The internet this decade - step AWAY from the computer!

Why the future of the internet has very little to do with your desktop computer.

With the imminent arrival of the Apple tablet/iPad/ iSlate dinner-plate sized portable computing device, it's been a popular thing to reflect on where this interweb thing came from and where it might be going to.

We all know it started 20 years ago with a bunch of scientists at CERN wanting to share documents across different computers with a common format (see Tim Berners-Lee's Weaving the Web for all that stuff). It went into message boards, web pages, web sites, forums, audio, video, advertising, ecommerce, search and the need for a Titanic scale web presence to be taken seriously. With porn, junk, plane tickets, advertising and books proving to be where the money was mainly at.

I'm reminded of a great quote from the late 1990s (allegedly attributed to media futurist Marshall McLuhan) that the problem we humans would face in 2010 would be not getting ON to the internet, but ever getting OFF it! Bullseye - this is definitely where we are now.

Dialing up and enduring 2400 baud modem's shrieking handshakes was like rolling the dice at Vegas - gambling whether it would come up this time? That's a distant memory for most, and not even a known concept for many. Apple offer it as highly ironic ringtone on the iPhone.

A great blog post on Mashable is worth us all taking the time out (from TV sitcoms for example ;-) to read in detail. Bravely titled 'What the web of tomorrow will look like: 4 big trends to watch', it's on the money with the sort of issues our clients face.

Trend #1: The web will be accessible anywhere

In the USA the spread of Wi-Fi is impressive, given free wi-fi was only invented in 2003 - now people are seriously talking about a national grid network across major cities. Admittedly, they were talking about that when we were in San Francisco 10 years ago, but the country has had a torrid time since those heady dot-com days.

This is the trend that concerns me most for our place in the world - New Zealand is getting a bad reputation as being luddites when it comes to free wi-fi access. On his recent trip to the North Island, our alumni Nigel Dalton found only 1 free hotspot in 2000kms of driving (here's to you Crouton Cafe in Kinloch!).

Trend #2: Web access will not focus on the personal computer

Microsoft's lack of a presence in the mobile computing market is about to become an obvious goof-up of Titanic proportions - despite Billy-come-lately Gates getting a twitter account this month. He could have bought Twitter with a week's income a couple of years ago.

The personal computer's dominance is over for web browsing and consumption. Look beyond the Apple 'slate' computer hype to the BBC's progress delivering its programs (via iPlayer) on consumer platforms like Playstation for examples of what devices will matter in the next few years.

We've experienced the challenge of getting business people to accept that just when the internet became relatively understandable ("it's behind that e logo on my desktop"), it's going somewhere else. Hell, I remember fax machines being the technology that would bring down the Post Office.

Too many corporate digital strategies are currently focused on producing what we call a King Kong website. Waste of money now. You need some things that are small, to the point, and work fast over wi-fi or 3G to avoid making Telecom rich(er).

Trend #3: The web will be (multi) media-centric

What's interesting to us about this prediction is that the multi-media you will interact with may not be entirely delivered in real-time. 3G mobile video still sucks, and 4G is a while away unless you live in the digital first world. Think a clever mixture of YouTube and your iPhone. Wi-fi will help.

But needless to say, the web is now further along the continuum from ascii characters on a message board towards 1995's Johnny Mnemonic than you might imagine. Don't be distracted by the rise of your tween's SMS messaging ability, progress from there is simply being throttled by monopoly/duopoly control of the medium.



Trend #4: Social media will be its largest component

Yesterday Twitter produced 1.3m A4 pages of content. And if you're working in a sector that (like social media online) has grown by 82% in the last year, let us know - we'd like to invest! Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and blogs - if you're still saying "I don't get all the fuss" or "most of it is rubbish", then what you're really saying is "how much would a Jim's Mowing franchise be?"

Anyway, don't take my word for it - read the Mashable post.

Clay Shirky - who hid the mouse?

Why the future of the internet looks pretty secure.

Clay Shirky wrote a great book titled 'Here Comes Everybody' in 2008, a primer for understanding how the web and its tools (social media, publishing etc) has changed the way people organise - making a lot of traditional barriers to groups of people organising themselves disappear along the way. It's followed up with a supplementary blog, which keeps the book alive with case studies and discussions.

These 2 videos from YouTube are Clay talking on another favourite subject - how the world is being impacted by the web.

He was asked by a TV producer while talking about how Wikipedia works, "how will people find the time (to do all this internet stuff)?" The maths that follows is boggling:

Wikipedia, in all 100+ languages, since its inception in January 2001 represents about 100 million hours of human thought and effort - which has produced over 14m articles and references.

Television, in the USA alone, is calculated to absorb 200 billion hours of human effort and thought (what Clay calls the 'surplus') every year. That is the equivalent of 2,000 wikipedias each year.

In a single weekend, Americans invest about 100 million hours watching just the TV adverts.

A 1% shift of Americans watching TV adverts to some form of participation on the internet is over 50m hours of 'consumers' eyeball and brain engagement time a year.

Much of what he raises we have been talking about for a while within R+R's walls - in particular the erosion of advertising in traditional media like newspapers etc, but his thinking about 'one way consumption' vs a new generation of people who prefer to 'consume - produce - share' is very insightful. Their desire to share and be interactive might surprise you.

I love his critique of 'media that doesn't include you'. Brilliant! The new strategy for you and us is, as he says, looking for the mouse. Enjoy.




Part 2 starts here: