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Has The Internet Peaked?
Boone^ writes: "ZDNet has some commentary detailing how they believe that the Internet has 'peaked', and is now settling down. Broadband isn't providing people with interactive TVs, just a pleasant Web experience. The list goes on. One British dot-com (err .co.uk) is putting its last minute Christmas push out on paper instead of online. Is the age of vast Internet exploration over? Do we now know what we've got, what works and what doesn't, and are now beginning to refine those?"
No. The Internet has not peaked. People thought the Internet peaked with Netscape 3.0 - NOT! Wait and see how invasive this thing is yet to become - esp. with IPv6 right-around-the-corner-any-time-now. In another 5 years, people may get ip address space personally asigned to them. Wouldn't that be interesting? Let's see where this ride lets off - it's only just begun...
Fawking Trolls!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
The statement 'the internet has peaked' is so loosely used it's not funny.
You can't ask 'has the internet peaked?', maybe 'has internet usage peaked?', but the internet in general is not something that can be determined to have peaked.
Even if the number of connections on the internet (not just the web and email) had peaked (which I storngly doubt it has) it doesn't validate a broad statement like 'has the internet peaked?'.
Besides just because all the dot comers have suddenly realised that you cann't use the internet for absolutely everything doecn't mean there won't be any more innovation as far as the internet (or web for that matter) is conerned.
While saying that the internet has "peaked" may seem a bit odd because, of course, it will continue to grow, I think this article raises a good point.
Regular growth of all sorts of observable phenomenon starts slow, speeds up quickly, and then levels off to grow more slowly. The growth curve looks like an "S" with it's ends stretched out. A tree, for example, may grow 20,000% in the year after germination, but only grow 2% in it's 20th year.
Perhaps rather than the internet itself "peaking," we might say it's acceleration of growth has passed it's max.
hello, the internet is in its INFANCY! at least on the mainstream level. i know everything is this electronic age is moving fast, but the internet has not yet peaked. is has to settle down before it expands again, true. but it will not slow down significantly until something replaces it. i remember that people thought the internet would be crushed under its own weight by 2001. people say these things without considering other possibilties, most of which are far more likely.
Death of Internet Predicted: Film at 11:30.
Since Al Gore, the inventor of the internet, has lost the election and will be going home on January 20, 2001, apparently he'll be shutting down the internet on that day and taking it with him.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I guess he was listening through the thin walls in the hotel room next door:
(Internet): "Ungh....Ungh....yeah broadband baby, all for you, I promise....ungh....ungh....all the porn and details on making pasta figurines too....UNGH...ungh...ungh...search engines based on outside linking...interactive Who Wants to Be a Millionaire....Slashdot Karma....it's all yours baby....Ungh ungh ungh UNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGH!!!"
(Internet): "Sorry baby...I didn't mean to peak like that. I got excited. No, don't get dressed. Cmon baby..."
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Let me give you the lowdown
A few years after I graduated, a local university made waves by being the first in the nation to demand that every incoming freshman must have a computer. It was considered frighteningly drastic.
It took a few more years for every campus to run to catch the wave and install networking to the dorms.
The 1999 grads were the first out who had the "web" for their entire college experience, and where doing something as sophisticated as downloading digital audio was not just a geeky preoccupation but rather one deeply in the mainstream.
What I'm trying to say here is that the 'net hasn't even really started its peak. The masses out there aren't putting it to its test. The people with the money are still far older than anyone who grew up with the net, and many of 'em are still scared of trying to manage their bookmarks.
Without question, the net will continue to become more ubiquitous, usage will continue to increase, new applications will be found, exciting new appliances will be developed. Think of the boundaries we have yet to cross. A majority of people yet to have email addresses, for example.
A lot of people have to learn to change their behavior in order for a lot of the .com concepts to really take off, and *that* might be fair to examine. I for one would love to have my groceries delivered; but I know that people, in general, are sentimentally attached to the idea of visiting the warehouse and lugging heavy bags of stuff back to their homes.
And when major ecommerce players -- I mean MAJOR major -- still make simple mistakes in usability on their websites, we know they have a lot to learn about how to get people into buying online.
