Rumors of the Web's Demise
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The Web as a "sense of place" may be coming to an end -- or due for a new beginning?
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Rumors of the Web's Demise
- 1. Rumors of the Web’s Demise UC Berkeley School of Information Roy Bahat October 2010
- 4. U.S. Internet Traffic Adjusted for total traffic volume Source: BoingBoing.net
- 5. Townsend 75309 TOwnsend7-5309 TO7-5309 867-5309 (212) 867-5309 +1 (212) 867-5309
- 8. “I’ve just talked to his lawyer and he’s agreeable – you get the Hamptons and he keeps 212.” © 2008 The New Yorker Collection from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.
- 9. Townsend 75309 TOwnsend7-5309 TO7-5309 867-5309 (212) 867-5309 +1 (212) 867-5309 +1 (360) 867-5309
- 10. Abundance can destroy meaning
- 11. From striatic on Flickr – Creative Commons License – Some rights reserved
- 13. Abundance can destroy meaning
- 16. Abundance can destroy meaning In the physical world, you can only be in one place at one time The Sixth Sense Effect: We can still see dead things, long after they’re (basically) gone
- 19. Abundance can destroy meaning In the physical world, you can only be in one place at one time The Sixth Sense Effect Digital metaphors can have real value
- 27. 27 Source: comScore September 2010; IGN Entertainment analysis Homepage visitors Percentage of monthly unique users 68% 57% 56% 10%
- 28. Visual of a home
- 30. 30 Source: eMarketer via ThinkEquity LLC, “The Opportunity in Non-Premium Advertising.” May 4, 2009; IGN Entertainment analysis 2009 2010E 14,225 16,473 18,903 2011E 2012E 21,411 2013E 24,023 +69% Worldwide display impression forecast Billions of impressions
- 31. www.com is not the only platform… soon, it won’t even be the biggest why? content travels top-level domains for sale: dot-anything so many screens! social might beat search
- 32. www.com m.com Google YouTube (Yes, Bing too) RSS Facebook (and MySpace) Twitter Android (and iPhone) iPad Interactive TV Kindle Xbox Live
- 33. telephone prefix : 1960 “hit” or “eyeballs” : 2000 website : 2010
- 34. as the amount of digital real estate expands, digital “place” loses its value that is already happening to the pixel, and will happen to the URL… taking the site out of websites
- 35. so how do we create a valuable place? scarcity
- 37. where on the web can we find a nice, quiet place to call home?
- 38. http://about.me/roybahat >play conference 209. Media, New and Otherwise Spring 2011
- 39. ?
Editor's Notes
- What is Wired talking about? Doesn’t everyone use the web? This presentation is about one way the web *is* dying – as a system for understanding how the digital world is organized. As a metaphor. The World Wide Web: websites and pages and http://something and browsers and all that. That *way* of organizing the Internet is what’s going away. I’ll set up some context with lessons from other systems that have died, not so much by becoming technologically obsolete… as becoming bad metaphors. The web’s organizing principle for the digital world – it’s metaphor -- is, I believe, all about having a sense of place. A universe of ideas, feelings, sounds, images – all organized in our minds by their *locations* in the digital world. Even the word web*site* is all about location. But the map of those locations is changing, and I think understanding that map – understanding the “sense of place” on the web – is one key to understanding the Internet’s future.
- So first why does Wired think the web is dying? They led with this now-much-maligned chart. The chart shows the proportion of total traffic on the web that is devoted to various activities, and seems to show the “web” portion declining with time, due to the rise of video and peer-to-peer services. Of course if you adjust for total traffic then it looks more like….
- They’re all increasing, fast. Especially video – the pink section. But the web – in red – is growing, too. No death here. BoingBoing, which published this analysis, helpfully points out that this is only a measurement of bandwidth – how much data is consumed. That may not be a great measure because 50MB of video and 50MB of text are two very different experiences. It doesn’t account for time spent, revenue, whatever else you care about. But the web is clearly NOT dying in terms of usage. So how might it be dying? Let’s look at a few other examples of systems that have died, not by becoming technologically obsolete so much as irrelevant.
- Telephone numbers’ prefixed originally had lots of meaning – they told you where a place was. But, over time, they became just numbers. Even the area codes today are, increasingly, unrelated to where the number is issued.
- Originally, area codes were very meaningful: they told you where someone lived. This is the original map of the area code system created by the North American Numbering Plan. One great rule of the organizers of the information is that they love acronyms.
- They were so meaningful that when we started running out, people had a bit of a fit. The Atlantic dug up this old gem from Google Archives. The original system had a billion numbers. There are only 300 million or so of us – do we really need more than a billion phone numbers?
- Even as late as 1997, when this cartoon ran, area codes were still status symbols.
- But then they became… just numbers. In fact, this last one has the area code for an eFax number I got a few years ago. I didn’t even realize 360 was a real area code, I’d definitely never been to Western Washington.
- This has happened in the media world. The networks used to rule television. Of course, there weren’t many choices. So if you controlled, in this very powerful medium, what appeared when someone clicked to the number 4, you had a very valuable asset. Today, people have more choices…
- This is the channel listing on Hulu. Everyone understands that in media there has been an explosion of options, and that this has put enormous pressure on all media companies. Think of your favorite channel on cable or satellite. Can you even remember what number channel it is? As channels become abundant, the idea of a channel is becoming less relevant. (Let alone DVRs, VOD, and all kinds of things that are doing away with linear television viewing altogether…)
- So, again, over time, abundance can destroy meaning.
