The End of the Web? Don’t Bet on It. Here’s Why. Fred Wilson recently posted a great video on his blog with the CEO of Forrester Research, George Colony. The money slide is the graphic below. The chart shows three scarce resources and their improvements over time. The top line is available storage (S), the middle line represents processing power (following Moore’s law) or (P) and the bottom line is the Network (N). In it he asserts that the web is dying and in its ashes will see the rise of the “App Internet.” The App Internet is different than the HTML Internet (aka The Web, WWW and in the mobile arena “The Mobile Internet” or short-hand HTML5) because the “presentation layer” and “client side” functionality are defined by applications that run on your mobile device and connect into the open Internet back-end to exchange information with other web services.
He’s right about this. But only temporarily in my view. In the end, Seth Godin’s comments on Fred’s blog post said it best: George’s Arguments 1. 2. 3. Sound familiar? 1. 2. 1. 2. 3. Roger and Mike's Hypernet Blog. Www.chimehosting.com/moonalice/TechInvestingHypotheses.pdf. The death of the URL | FactoryCity. Prelude You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. Remember — all I am offering is the truth, nothing more. In the Matrix, Morpheus presents Neo with a choice: he can take the blue pill and continue his somnambulatory existence within the Matrix, or he can take the red pill and become free from the virtual reality that the machines created to enslave humanity.
As you can see from the clip above, Neo chooses the red pill, severing his connection to the Matrix and regaining his free will. Everyday, when you fire up your browser and type in some arbitrary URL in the browser’s address bar, you are taking the red pill. Increasingly though, I see signs that the essential freedoms of the web are being undermined by a cadre of companies through the introduction of new technologies and interfaces that, combined, may spell the death of the URL.
The War For the Web. On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference: the link in the posting was no longer active. It turns out that a lot of other people had noticed this too. Mashable wrote about the problem on Saturday morning: Facebook Unlinks Your Twitter Links. if you’re posting web links (Bit.ly, TinyURL) to your Twitter feed and using the Twitter Facebook app to share those updates on Facebook too, none of those links are hyperlinked. Your friends will need to copy and paste the links into a browser to make them work. If this is a design decision on Facebook’s part, it’s an extremely odd one: we’d like to think it’s an inconvenient bug, and we have a mail in to Facebook to check. Suffice to say, the issue is site-wide: it’s not just you. As it turns out, it wasn’t just links imported from Twitter. The problem was quickly fixed, with URLs in status updates automatically now linkified again.
P.S. La guerre du Web, par Tim O'Reilly. Un article majeur de l’un des gourous de la Toile, qui met le doigt là où ça peut faire bientôt très mal. Hubert Guillaud, nous le présente ainsi sur l’agrégateur Aaaliens : « Tim O’Reilly revient sur la guerre du Web : entre Facebook qui ne transforme par les liens en hyperliens, Apple qui rejette certaines applications menaçant son coeur de métier… Tim O’reilly répète depuis longtemps qu’il y a deux modèles de systèmes d’exploitation de l’Internet : celui de « l’anneau pour les gouverner tous » et celui des « petites pièces jointes de manières lâche », le modèle Microsoft et le modèle Linux.
Allons-nous vers le prolongement du modèle du Web interopérable ? Ou nous dirigeons-nous vers une guerre pour le contrôle du Web ? Une guerre des plateformes (Google, Apple, Facebook…) ? La guerre du Web aura-t-elle lieu ? La réponse dépend aussi de la capacité qu’aura « la communauté du Libre » à diffuser et défendre ses valeurs et ses idées. La guerre du Web The War For the Web. Google, Twitter, WordPress & Facebook: Publish/Subscribe Matrix. A storm of news points to a future of frictionless publishing and subscription, across platforms. Google just announced that its FeedBurner RSS publishing service now supports automatic publishing to a Twitter account. If you're among the many people who use the service Twitterfeed (like CNN, the WhiteHouse, ReadWriteWeb, etc.) then you may very well find that startup expendable starting now.
That's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this and a series of related announcements over the past few days. The new feature looks relatively sophisticated and will use a new URL shortener, goo.gl. FeedBurner has not proven the most reliable service in recent years and is now part of the ad network AdSense, but the little startup Twitterfeed isn't always reliable either. The Twitter/FeedBurner integration uses secure OAuth authorization, so you don't have to give Google your Twitter password.
The next step? Publish once and your content is everywhere, immediately. URLs Matter — Paul Robert Lloyd. The humble URL has been on my mind a lot recently. Through a series of developments, this simple means of addressing the wonders of the web has been obfuscated and abused, to the point that it’s now seen as difficult to use and an affront to users. Shortened There has long been a need for URLs to be shortened, be that in e-mails or within the pages of a magazine, and for a number of years the service TinyURL did a fairly respectable job of performing this task. However the onset of Twitter and its 140 character limit has meant its 18 character URL is now considered too long, with users opting to use newer shorteners made up from just 13, 12 or even 11 characters.
To provide some semblance of readability whilst keeping the URL short, these services use various country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) to complete the name of their service (for example flickr.com becomes flic.kr) or provide vanity to the overall shortened URL (ie. tr.im, or j.mp). Sentenced becomes the more readable: Abused.