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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...
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.
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
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.
"It's an ad!"
Longer version: the author describes a problem and then -- wonder of wonders! -- is selling something.
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.
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!
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.
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.
That's a business plan, not technical content.