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Splinternet, Or How We Broke the Good Old Web
StormDriver writes "I don't want to be that scruffy guy with 'The end is nigh' sign and some really bad dental problems, but most industry analysts already noticed that global Internet is coming apart, changing into a cluster of smaller and more closed webs. They have even created a catchy name for this Web 3.0 – the Splinternet.
A blogger claims it's the end of the worl^H^H^H^Hinternet. More information and comparisons with similar claims dating back to 1995 at 11.
Disclaimer: can’t read the article (filtered) but have a good guess at what it says
Personally, I put part of the blame on mobile “apps”. You can’t charge someone for access to a website unless you’ve got some really compelling content.. but you sure can sell them an app for their phone that provides the same kind of information for a few dollars.
And yes, there are lots of mobile apps that wouldn’t be practical in website form, but there are just as many that could easily be a website.
As for the large closed sites that’ll change. Everything in tech seems to go through periods of convergence when the current set of technology becomes more refined, and divergence when it’s time for change. I actually don’t long for the days of wading through geocities and lycos and angelfire pages looking for some tidbit of into when these days I plug it into wikipedia, or some other niche wiki.
As for facebook and myspace and twitter, I think they’ve largely replaced the personal website and personal blog site for so many people because they provide all the functionality most people who had a personal site wanted, with none of the flexibility that they didn’t. When people want to start branching out in some way that you can’t do with facebook and friends en-masse.. you’ll see divergence start happening again.
Also, if "Web 3.0" actually becomes a new buzzword at this point in time... someones losing a finger.
It's a self-promotion piece that tries to pull disparate internet issues together and fails.
It must be true
...but what does TMNT have to do with this?
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
This is an advertisement for some lame web sharing startup and nothing more.
There, it saw 4 baby turtlenets crawling in a green ooze...
RTA
The guy's confusing content with hardware....
OK, content is based on location and user preferences.... Maybe if I'm Japanese I want content in Japanese and not in Swahili? How exactly is this "splintering" the net?
The hardware works just fine, as the upheavals in North Africa have proven.
Catchy name, just made for some pseudo babble in the Sunday papers, but content-free.
This seems 100% content-free... First of all, is this about the web or the internet? If they don't know the difference, how did they get on the front page of Slashdot?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
The article is a 10 graph ad for their social software.
Nothing more than a bogus lead-in story talking about the product that the story's author is "preparing to release someday". Basically, creating a problem for his "solution".
News flash: develop your damn product first, let people try it out, and THEN promote it. Astroturfing vaporware is the epitome of hubris.
I predict EPIC FAIL for this one.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
Back then, the Internet was one - a global web, similar regardless of weather
Well I can attest to the fact that "back then" during stormy weather my internet went down on several occasions.
No phone = no internet.
^^vv<><>BA
a group of interconnected clusters. With the ability to route between them. The idea of interconnecting clusters is the core idea of the original Internet in the first place... And if that was Day 1 of Internet Genesis, then Day 2 was hosting multiple application spaces. Like Gopher versus WWW versus FTP versus email - nobody has ever claimed it all was one big homogenous lump!
Major thrust of article is that "oh noes, the facebook and twitter content of the web is often hidden behind login requirements and privacy settings".
You know what, I don't care if ALL the social networking via the internet is normally inaccessible and un-indexable and unreachable by search engine. Part of the good thing about the internet is that sites, such as my bank's, can protect data from public visibility. That's not splintering. The internet is only splintered if I can't get to my bank's web server when traveling around the globe. So far, I haven't noticed that problem, even from the poorest third world countries the internet cafes with ten year old Hitachi towers pulled from some first world dumpster running pirated windows XP (with latest updates, mind you) work just fine. That's f'ing amazing, I can pay my electric bill and win eBay auction from Laos or Cambodia and have the stuff arriving home at the same time I do.
Then he raises the specter of content filtering, *might* happen and might fracture internet. Well, the web ain't broken yet.
