Thoughts on the dead internet
Kevin Day, August 27th, 2007Mark Cuban has an interesting blog post that has gotten a lot of attention about how the internet has stopped evolving. In general, I agree with him. A lot of people have high speed internet, Javascript isn’t as much of a pain to write as it once was, and open source software has improved significantly. The result is that we’re now getting a lot of similar websites that all use these tools.
Although some people seem defensive about the idea that the web is dead, I don’t think it’s a surprise. Some of the biggest innovations on the internet recently have been Ruby on Rails, Gmail, and Google Maps. Each of these, however, have really just been significant improvements over things that already existed. They made the internet more fun to use, but didn’t allow you to do anything new. Mark Cuban is waiting for a big increase in users’ bandwidth so that people can actually do something different, such as stream HDTV to their computers. Based on previous technological advancements, I can see why he would think that HDTV will be the next big change.
The alternative to his predicted future is that something else comes along first. Perhaps the dramatic change will be driven by software instead of hardware. From reading programming.reddit and news.ycombinator, I think people are already thinking bigger that just fancy database-driven websites. For instance, Erlang seems to be slightly less obscure now. Also, O’Reilly’s new book, Programming Collective Intelligence, sold out at Amazon as soon as it was available. If these trends continue, I can envision a software-driven advancement that would make the internet interesting again, but I can only guess what it will be and how long it will take.
