-Derek Slater

The Web as We Know It

The Trendline
Like TV, radio and the printing press before it, the Web has provoked a sea of change in communications. Geographic and geopolitical boundaries have evaporated. An individual in Tokyo with a Pokemon card to sell can market it to millions of potential customers around the globe using just a few mouse clicks. And only a couple years ago, not having a website meant that your company was merely cautious. Lack one now and you’re a relic, something to be stuffed and displayed at the Smithsonian.

The Promise
Most of the excitement is valid. The Web has set commerce on its ear. Online retailing continues to climb at a fantastic rate. People actually buy computers simply to get online. And recent reports indicate that the Web has even turned the tables on what was formerly a mostly-male venture—more women than men are now online according to a recent Jupiter Communications report. Always eager to go with the flow, corporations are looking for ever-more ways to integrate the Web into their operations, through intranets, sales sites, online marketplaces and—most recently—application service providers who say they can turn the Web into your very own virtual office, freeing IT from having to manage millions of desktop PCs full of applications.

The Pitfalls
Even as companies clamor to hire legions of freshly graduated art majors and Java programmers at $75,000 a pop, there’s a chance that the Web as we now know it might become a footnote in the history of the Internet.

For instance, take the problem of consistency. Most websites are designed to do only a handful of things: deliver text, provide areas for collaborative discussion or serve as a repository for files, be they program patches, video clips or music samples. Unfortunately, every website is like an application unto itself—with differing interfaces, capabilities and styles. That’s where Napster and its clones come in. It’s possible to imagine a world where users simply pick a Napster-like client (MyCIO.com has one called Rumor, and Intel is investigating similar technology) that delivers the interface and features they like and then connects to fathoms of XML-formatted data sitting in databases around the globe. The need for websites diminishes, and everyone gets their information in a format that suits their needs.

Suddenly, all that fancy formatting, hours of laboring over site designs, screaming matches about whether to support frames or not, and heated arguments over who’s division gets the big GIF on the front page this week go up in smoke—most likely along with a lot of the employees who sit in on those meetings. And Napster-like clients are only the first contenders in what is bound to be a flood of new technologies during the coming years that bend the basic pieces of the Internet to their own ends—ends that may differ greatly from the pick-and-click experience we all enjoy today.