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Splinternet, Or How We Broke the Good Old Web

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the zomg-its-the-end-of-the-world dept.

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.

19 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. /. News Network by Even+on+Slashdot+FOE · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  2. Grilled sirloin steak with peppercorn sauce by Anrego · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Grilled sirloin steak with peppercorn sauce by Rockoon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Disclaimer: can’t read the article (filtered)

      Ironic.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    2. Re:Grilled sirloin steak with peppercorn sauce by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think sites like facebook are the greatest threat to WWW interconnectedness. It seems to me that the new trend is to congregate on exclusive networks, like facebook. The problem with facebook? Most content is invisible to non-members. Yeah, sure, it's free to register...but what if I don't want to? Is facebook really giving me new informational content (I'm not talking about the social networking aspect) that was not available before in another form on the internet? No. It's just walling off the information from me.

      Clubs, cafes, restaurants, theaters...all used to have websites. Informative websites. Websites that used to state things like what was on the menu, or who was DJing on Friday night, or which band was playing on Saturday night, what the dress code is, how much cover is, pictures of what the place looked like, etc.

      Then facebook came with its profiles for businesses. Sure, it started off with a mostly empty profile that just pointed to the existing website. But now, in many cases, it's the other way around: now it's the website that is empty - it often contains the establishment's name and address and a link to the facebook group/page/profile. That's it.

      Dunno 'bout everyone else, but for me, that really sucks. Information that was once freely available is now behind somebody's registration wall. It's like the early 90s again, with CompuSERVE and AOL. Now I often find that without a facebook profile, it's impossible to figure out what's going on in town tonight using the web - something that was easily doable until very recently.

    3. Re:Grilled sirloin steak with peppercorn sauce by Lumpy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    4. Re:Grilled sirloin steak with peppercorn sauce by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It did. In a nutshell it means "you make the content, I make the money with it".

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  3. A story about nothing by rbanzai · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's a self-promotion piece that tries to pull disparate internet issues together and fails.

  4. It has a catchy name by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    It must be true

  5. Mod parent down by KPU · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is an advertisement for some lame web sharing startup and nothing more.

  6. WTF? by bcmm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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 /dev/mem | strings | grep -i llama
    Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
  7. Astroturf story by sstamps · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."
  8. Splinternet by Baseclass · · Score: 3, Funny
    FTFA

    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
  9. aw c'mon,based mostly on social privacy settings?? by rubycodez · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  10. Adm. Akbar warning by himself · · Score: 3, Informative

    "It's an ad!"

    Longer version: the author describes a problem and then -- wonder of wonders! -- is selling something.

    1. Re:Adm. Akbar warning by Animats · · Score: 3

      Worse, it's an ad for a site which immediately wants you to sign up. I clicked "deny" for its cookie, and now the site won't load at all. Also, "an augmented browsing web app which allows you to see other people visiting the website you're visiting" sounds like a terrible idea from a privacy standpoint.

  11. The author seems to suffer from nostalgia by JSBiff · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  12. Oh noes! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    The Internet is fracturing into interconnected networks!

  13. Re:aw c'mon,based mostly on social privacy setting by rubycodez · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  14. walled gardens by jbolden · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.