on the internet that has become really big is twitter (now with 200 million users.) However, when it first came out people said that it was merely texting your facebook statuses to your friends. Which essentially it is. And it has now been linked with facebook in such a way that you can twitter your facebook status, or turn your facebook statuses into twitters. In this way, while twitter is a separate organism its social networking happens through facebook.
Google, on the other end of the spectrum, has become a mechanism by which different websites search for different things. So, if you go to site specific search engines on many sites it is "powered by google." Google has developed into a microcosmic search engine tool, just as much as it is a macrocosmic search engine. It's still the basis for internet information seeking. Thus, the nature of information seeking (using keywords, rather than the social information seeking of facebook) has routed itself through Google.
These websites have become fundamental to the way that the internet functions, and consequently, I think internet innovation surrounds them. They have become the spiders behind the "web" of the internet. Before I wrote this post I had started to think that the internet had reached a "limit" of innovation. However, as I continued to write it I have started to think that it hasn't reached its "limit" but instead has just finally found form. That the chaos that seethed at the beginning of the internet has now resolved itself into certain structures.
I think in a few years this form will solidify even more. We will really begin to see the structure behind the way the internet operates. And I think that those core forms, like Facebook and Google, possibly others that I haven't identified will remain part of the internet for many years to come. Innovation will happen on the internet, and will happen fast, however the broad changes in the fundamental way that we interact throughout the world will slow down. I think the last twenty years or so will be looked at as the period of the "internet revolution." Where this mode of information sharing was new and exciting, and no one knew quite what would happen with it.
However, I think this period has ended. That while the internet (and improved telecommunications in general) has increased the speed at which ideas move and come to fruition fundamentally, it won't constantly improve the speed of information sharing. At some point we will stop feeling like change is happening "faster and faster" and instead it will just happen at the speed it happens at. A speed which will be defined by the speed at which these core structures of the internet can distribute information. And will in general be fast.
So, in summary, the way that the internet "changes" in terms of broadness of form, and speed of change will level out. New ideas will happen and they will happen fast, but those ideas won't fundamentally change the way that we interact. Those interaction-based changes have mostly already happened and are establishing set means for information exchange to occur. There may be many more amazing internet ideas and internet companies. But the utilities, the internet infrastructure, has already been established and is here to stay.
(Just a side note, if you like this article, subscribe by e-mail, share the article on facebook, or like this article on stumbleupon. In that way you can use those core mechanisms and help share information faster! :-).)
No comments:
Post a Comment