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The main focus of the article is the fact that commercial sites (primarily e-commerce) are turning away from net-only sales strategies. The random nature of the web and the sheer size of it can't compete in every way with something that sits around your house all day (catalog) or something that pushes content at you without your interaction (television).
I see this "peak", if that's what you want to call it, as a sign of what the true purpose of the internet is: a vast store of information. When you walk into Wal-Mart, are you reviecing information? I don't think so... you're getting bombarded with mental cues to BUY. I doubt the managers of retail stores care at all whether you leave their enlightened. About the only place you may leave more informed is a book store, which is why Amazon is really the only e-commerce operation that's making money: it is closest to the true purpose of the net as a medium. Also, one rarely randomly shops on impulse in a book store, they seek what they are looking for. The net was not designed to manipulate your buying impulses, it was designed for the searching and retrieving of information.
Let the net "peak", maybe all of the profiteers will place their marketing where we want it, instead of leaving fliers between books in our library. It really sickens me that the only standard by which the internet is measured these days is by how much cash it can generate.
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
It's uncanny how people associate the Net with the Web. Two different things altogether (although one is required for the other). Maybe the WEB has reached a potential peak, but the Internet is still a maze of possibilities, much more so than TV's and Phones.
Detroit (AP) - With the widespread adoption of the new Ford Model T, in this, the year 1920, it has become clear that most of the issues surrounding the automobile have been addressed in the past twenty-five years of innovation.
For instance, many people are reverting back to walking to go to the neighbor's house, or to simply get some exercise. The automobile has gone from being a novelty to being integrated into the everyday lives of people, and some question whether any new technological advances can be made. Indeed, recent thermodynamic studies question whether the inherent inefficiencies in automobile engines make the pursuit of such advances worthwhile.
People who drive automobiles are generally happy with the way they use them, as intracity and other localized transportation avenues, and demand for other uses for automobiles is dwindling. Despite some fringe elements calling for a countrywide "interstate" system of roads, trains and boats, with their greater hauling capacity and more reliable operation, will probably squeeze out any such ideas of mass cargo transportation by road.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
However, I strongly believe that the media and the marketing of available technologies drives the ebb and flow of interest. If the media stresses that we've "peaked" and are now in a "slow-down period", this will calm the excitement and interest that many of the not-as-savvy users have.
It's a pretty simple concept: hype the internet and associated technologies, and people will stay excited and interested. state the (alleged) fact that the peak has been reached, and people will calm down and not be so avid to jump on the technological bandwagon, so to speak.
"I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein
There has been little to no improvement in the user experience of commercial web sites. Things like customer service, order fulfillment, information architecture, usability, and privacy have generally not improved at all in the last five years -- and they were pretty shitty to begin with. It's the year 2000, and I still see well-funded dotcoms with unusable navigation and time-wasting splash pages. It's the year 2000, and I still get spam from most of the companies I've ordered a product from.
I was more optimistic at first, telling myself that eventually companies would realize the importance of user experience, but I'm starting to think that there's a poisoning of the waters going on. There are a lot of surveys that indicate that web users have an extremely low trust of web sites in general. And it might be very difficult for one individual web site to change that tide. A possible short-term trend, then, might involve a massive die-off of commercial web sites, followed by a period where new entrants will have to work ten times as hard on user experience, just to get over user suspicion.
Of course, if you look at the web in non-commercial terms, it's pretty successful. Personally, I find it remarkable that I can get a quick answer to most any narrowly defined question in a matter of minutes: I go to google, type in something like "sake temperature FAQ", and get almost instantly pointed to the quick answer I need. Maybe that's not the buy-everything-online future predicted in the tech-business press. But maybe life isn't just about buying shit.
Look at the most recent groundbreaking consumer technology: Napster spawned thousands of users (and hundreds of Slashdot stories) by writing an entirely new protocol that has nothing to do with the web. You could make the case that innovation on the web will slow down now, since there's less new ground to cover. But there's still a lot of ground to be covered by writing entirely new protocols for applications that the Web was simply never intended to support.
If you wanted to, you could even make the point that the web and e-mail were killer apps for the internet as a whole. If you'd created Napster five years ago, its impact would've been marginal. But because everybody had been hooked into the network because of all these grand predictions of an web-based future, Napster had a much bigger user base to start from.
Do domain names matter?
