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.

Comments

Re:Grilled sirloin steak with peppercorn sauce

[Lumpy]

No it wont change... the large closed sites get bigger. I am a member of several closed sites and they are going "offline" or off the main path because of all the retardation of suing over dumb things and corporate enforcement of corporate profits and ideals.

I VPN into a node that gives me access to one of the largest Automotive computer and electronics hacking groups out there. It's invite only and it was a major bitch to get an invite into it. All this stuff is closed because of the morons that run automotive companies. Other hardware hacking circles are also going that route, PS3 hacking is starting to close in because of sony's antics. But having access to a dis-assembly of a current GM ECM gives me more options for tuning and performance. Plus I have acces s to "illegal" ECM bin files to learn from or use as a baseline tune. It's not easy to get my hands on a ECM from a Caddilac CTS-V but the bin file and other files allow me to look inside and see what they did. Also trying to retrofit a canbus controlled steering assist system to a car that does not have it allows me to add modern power steering assist to a hotrod instead of letting that hardware get crushed in a junkyard scrap crusher.

It's going to get more and more closed, the good information is getting squirreled away because of corporations.

walled gardens

[jbolden]

Even bigger change came with the rise of social networks and various web apps. Every day more content is hidden in the walled gardens of the web, like Facebook or Twitter, behind the fence of login and password. Just think about it: how much interesting content have you discovered in your friend’s updates, notes and tweets? This content is invisible to Google and other search engines, it’s not backed up by wayback machine or proxy servers. The number of people seeing only the things recommended by their social circle is growing.

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.