Most industry analysts make money out of scaremongering such things, and recommending solutions. Many, if not most, of them are snake-oil salesmen. I recommend taking every single thing they say with a pinch of salt.
This article is garbage. Yeah the Internet, like every system, needs good management -- but it's not going anywhere anytime soon.
The "internet" is about connectivity, not about web protocols and gadgets. So long as connectivity on the internet is supplied by ISPs in a content neutral manner, I am quite okay with it.
And that's where I get a little bugged though -- when the prospect of network neutrality is broken, I have issues with the grand design getting destroyed.
Make your walled gardens... your paywalls... do whatever you like with your endpoints on the internet. Just leave the public pathways ALONE!
This is a repeat from 1992 or so.
This essay is a mess. For one example, the guy laments that some mobile devices support Adobe Flash while others do not. He argues later that Facebook and twitter are walled gardens which can not be indexed by search engines or stored for prosperity by the Wayback Machine. Well, guess what, those Adobe Flash websites you wish were universally accessible are not indexed by search engines or archived in the Wayback Machine, either!
Censorship and greedy media corps!
Of course people are going to set up some darknet or VPNs amongst friends/collaborators if they are constantly spied upon!
The public internet is going to become a shopping mall eventually and the real interesting stuff is going to happen on smaller darknets.
"It's an ad!"
Longer version: the author describes a problem and then -- wonder of wonders! -- is selling something.
Actually, I don't mind the new moniker (Web 3.0) if it means we can confine all the high-bandwidth, AJAX-heavy websites to an ill-reputed package named (Web 2.0) and toss it out the window.
How we broke the good ole article. Maybe someone can write an article about this.
There seems to be a particular psychological disorder, which people apparently get more vulnerable to the older they get, called "Nostalgia". I think it's closely related to "Dementia". Might even just be a type of dementia.
Nostalgia causes people to forget the truth about the past and remember it in a far better light than it actually happened. For example, from the article:
In the beginning, most users browsed the Internet from similar desktop machines. Even if the operating system was different, standardized web protocols and languages made the final experience similar, whether you were using Windows 3.1 machine or your trusty classic Mac.
Did that guy ever USE a version of IE before version 7, or the old Netscape Navigator browsers?
I remember all the time, trying to visit websites, getting messages that the website was designed for some other browser, and either not being able to access the content on the site at all, or having it render terribly glitchy. As a sometimes Linux user, I noticed a lot of problems accessing some websites with the browsers available for Linux (Netscape, Mosaic, etc).
Standards compatibility has come a long, long way since then. I would argue that we have better standards, and better implementations of those standards now than we ever did before. IE9 has greatly improved Microsoft's standards compliance, by most accounts. iPhone/Android/Blackberry/misc cell phones do a pretty decent job rendering most websites - something which could not be said of the early cell phone browsers.
MS tried to splinter the web with IE and proprietary standards. It failed. Many said that Apple would splinter the web with the lack of Flash on iPhone, but major parts of the web away from that proprietary standard. The parts of the web that do not work on mobile browsers tend to have Apps. The next major attempt at splintering will be the proliferation of paywalls. I don't think these wil success either.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
there's some chance, as the truth is ignored, that we'll survive/thrive anyway. babys rule. perfect math. no going back from the truth. don't look unless you are ready for real changes. thanks
Isn't the Scruffy guy is a janitor?
I'm confused with Web 3.0.
What happened to the 2.1 series and where are the nightly and RC builds that lead to 3.0 being released? Where the hell is this entire project even being hosted, maintained and discussed? Where the freaking road map?
I heard Infinium got a license deal from the SCO group and will be working on a porting DNF to work with Web 3.0.
I see you have never run into "This content is not available from your area".
