Wired: 'The Web Is Dead, Long Live The Internet'

Wired:

Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services -- think apps -- are less about the searching and more about the getting. Chris Anderson explains how this new paradigm reflects the inevitable course of capitalism. And Michael Wolff explains why the new breed of media titan is forsaking the Web for more promising (and profitable) pastures.

Read the whole story: Wired

Comments

[unbozo]

12:14 PM on 08/18/2010

New buzzwords for old... new buzzwords for old...

[curiousasheck]

11:04 AM on 08/18/2010

Credibility, like virginity, can not be restored once it's lost.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.04/wipeout.html

[aphextwin07]

10:53 AM on 08/18/2010

"This is not a trivial distinction."

sure sounds like it to me. i also find it funny they would write this article a week after eric schmidt's comments on the same topic, as if they are the ones reporting on this first.

[LordByron13]

11:16 AM on 08/18/2010

Just had to say, aphextwin rules.

[YouDontWantMeHere]

10:32 AM on 08/18/2010

how about this1? the web is simply a GUI for the internet

[Kache]

07:10 PM on 08/18/2010

Yes, one of many. That's their point. And the web's share is diminishing.

[OldeTymeLiberalDude]

09:26 AM on 08/18/2010

It's a series of tubes!

[Kache]

07:31 PM on 08/18/2010

The "internet" is a series of tubes, the "web" is not.

[alpinefresh]

08:10 AM on 08/18/2010

TechCrunch had the best response to this article. http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/17/when-wrong-call-yourself-prescient-instead/

[aphextwin07]

10:55 AM on 08/18/2010

glad someone else pointed it out, but it doesn't really require a follow-up article to see that wired doesn't really know what they're talking about; anyone that has followed the web since its mainstream rise can easily see how flawed the entire article is.

[voiceplate]

01:52 AM on 08/18/2010

This is such a dumb article for so many reasons. The web is going to get bigger with your average Joe and Jane making their own sites, using services such as Google Sites, SquareSpace, or VoicePlate.com. Plus they talk about mobile internet devices using apps, do they forget that with all of these devices have mobile web browsers, and developers can focus on making the best site for all platforms.

[NC4Obama]

03:15 AM on 08/18/2010

They are comparing how much data traffic is being used for websites in comparison to other things on the net.

[Kache]

07:55 PM on 08/18/2010

Apparently you've not built a Titanium mobile app yet. The beauty of building a Titanium app is that it's a write-once/play-any-platform and you only design for webkit.

For years we sold access to a website to schools. Although the site was built like an application using Web 2.0 concepts 5 years before the words Ajax and Web 2.0 were coined, it ran in a browser. This year we packaged it into a Titanium app that runs on any operating system, desktop or mobile. Although it's still accessing the same website, it does so with a webkit engine that we have full control over. In otherwords, it has no location field and cannot leave the website. Bingo, that is just what schools and libraries were looking for. It is an app that gets installed on the user's computer just like any other app. The first time we built it we used Adobe AIR instead of Titanium and may go back to it.

It's our experience that there was a browser war, and browsers lost. In more and more places the encapsulating app is what people want, whether it's written in objective-c or html5 is immaterial. This aint your Auntie Em's internet any more, the Emerald City is real and coming into view.

[crayola 08b]

12:20 AM on 08/18/2010

I can has Internets?

[fatnugly]

09:08 PM on 08/17/2010

It's all going back to the browser with HTML 5. Much better to write one app that runs on different platforms than to write multiple apps one for each platform.

[Kache]

08:01 PM on 08/18/2010

From a web designer's perspective that's true. But the web designer doesn't count. The end user is what matters.That user is just one click away from the next web designer.

BTW, writing an app that will run on all operating systems, mobile and desktop, is trivial.

[fatnugly]

03:01 PM on 10/07/2010

it's trivial to write and app that runs on Iphone and android platforms? They don't even use the same programming language.

[MaxProgressive]

08:54 PM on 08/17/2010

"blah, blah,....this new paradigm reflects the inevitable course of capitalism." oh boy, oh joy, oh here comes a new uprising, and the people will prevail. Social networking including Twitter has grown into a powerful force to be reckoned with. Corporate America, take notice.

[mojo filter]

08:50 PM on 08/17/2010

I hate these articles. Seems like they come along every time there's some new technology that becomes popular. Netbook will kill the laptop. Laptop will kill the desktop. VHS will kill the theaters.

[SDH283]

10:35 PM on 08/17/2010

what's a desktop?

[Kache]

08:03 PM on 08/18/2010

No kidding! I make my living on the internet and the last time I even saw a desktop was at DMV getting my license renewed.

[Upside]

07:32 PM on 08/17/2010

Usenet is the shizznit. Always has been and always will be.

[ResearchtheFacts]

07:17 PM on 08/17/2010

1) FaceBook and every other app is on the web.
2) You still have to connect to a web server somewhere. Its still using the web.
3) Without having a generalize "vast" source to start with on the web then you are putting yourself in a narrow box and cutting down the odds of getting new or exciting information and innovations.

This article is ludicrous one guy's analysis about the web. What does everybody with a website or business presence do just drop the www?

Sure I will just go to a library that only has books on three or four subjects and stick with that lifelong.

[NC4Obama]

03:32 AM on 08/18/2010

1) You can get a app that sends facebook data to your computer instead of you going to the website to access the data. That data is on the internet, not the web. Web = HTML, the web is part of the internet but the internet is much more.
2) Your incorrect in your thinking of what the classification of the web is and/or how data is transfered.
3) They aren't saying websites will go away they are saying that other things are taking a bigger share of the data traffic on the internet and things are becoming more grouped together, such as how many people use facebook.

[ResearchtheFacts]

10:42 AM on 08/18/2010

The World Wide Web, abbreviated as www and commonly known as the Web, is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet.

There's a reason for having a www address. Everyone on the internet will not be creating an app to get to their site. It's ridiculous and the article was more ridiculous.

[curiousasheck]

04:45 PM on 08/17/2010

The Web can only benefit from a good "shakeout" of the endless digital forest of mediocrity, uninformed political commentary, unseemly home videos, embarrassingly amateurish music, unreadable poems, essays and novels, what have you.

Tech will always over hype itself as being bigger and more influential then it really though. Because life doesn't depend on or need tech to survive. It's about product. It's all about money,

[studmoose]

04:42 PM on 08/17/2010

Web sites and peer-to-peer amount for 23% usage each, video is 51%.

Duh! This is a no brainer, while webpages and p2p are designed to be light. There's not much you can do with video files.

Perhaps this would be more relevant if it dealt with page hits?

[hypnotoad72]

04:49 PM on 08/17/2010

Video is up? Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer static images and text to read. Not drooling over a video, which probably has glossy, pretty people doing the antics since nobody wants to look at real life anymore. Ironic, given the concept of "reality TV", but I digress...

Broadband will need to be as well, to handle that amount of traffic. Text-based pages (and static images) are definitely lighter (and still annoy 56k modem users, since it'll probably be 2586AD before the US gets up-to-date compared to the rest of the world in terms of infrastructure).

[studmoose]

04:53 PM on 08/17/2010

(and still annoy 56k modem users, since it'll probably be 2586AD before the US gets up-to-date compared to the rest of the world in terms of infrastructure)

tell me about it :-)

[curiousasheck]

05:01 PM on 08/17/2010

Why hasn't anyone recognized part of the problem is delays an average end user pays for is caused by web analytic firms slurping their personal information and other stuff before they are allowed to proceed to the story they want to read.