Everyday Is Better Than The Next

Introduction
Sometimes while I’m cruising around the Internet, I often wonder what the new face of the web is going to be. It appears to me that what I would call the direct communicating Internet is dying. Chat rooms, myspace like sites, and other “hey how are you. I’m good how are you” sites are of just no use to me. So, I pronounce today as the death of the directly communicating Internet. Today is the day that I realized that these kind of sites are no longer the vehicle for social connection.

The Past
In the beginning there were few reasons to get on the Internet. The Internet had not been commercialized yet and there was very little worthwhile information available. Of course we didn’t realize it then, because no information was available. And as opposed to no information, suddenly the Yahoo - Humanities (1996) category somehow seemed interesting. You couldn’t check the score of a game, you couldn’t buy anything, you might be able to get the weather if you are lucky, and you would probably rather read the newspaper than news that had to be hunted for.

So what was the Internet good for? Connecting people on a large scale. Before the Internet social connection was very limited, mostly by your geographic location. But here comes the Internet, and now you can chat (a new world back then) with millions of people all over the world. I can actually remember calling my dad in all excited to say “look I’m talking to this kid from the UK.” It was that big of a deal. By the time chatting and email began to get old technology had evolved to the point where web pages were accessible to everyone, and everyone could have their own. Before this time a web page was something that you just typed in the address thingy, pressed enter, and text magically appeared on your screen. You were most likely accessing information from a company such as Yahoo or AOL, and not the common person.
As commercialization began to take hold, you could make your own web page. Tripod, Geocities, and others would be glad to lend you some space on their servers as long as your ran ads on your page. Everybody was telling everyone about their little niche. Family pictures, People’s hobbies, porn sites were springing up everywhere, chatting, and email were huge. it was like the wild wild west. Everything kind of settled down for a while after it all came crashing down when the dot.com bubble burst. It reminds me of the scene from Anchor Man when everyone is sitting around talking about the gang war they were just in, and Will Ferrell says “Boy, that escalated quickly… I mean, that really got out of hand fast.” Anyway, people’s websites evolved into online journals, and eventually into the blog. Which, if you didn’t know is what you are reading right now. Blogs were a good way to get information out about yourself or something that you did. And in the past, and I’m talking up until a couple years ago, that’s what blogs were about. People.

The Present
Then along came Google. Google, in my mind could be marked as a revolutionize to the Internet in the same way that AOL, Microsoft, and Napster are. Now you can search, and search well. Did you lose your needle in the haystack again? No need to worry, Google will find it. Google became so popular that the term for searching became “googling”. If you were trying to find something you could google it. Another thing Google did was pay to run advertisements on your page. This causes blogs to evolve they are no longer about people They were about technology, software, hardware, planes, trains and automobiles. They are everything and the kitchen sink. Anyone could run a blog and anyone could collect on it. Blogs absolutely exploded around 2004. In fact right now they are so big that I have that feeling like things are “really getting out of hand fast” again. Spam blogs, and spam in general are at near epidemic rates. I have to wonder who is paying for all these ads that google is selling. For those that are buying ads, I have to wonder if they are actually seeing results from them. With all this commotion in the “blogosphere” (Who ever thought that would be a word?) people began to step aside and on to the next form of connecting via the Internet.
We are beginning to move away from a directly communicating Internet, and moving towards an indirect communicating Internet. People are beginning to connect now based on interests, but they aren’t really connected. Or are they? They may never actually even speak to each other. Thus the term Social Bookmarking is coined. Social as in sharing, and bookmarking as in things you are interested in. Let’s take for example one of my favorite places, digg.com. You can have a friends list but the only thing you get out of it are news articles, videos, and other web-musings that your “friend” likes. You are not directly communicating with them but you are sharing similar experiences. Another good example of this are the media sharing sites such as Flickr and Youtube. Both give you the oppurtunity to share experiences with other people. The most popular photos and videos are raised to the top via viewing or rating and people are more apt to see them. In the past your friend may have told you “Hey, check this out” Now you have millions of people saying “Hey, check this out”, without ever actually saying anything.

The Future
The future of the internet is a clouded one, but that’s normal. It’s hard to say at this point where the technology will move but social interaction will always be around. I think that is the Internet’s most basic component. The vehicle for this social interaction will change as it has in the past. However, there are few things that concern me about the future. The war on spam must be one. In 2006 40% of all email was spam. Currently 85% (possibly higher) is spam. Spam blogs have popped up everywhere. Out of every ten blogs nine are spam. Secondly, We need to get the laws straight. The battle over music rights, net neutrality, various other grey areas need to be taken care of, and they need to be taken care of by the people who are affected by them. Debating them in Congress isn’t going to solve anything. Last, but not least, Open Source. As open source applications become more widely available we have to do everything we can to support their rise to power over proprietary software. Doing so, in my opinion, would open the door for an open source society where everything is shared.