Whooosh to everyone in the US. The internet IS splintered. I live in Central America - care to explain to me why a major online retailer keeps insisting - no matter what option I select - on charging me in Pound Sterling? I am entered in Oracle's database since I downloaded MySQL. Despite setting everything as English when I signed up (I am a native English speaker), they insist on sending me email in Spanish. There are countless other examples (like customer service and product returns to a major manufacturer whose equipment was purchased in the US, has never left the US, was billed to my US address (I have a condo in Fla), and yet because my IP is from Central America, they refuse to honor the return. And let's not get into the fact that my country has 8 digit telephone numbers (how many times do I get errors because of this?) and no zip code (00000 doesn't always work).
I wouldn't go so far as to call it Web 3.0, but there are some serious issues being caused by shoddy/lazy programming and erroneous assumptions and these are affecting the usefulness of the internet for a HUGE market.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The Internet is fracturing into interconnected networks!
To be fair, the problem with the likes of Facebook's closed nature isn't in cases where *your* privacy is being protected. It contains much content of general interest that isn't private per se- quite the opposite, I'm sure that its creators made it "public" within Facebook- but that you have to be signed on and inside- and having your privacy invaded by- their proprietary platform to even know that most of it exists.
Is it really the case that some music venue putting its listings, etc. up on Facebook wants them to remain inaccessible to those outside Facebook? Unlikely- I'm sure that given the choice, and if they thought about it (or cared that much) they'd happily want it accessible to every man and his dog. No reason it shouldn't be.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Upon reading the headline and summary, I went to read the article, expecting to read about governmental fracturing of the Internet, including web, email, and other services, behind national firewalls and censorship. That's a REAL issue. Instead, I found that the article was about (1) the horrors of not having a standard browser with the same extensions for everyone, and (2) the heresy of making people either pay (e.g. NYT) or exchange personal contact information (e.g. Facebook) for certain content. The browser wars are as always has been, but HTML5 is a fine advancement and it is being deployed by market pressure. As to paying or bartering info for content -- well, it is either that or advertising. I am not bothered by it. The young ones (yes, I am an old fart) seem to gleefully offer up access to themselves in exchange for access to similarly minded individual. I got one of them-there Facebook accounts, myself. Not to mention LinkIn, Twitter, MySpace, ...
None of the above (paywalls, social networks) can be said to fracturing the web, anymore than the L train fractures the transportation system. It just means sometimes you are asked to pay a fare.
-- Perhaps I see less than some, but more than many.
Whoosh on you, your complaints have nothing to do with "splintering of internet", your packets are getting to and from Oracle.com just fine and to and from the manufacturer just fine. If sites policies and package shipping procedures cause you problems, that's splintering and alienation of their customer base, bad and shame on them, but the internet is doing its job.
"...a cluster of smaller and more closed webs."
It has always been so. Every corporate network is a closed web. Every bulletin board is a closed web. Thus it has always been. The Internet is a network of networks.
OK, content is based on location and user preferences.... Maybe if I'm Japanese I want content in Japanese and not in Swahili? How exactly is this "splintering" the net?
If you live in Japan, and you happen to speak Japanese and Spanish, you don't necessarily want to be locked out of articles in Spanish.
If you are visiting Japan but happen to speak English, you don't necessarily want to be locked out of articles in English.
If you're in Canada and speak English, you don't necessarily want to be locked out of articles and especially videos in English *cough*Hulu*cough*.
"I have always liked... Cowabunga."
Thanks to countries like China, and Syria, and Libya and .....the list is endless, of how many of these countries that want to control the flow of information are breaking the internet as we know it....then we will all have splinter factions of the internet running in each country, and 1 main controller giving access to the rest of the outside world....and controlling what you see in your country, I sure hope NA is left out of this.
Those of us in the United States don't get to use Spotify in the UK. Call it even.
We encounter this in the US too. For example Spotify.
Imminent death of the net predicted!
Worth noting: The fearmongering about the death of the 'net actually pre-dates the Internet. It originally referred to Usenet. The more things change...
