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75% of Network Connections Not From Browsers
Trailwalker writes "An article at BigBlueBall.com states that 75% of web connections do not use a browser. IM and P2P applications are used instead." While surprising, this is probably more indicative of how instant messaging has been able to complement and/or replace email in recent times.
IM has less spam than e-mail!
One would think that spam and email worms constitutes a significant portion of that 75%.
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What about gaming? Many connections from that :)
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I would think that msblast makes up a larger amount of the applications with network connections. I work for an ISP and there a still many customers who are afflicted with that virus.
Think about that. Most HTTP traffic is fairly light compare to average P2P, Mail and FTP traffic. But 25% That's a heck of a lot for one protocol. Sure it's not over 50% but HTTP is still king of the Net.
I don't find this surprising at all... think about it... most people probably have 1-2 AIM windows open for each browser window, and sometimes have an internet radio or something else running at the same time.
Does it even matter anymore?
The article states that 75% of users use non-browser applications to access the internet.
It DOES NOT say that 75% of the connections are made by non-browser applications.
There is a difference, and I blame the lack of any sober editors at Slashdot today for this getting through.
how do they come up with this number?
From the article: "Source: Nielsen//NetRatings, December 2003". More information on Nielsen's products may interest you.
If Nielsen's net ratings work anything like their TV ratings, then lucky families get paid to put a spybox between the cable modem and the home router, with full knowledge and consent of what's going on. I'd expect an airtight privacy policy; Nielsen has provided TV ratings for over a decade.
AIM isn't very formal either....I wouldn't dream of IMing someone regarding a job interview, or a professional deal, etc...but I agree for informal communication, for the most part. Email's paper trail also has niceness about it though, but I suppose if MS has its way, Emails will be DRMed too. :)
"Internet users spent an average of three hours and 37 minutes per month using Internet applications."
I don't mean to badger at statistics without seeing their complete methodology, but many people just leave their IM client connected. And don't WMP and RealPlayer phone home? So it seems hard to hold to numbers without specifying an activity which can more easily be linked with HCI time.
The truth is that IM and music players probably are the big draw for most people, which is the conclusion in article title ("Instant Messaging and Media Players are Primary Internet Applications"). Of course, hasn't the Internet always been a majority of activity not directly related to a web browser? Is this news, or a new (more realistic) perspective?
After reading the article, I noted that Windows Media Player is the #1 application accessing the internet. All I can ask is, why?
Why does a media player need to connect to a server so frequently? What information is it sending out? What good does Windows Media Player provide the end user, that it is taking up 34.43% of the web connections?
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It might be broken, exploited, less sophisticated, and maybe even not as convenient as IM, but it's still at least as ubiquitous. Also, IM has a lot of conventions which make it often times (not all times) less professional or even communicative. For example, IM stresses ways to shorten words but not necessarily make things anymore clear (or more developed). It's a lot like a phone in many ways. And sure we use the phone a lot - to varying degrees of success.
Email is just becoming a mainstay of many people's life. And it is very accessible - it really is like electronic mail (it has many mail conventions) and people seem to respond to its simplicity well. Also, the art of writing a coherent sentence, proof reading it, and then choosing a better word or phrase is much more suited to email.
I just hope I didn't prove my ignorance of these things in this post ;)
Sure, maybe the majority of network traffic may come from other sources than the web, but this doesn't mean that the web plays any less of a part in most people's regular internet activities. On average, I can assume that most P2P connections occur somewhat dynamically (unstable, temporary, etc). For example, it is not uncommon for a single bittorrent download to require 20+ connections to other users. Since the connections of most home users are somewhat unreliable, this many is necessary. So of course this means more P2P traffic than that of http, but we have to keep in mind that what could have been retrieved with multiple P2P connections would only take one steady connection with a web server. And if IM traffic is measured by the connections between client and central server, well, that ought to be pretty many as well.
