
The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet - ssclafani
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1
======
SamAtt
This article basically uses the graph as a jumping off point to make the same
old 'apps will take over the world' argument we've been hearing since the
iPhone opened its SDK (it seems like people have completely forgotten the
evolution of the Desktop PC and are intent on reliving those same mistakes
with the smartphone)

The problem I see with the graph is it's based on percentage of total traffic
but it doesn't take into account a huge increase in bandwidth and internet
users. Put it in perspective and you realize the web's "peak" according to
this graph was when most people were using 56k modems (2000 which was about a
year after V.90 modems started hitting the street).

There's also an efficiency factor. Ajax type technologies have dramatically
shrunk the size of the data chunks being passed back and forth. Back in 2000
most were still resending the whole page on every refresh.

~~~
MisterWebz
Excuse my ignorance, but i thought Ajax sends the whole page but only renders
a part of the page?

~~~
coderdude
The server sends a client a whole page and once that page renders in a browser
then you can use Ajax to transfer arbitrary bits of data to and from the
server. You typically would not send an entire page to a client via Ajax, but
you would use it to tell the server that 'User A' has voted on 'Story B'
without having to load an entirely new page or refresh the page you're on.

------
user24
Interesting graph, but is 'video' really a different class of traffic to web?
Every other type shown in the graph is literally a different internet protocol
(email, telnet, web, etc). Separating 'video' from 'web' seems a little
unwarranted.

It's true that you could make a distinction - the web is hyperlinked
multimedia and video isn't very web-like according to that definition.

But I don't think you can claim from that graph that 'the web is dead'. The
weaker claim that 'traditional hypermedia is giving way to video' would be
better supported, but less interesting.

tldr - false dichotomy

~~~
rmc
The Web is moving to include video. Just look at the <video> tag in HTML5.

~~~
scott_s
The parent's point was that only a myopic definition of _the web_ does not
already include video.

~~~
BerislavLopac
But I agree with the article that video is not an integral part of the Web --
up until HTML5 the browsers even didn't have the ability to play video
natively, relying on plugins like Flash.

If you watch YouTube videos on your iPhone, you don't even have a browser to
play the video at all. It's true that it's still transferred using the HTTP --
the Web protocol -- but that's the whole point of the article: a new Web,
which uses much the same protocols but don't rely on the browser for
consumption.

I've previously given a thought to the whole concept at
[http://berislav.lopac.net/post/615858128/the-future-of-
web-b...](http://berislav.lopac.net/post/615858128/the-future-of-web-browser)

~~~
Sizlak
But 9 times out of 10, I'm viewing video in a web browser. Splitting it out
only makes sense if they track which videos are being viewed in a web page and
which ones are viewed in apps, and they aren't doing that, so the graph is
meaningless.

~~~
BerislavLopac
Should Gmail be counted as Web or email?

It's all about usage, not about the technology. Think out of the box.

------
cryptoz
Why does the graph end _five years ago_? That seems silly given how short the
whole time scale is.

Also, that graphic is very confusing and I'm not too sure how to read it. Peer
to peer hasn't changed much in the last five years on the graph, but it looks
like its in decline. Am I reading that right?

Edit: Also, it says "Wired September 2010" at the top. What? This is from the
future, and yet the data is 5 years old? Silly website...

~~~
SamAtt
The graph is skewed but to be fair Peer-to-Peer saw an upswing from 1999-2001
when the original Napster introduced the technology to the masses. Then
declined for a while between Napster being shutdown and more decentralized
systems taking hold.

~~~
loup-vaillant
And, there is the big, centralized, web-based, file sharing services like
MegaUpload and RapidShare. Thanks to the silly asymmetry in our connections
(and if you pay), they are faster than bittorrent based file sharing. Thanks
to some laws (like HADOPI in France), they are legally safer than bittorent
(for copyrighted work). I suspect bittorent based file sharing is losing
ground to them.

------
olegk
This is stupid. Of course video percentage will grow. Every time you double
the resolution, you quadruple the amount of data you have to transfer.

~~~
sliverstorm
It's not really that linear because of compression. As an example, I shrunk a
bunch of photos to 1/4 the resolution, and they only dropped in size about
1/4.

Plus, video can get even more aggressive about compression because it can
reference between frames.

------
relix
The graph is interesting but gives a skewed view of the facts, since it's
relative to each other. A more interesting graph would be one where absolute
numbers are shown. I bet the "web"-part would still be on the rise, however
not as fast as the "video"-part for example.

------
nroach
Even if you accept the author's premise that the world is moving to "apps",
how many of those are just built on a webkit core? I'd say half of the "apps"
on my iPhone are just wrappers of varying complexity for good old port-80 HTML
and HTML5 content.

------
chopsticks
i think the author follows a similar idea as Tim Berners-lee with this
paragraph in the "Giant Global Graph" article:

"So the Net and the Web may both be shaped as something mathematicians call a
Graph, but they are at different levels. The Net links computers, the Web
links documents."

published at <http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/215>

so, if it is something that is not a html document that can can be reached via
a hyperlink is not part of the web but it just uses the internet.

------
slpsys
"At work you scroll through RSS feeds..."

...is the author of The Long Tail really this ignorant of technology?

~~~
sabat
I think he meant to imply that one scrolls through RSS feeds using a news
reader. He wasn't being literal.

~~~
kurokikaze
Still, RSS readers use plain old HTTP requests (Web Traffic). Transition of
users from browser to reader apps shouldn't matter if we count traffic by
type.

~~~
slpsys
Right, that was my point (which was written from my phone, so it was terse).
RSS is just XML, but to my knowledge, no one's _delivering_ RSS over anything
but HTTP in a generic way. Indeed, it's a syndication system _for_ the Web. I
will admit, I didn't read the entire article (again, on my phone), but as
another commenter pointed out, most of the examples were either pretty-printed
data over HTTP, or were services that have never existed in the sphere of the
Web.

------
volida
I don't have time to read that huge article. Question for those who did: If
video is counted as video delivered from the web excluding video delivered
from torrents because that would count as P2P, then 51% + 23%= 74%

So, if you told me text is not the king medium it would be more real than web
is dead. But that wouldn't make it a title for retweeting, or would it?

*edit: a quick search on the content of the article for the word video has only 1 result.

------
c00p3r
read: Cisco want to sell video-on-demand stacks and other software.