- What can we learn about a system that is, more explicitly, about organizing information? We all know the Dewey Decimal Classification. Section 500 for Science, etc. This used to double for a physical map of the library, because you could just go to the 500s section and it corresponded to a physical place in the library. Some of you may know the classification is still being updated, managed by an organization called the – here comes the acronym -- OCLC (which won’t tell you on its website what it stands for, I think because the O is for Ohio and maybe they’re going global). It’s a big world – they’ve organized it! Or have they?
- If you search for references to the Dewey Decimal System on Amazon, the first result is for a book about love. And on the Amazon forums there is actually a question of whether the Dewey Decimal System still exists… And why is that? It’s because in a world where a book can be found in more than one place, tagged with more than one category, and can appear, digitally, on more than one shelf maybe we don’t quite need a system that puts every book in one and only one place. The idea isn’t as relevant.
- So in the physical world, a relevant idea helps us map the meaning of physical objects. Because a physical object can only be in one place at one time. One other lesson of both area codes and the Dewey Decimal System is that, long after they’re not as relevant, they are still around.
- Finally, let’s look at an example of a place that really doesn’t have any relationship to the real world – yet has enormous value. This is a map of a section of the World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft has 12 million people in it, who spend more than a billion hours a year spent in this game. You’d think a world like this might get pretty crowded?
- The clever people at Blizzard, the company that is the omnipotent G-d of World of Warcraft, solved that problem. They created what they called “realms.” Effectively, entirely separate dimensions. You could be in a city in this universe, and I could be in the same city, and we’d never interact with each other. There are over 200 realms for North America alone. There is even an online census of the various realms, because some have overpopulation problems. The technically minded folks will know that this was really all about instances on different servers. Physical hardware boxes mapping to metaphorical dimensions in the World of Warcraft. So what do you do if you get tired of the people in your dimension? Or want to meet a friend who is in Arathor while you’re in Bronzebeard? Well, the people at Blizzard have a solution for that: you can pay them $25, plus tax. Yes, we tax you for going to another dimension in World of Warcraft.
- So the last lesson – before we talk about the web – is that a digital place, an idea, can have real value. Anyone who has bought a better kind of seed in Farmville knows that. So what does all this tell us about the web? I want to start by explaining how important the idea of PLACE is to the vocabulary of the web and computing technology in general.
- This was Microsoft’s first real global brand advertising campaign, in 1994. WHERE do you want to go today…
- The language of the web is full of references to location. In the early days of the web, this made complete sense. The only way to really find a page was to start at its homepage, so it felt like a natural metaphor.
- Yahoo! was originally a directory. There wasn’t really a way to conveniently get to anything but the homepage (unless you remembered a long, complicated URL).
- Today, this just isn’t the case. This is one of the most visited sites on the web, eHow, owned by a company called Demand Media. This is their homepage, which, to be honest, not that many people go to relative to the enormous size of the site.
- They get to the site by searching on Google…
- And then they land on what we’d call an “interior” page… although that’s a strange name because it is, for a typical user, really the front door.
- This was the old model for how people imagined traveling through the web.
- It holds – Sixth Sense principle! – even today. And it’s even a proxy, as you can see here on this chart of homepage visitation – for the strength of a brand.
- But really the web today isn’t like this, where you come in the front door. It’s a strange house, where you can pop in anywhere – just *appear* in any room. This is confusing to a user… it’s hard to design a house in a way where every door is a front door. In the digital world, unlike the physical world, a room can also be entered from any other room!
- It starts to get a little confusing. This is a real problem for the web. Maybe users don’t want to surf this way. Maybe they just want a boat. Not to mention on the web, unlike the physical world – everywhere you go you leave a trace, and carry a unique ID card. 84% of people can be identified by their browser, operating system, and plugins. If you use Flash, 94%.
- Not to mention abundance is starting to erode value. This chart shows the growth in ad inventory on the web, as a proxy for the general explosion in commercial supply.
- Abundance is going to apply at many levels, and erode the value of a website.
- So what does this mean for how we organize the web? We are already designing every door as a front door. But now we also have to design all kinds of different houses. A mature web service has to be on so many platforms… so the idea of a service being in a single “place” is now really challenging to imagine.
- The web might become irrelevant as a metaphor for understanding our digital world.
- It starts with restoring scarcity. Genuine scarcity that comes from something really valuable – not an artificial restriction.
- And *that* is why applications are such a fundamental change in the organization of the web. Apps are promising because they return us to a world of fewer choices. And they’re scary for the same reason. Yes, there are millions of apps out there. But you’ll only have 20-40 on your phone at any given time? And probably only access a handful regularly. It’s more like the dial on your television than it is like the channels on Hulu. And note: an app only has one front door. You can’t start on a random page. You can’t search your way directly into the page of an app on carving a pumpkin. The experience has, again, more of a “path” to it. An app is a place. Just a digital metaphor, but one that has real value. And that’s what everyone’s fighting for. Facebook thinks your friends, and what they “like” will be the place that matters – rumor is they might even build a browser to help you surf the web that way. Apple thinks it will be this view here. Google has their view.
- And so the central question is this. Where can we find a place that matters. One that has scarcity, that understands that on the web you can be in more than one place at the same time. It probably won’t be the URL bar, although that will stick around a long time -- because of the Sixth Sense effect. Where will it be? I don’t know. Maybe it will be re-attaching the web to physical places, Foursquare is doing just that. Maybe it will be with simpler platforms, though I think there will always be a tension between times when you want the MC Escher magic staircases, you want to pop into and out of random pieces of content. But one way or another the web, as we know it, as an idea for how places in the digital world are organized, that web is dying – and a new one is being born. Looking forward to seeing what the map of that web looks like.