...for the common man like STunnel, FreeSWAN, or OpenVPN, how long can it be before people are just using private networks between family and friends at home to do IM, P2P or even Windows File Sharing? I've moved in this direction already with my family and friends. All it took was a little of my time to set up SSH clients with Local and Remote forwards that my family and friends initiate connection to my server with. Then they just access the Jabber server I run or, the internal mail server using IMAP, or the recipe database I've created, etc... Since some of my friends and family are Windows bound, I've been able to get them to use the Exodus client for Jabber with cygwin SSH to communicate with me. We even share RDP and VNC sessions. So... what does this have to do with the article? I would argue that there are a good number of people out there doing more than just IM, P2P or web browsing and they are probably doing it via tunneling. It can't be long before this becomes a part of the OS (even for Windows) to allow people to share data in new and very secure/private ways. It's done wonders for the support I offer my friends and family too...
Un-news
These statistics may be derived by bandwidth alone in which i'd probably give it some credibility as video and audio streaming can be extremely bandwidth intensive (especially the former).
One 3 minute streamed video clip at 300 kbps may require as much bandwidth as 100 webpages.
Hmmm... Pie...
How often does the average user's email client (read: Outlook Express/Outlook) check for new messages on the server?
In the same light, how often does IM clients check for new messages? Does it reuse the same connection, or initiate a new connection with the server? (I'm assuming its client->server, due to NATs, firewalls, etc).
Just because the client software is constantly requesting data does not make the software more popular. Statistics about *active* use (say, page hits, email messages, etc) would be more informative.
I wonder if this is because IM and P2P applications are left active all the time. In many cases running whenever the users computer is running.
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This article is ridiculously confusing. First of all, it looks like they're saying that 76% of people who use the web also use other programs besides web browsers to get internet content. But it doesn't help that apparently "Internet" has a very particular meaning, which excludes email (otherwise email traffic would have figured in here somewhere) but also miraculously excludes the web, since "Internet Applications" are only used by 76% of web surfers according to this article. This means either that web browsers are not, in fact, "internet applications," or that 24% of web surfers surveyed have direct telepathic connections to the 'net.
Unfortunately, there's no better info available... The company's original press release is pretty much reproduced in its entirety, word for word, by bigblueball news. I hope that Nielsen's clients aren't actually paying for info like this.
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So how do you communicate with someone who's not online or using a different service? Can you leave messages with people who aren't online? With people who are using a different IM service?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Internet users spent an average of three hours and 37 minutes per month using Internet applications. A page like a slashdot article containing some comments takes me more time to read (no internet activity in between) than to download. So, even if they could sniff all our data usage, it would not reflect our real time usage because of differing idle times for each application.
The answer is, get better friends. The whole point of IM is you can see whose online and available. For things that are time sensitive it's great. For example, I could email want to go to the movies at 7 tonight? around to all my friends. They could then reply when they get it, which might be the next day, or in 15 minutes. By the time they respond to my email, I might not be in a position I can check mine. With IM, you looks whose on, and talk with them. Furthermore, you can just strike up a chat, if you want to talk to that person, but anyone that gets annoyed if you dont chat with them is just retarded. If you just tell them you are busy at the moment, most people understand. If you dont want to be disturbed unless it's very important, put up an away message. If someone is really annoying, just block them. Most IM clients just show you as logged off, so if you need to talk to that person later, just unblock them. IM is best when used in situations where you would normally have to make a phone call, but don't want to interrupt the person the way a phone does. If IM isn't for you, dont use it. But most people like it the way it is, so I doubt it needs an overhaul. From the sounds of it, you and the people you talk with are trying to use it like a replacement for phone or email, instead of using it for what it's good at.
It's saying 75% of _Internet_ traffic is not HTTP, as far as I can tell. Back in the old days most Internet traffic was SMTP, NNTP, and FTP. I'm not too surprised if SMTP still is a large part of Internet traffic.
The summary makes it sound like 75% of port 80 connections aren't from web browsers, which would be weird IMHO. (On the other hand, there are lots and lots of web crawlers/spiders out there, so I could believe this stat too, at least for an "average" site.)
I highly doubt that 75% of all web connections do not involve browsers. I know that curl and wget are neato, but 75% of all web connections? Nonsense.
On the other hand, saying that 75% of internet connections are not by browsers isn't news at all.
Just pointing out that "web" implies www which implies http or https and nothing else.
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