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Forgive the paraphrasing and mashing up of two separate Mark Twain quotes in the title. Lots of folks seem to be talking about the latest linkbait Wired story claiming that the web is dead, based on this graphic (built off of Cisco data):
Of course, anyone even remotely familiar with basic statistics will note that the % of traffic is kind of meaningless in determining whether or not something is "dying." For that, you want the absolute numbers. Thankfully, Rob Beschizza over at Boing Boing took the same data and charted out the absolute results, which paints a somewhat different story:
Yeah, don't go planning any funerals just yet. Also, I'm curious how that "video" portion is being calculated. I would guess that a fair amount of "video" traffic is happening on YouTube, which is (last I checked) really on the web.
This is not to say, of course, that web technology will dominate forever. Frankly, I still remember when the WWW first came along, and I switched from using Gopher to the web and figured that it was merely a stepping stone (as Gopher had been), and that something better would come along in about five years. I was clearly wrong on that. But it doesn't mean something else won't come along eventually.
But I wouldn't rule the web out just yet. As we've seen with things like OpenAppMkt, HTML 5 and related technologies (Javascript, CSS, etc.) are getting pretty powerful, and could bring a lot more attention to the web. In fact, many of the "apps" that the Wired articles (yes, it's two articles, side-by-side, making it quite difficult to read) applaud as driving us past the web, are really just web apps in disguise. The death of the web has been truly exaggerated in this case.
In fact, much of both articles seems to be wishful thinking to support a view that the two authors -- Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff -- hope the world will come to eventually, rather than what seems to actually be happening. In both cases, it feels like they take the misleading graph at the top as the starting point, and then justify it, even though it's not painting an accurate picture. There is this new fascination with app madness as the latest new thing -- and companies love it because they think it gives them back some of the control they've lost to the open web. But, openness tends to find its way through. Closed systems are great for leading a charge to a new level, but they almost always stall out as more open solutions leapfrog them in the end. Apps are still digital, after all, and it's tough to keep anything digital closed for too long.
So I wouldn't fear the death of "the web," or of "openness" any time soon.Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
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