Maybe the web has peaked, or maybe not- My first thought was at the web peaked years ago, but I can't really think of any specific time, which maybe suggests that it hasn't peaked yet after all.
The Internet definately has not peaked.
Just look at P2P. Napster use is huge, even though it's a very single-use system. And there is lots more development that can be done with P2P. I think we've just seen the beginning there.
And who knows what will be the next thing after P2P?
People assume the Internet == WWW. Even people who know better make that mistake once in a while, if only briefly. But we do know better, right?
This is phenomenon happens with every new technology, especially computer-related ones. You have an initial wave of faddishness and starry eyed optimism, full of promises and hype. It's especially helpful if people think they can make money off it. Then, inevitably, the dreams don't pan out and you wind up with a big downturn, with everyone spelling gloom and doom and spouting that it'll never work, it's peaked, no one is interested, etc. Basically sour grapes because not as much money was made as was predicted. Then, again inevitably, people cool off and return to the original idea with newly realistic expectations, and a happy middle ground is reached wherein the technology lives up to its potential and delivers what it should.
It happened with video games, it happened with satellite TVs, it happened with personal computers (more than once that one), and it's happening now with the web. The Web is overhyped and overmarketed. Home users on 56K are tired of the crappy surfing experience, and businesses are discovering that having a Web presence isn't that trivial to do and doesn't rake in the dough they thought it would. So the big boom is over, but the Internet isn't going away. After the dust has settled and people's expectations become more realistic, the Internet will fade into the background -- it will become a ubiquitous part of everyday life, like the telephone, cable TV, and everything else we take for granted now but was initially hyped as the Next Great Thing.
I haven't turned on a TV set in over a year. Yet I haven't missed an episode of southpark, Startrek Voyager, Dark Angel, the Dune miniseries, and anything else I cared to watch. I watched it all on my computer. My... interactive TV.. if you would. Granted, its not the medium that the future version is hyped to be. Its not as convienent as Tivo for the average consumer, although for me it fits right into my regular tasks so I notice no inconvienence on my part. And yes, its probably not 100% legal.
However, I can tell you that there are NO technical limitations WHATSOEVER that prevent this type of interaction. The laws of the marketplace, copyright laws, marketing and advertising issues are the reasons why interactive TV over broadband hasn't taken off yet. Its NOT for lack of interest. But it will have to compete with a television set for convienence of use, and with cable in pricing.
Also, remember that this does not have to be STREAMING media. You need not limit the quality of your playback to the lowest common denominator. Let your customers download the program they wish to watch. Harddrives as a reusable storage method are quite reasonably priced. Once downloaded, the customer can watch it whenever he/she wants and can keep it as long as they can store it. Don't be sneaky trying to force individual payments for each download. Just charge a flat monthly fee for the service.
Will there be blatent piracy? Certainly. There is now. Nothing will change except that you might be able to sell me a service that I'm currently getting for free because you don't offer it. The technologies will emerge regardless of what you choose to do about them. You have a choice here, you can ride the wave when it comes in or get caught in a wake and drown. Napster is as popular as it is not because people want to steal money from artists (yes, I know the argument about that), and not all of them are just looking for freebies. It exists because the music industry refused to implement such a service early on when they could have had a lot more control over its use and revenue possibilities. Instead they chose to hold onto their old ideals and they completely missed the opportunity of a lifetime.
And so the internet grows on. And its not growing any slower. Just because the hype has died down does NOT mean that its leveling out. Hype isn't always the best form of motivation anyways. Internet stocks didn't crash because the an internet based economy is a flawed concept. They crashed because the companies behind those stocks were based mostly on hype. They weren't created to develop services, they were created to keep the hype alive. When the hype died down, the investors tarried, the stock market slumped and everyone suddenly got nervous and got out. As a result, the linux stocks took a bit of a beating, not because they were conceptual hype (although some were/are), but because a lot of their revenue was from other dot.com companies that WERE based on hype and therefore some of their market ceased to exist.
And don't forget. The web != the internet. They are certainly related, but all the web really is is a single internet based service. The internet is 3 times older than the web. Services have "peaked" before and all but died out, to be replaced by something more interactive, useful and/or visually pleasing. The internet itself still grows on. My interactive TV has NO involvement whatsoever with the "web" and its unlikely that it ever will.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here