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Well that's interesting. He specifically talking about the mid 1980-today and the flat internet. But in the 1980s the internet was not remotely flat. You frequently had to log onto sites and had all sorts of features depending on your IP address that you wouldn't have elsewhere. Passwords and user accounts dominanted and when you got things had a lot to do with the servers directly upstream from you. For example how quickly did your Usenet feeds updated determined what the cycle time was on discussions like this one. And of course there were huge numbers of walled gardens, much more walled then today since they belonged to your ISP. AOL, Prodigy, Genie, Compuserve and smaller sites were very different experiences. Other sites like Odyssey were almost completely walled off and rode piggy back on Compuserve's network as a private virtual walled garden, much like a corporate interanet today using an MPLS.
As for hardware making a difference, it did then too. Unix users had a much richer fuller internet experience.
So I'm not sure what he's talking about.
Sumtimes I wonder why people(especially poets...) attempt to some up a somearily simple issue that is obviously the some of it's parts.
The internet was originally developed by academic people for the goal of free distribution of knowledge. It has since been monetized, commercialized, popularized, and grasped at by commercial and government special interests. It makes sense that there are going to be border lines drawn in now by all the tribalistic people who either want their share or to separate those who have different interests/beliefs.
ITYM "iDiots"?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The wild west days were great and all but as long as their is worldwide connectivity there are going to be walls and barriers in different countries and on different platforms, there is simply no other way short of some utopian one world society to do it any other way. America's rules are different from China's, China's are different from Austrailia, etc.
The walled garden and boutique services such as the iphone and certain isp's are usually joined by choice not by requirement. In the past we actually had more of those but they were a requirement rather than a choice. I can remember the days of Lynx and Gopher when nearly every destination was a password away. Information is really much freer now but the concept of censorship and walled gardens have come more to the forefront because the information actually exists online now where before bits and pieces were there but most of it was unobtainable to the masses.
Yeah, the web has changed in my day.
It used to be full of homepages. Personal sites. If you searched for something (and search sucked in those days, trust me), more often then not you found a website that someone had made on their own time and covered whatever subjects they wanted it to. It depended on what you were searching for, but it ran the gamut of important to trivial. From fan-reviews of books, to people raging about how awesome the newest game was. But also important stuff like the effects of the fall of the Berlin wall the the social entanglement the web is posing for Muslim women.
Most of these pages were hosted for free. And I believe that's where I came in. Before the 90's putting something on the web required you to run your own server. Or have access to one in college or something. In the 90's, geocities and all lowered the bar for the internet and hosting was now free, with a small string attached. They technically owned anything you put out there and got what advertising revenue they could slap on the side.
Now a days things have changed. People no longer have their own websites, that's too much work. The bar has been lowered even further. You no longer need to know HTML or even what a tag is. In the web2.0 world, everyone can simply upload what they want onto websites. Facebook, flicker, and all. Those places have done the heavy lifting of making the webpage and all people have to do is insert the content. Web pages that take in people's information, pictures, links, knowledge and all that crap and host it for everyone else to see. When you Google something now, the first result is usually Wikipedia. Because Wikipedia is where people upload their knowledge.
But anyway, today's internet is more centralized. If you want to know about a movie, you don't find someone's website with a page dedicated to ranting about the movie, you go to imdb and find facts and reviews uploaded by people. You see someone's rant that was upmodded by other. The one that got downmodded is buried and (if you're feeling old and cynical) the truly insightful one got censored.
This is a slightly fearful consolidation of the web. Whereas there was once an ever-increasing amount of participation on the web, the meaningful web is now a handful of sites dedicated to their particular topic. It's arguably more structured, but it's taking the power from the people and putting it in the hands of the companies that own the sites. It's arguably the natural course for these sorts of things. Something new came along. Everyone competed, and then a few, very few, people won and started to consolidate. Fighting that process is nearly hopeless. But the natural way things work is kinda crappy. It leads to monopolies, and abuse of power.
And so that I'm not just reminiscing: How about making an easy to implement protocol that lets individuals with home-made webpages and servers establish friends and circles of trust. There's no reason that social network need to be run by a company. Distributed networks are simply better in the long run.
The Internet is changing and I'm scared.
http://www.bynarystudio.com
It's not so much about the privacy. It's more about how facebook etc are almost becoming internets within the internet (Innernets? Insidernets? - Ed).
It's sort of regressing to the "walled garden" age.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Did he argue that there was only one thing wrong, and those two things were different aspects of the same fault? Did he even claim they were in some way causally related?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Splinternet? Here you go.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Actually I live in the US and have come across the "This content is not available outside the US" message.
That's a business plan, not technical content.
...Stormdriver will allow you to see the web as recommended by other users. It will be much easier to avoid the really bad sites and content...
Isn't that what DIGG is all about? Ranking websites by popularity and just visiting those that other people think are cool?
Why can't we let people believe whatever they like? It's not like a little religion has ever hurt anyone.
The author is completely and 100% incorrect in his conclusions. Yes, facebook and twitter have private areas, their purpose serves a need to sharing of information with some level of scope. If the author is so consumed by facebook privatizing information, he really should ask himself -- should it be private in the first place? Often times, the answer is YES. Yes, I would find it very reasonable for a person to want a blog, wall, etc., that is whitelisted for their own friends/family.
Companies that setup private facebook only ads, are only hurting themselves -- because they are privatizing information that should be publicly available. However, most businesses have all their content open and available to anyone, regardless of whether or not they are "logged in".
Moreover, the content of the internet is almost wholly bittorrent, streaming media, and the like. Back in the AOL days, internet traffic consisted mainly of email, IM, and images. We used to pay for pornography. Fast forward 20 years. Now we have peer to peer protocols, streaming video, private and public broadcasting venues for the individuals (free) and for corporations (paid) that constitute most internet traffic (with volumes of of free, indexed, edge cached, and categorized pr0n). Whole countries, where propaganda and information blockades used to reign supreme, we now have nations revolting because they are able to communicate globally. This is the exact opposite of what this article implies.
I would suggest to the author to go peddle his fear mongering elsewhere
The Internet is splintering? Really? Here, I thought that -everybody- spoke English and used the same exact coding standards.
I come to slashdot to read news, not to see how computer illiterate the posters are.
When these paid advertorials get posted, could the editors at least mark them as such?
While you are correct in your claim that these problems do not affect TCP/IP packet routing, you're forgetting that you can route all the packets you want with no lag and no lost packets, but what people want the packets FOR is content. The internet doesn't exist just to move data around - there is a point to it: move the data I need around. These anomalies end up degrading the quality of the internet without affecting the infrastructure per se.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Even further back:
Constantine the Great AD 337
I don't know if it's worth mentioning, but do dah, do dah! in Navajo basically means "no it isn't, no it isn't!"
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Is it really the case that some music venue putting its listings, etc. up on Facebook wants them to remain inaccessible to those outside Facebook? Unlikely- I'm sure that given the choice, and if they thought about it (or cared that much) they'd happily want it accessible to every man and his dog.
Yes, that's why they have their own websites, which are plastered with things to get you to sign up for FB, or link in with FB. Hell, a lot of sites are now setup so the content on their site and their FB content are directly linked.
They have the choice. The ones who care, use that choice. I've seen two kinds of content (in terms of businesses) which are locked behind a FB membership:
1. FB-related promotions. Sign up for FB and 'Like' our store or join our friends list, get a coupon or a blow job, etc. The reason these are hidden is what they really want is to trade that coupon for one more person advertising for them, and possibly also personal info as well.
2. Cheapskate small businesses which are too technically UN-savvy to set up a hosted web page. A few clicks and boom, now you have a presence in "cyberspace".
The Web is not broken, its capabilities are actually growing.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
just the end of the World Wide Web.
It's not even the end of the Web. All these devices are still accessing websites, websites made friendly to hand held devices not just to desktop computers.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?