I’m fascinated by the sheer vastness of the universe with its interconnection of galaxies, planets, suns and moons, and after watching Horizon’s programme ‘Infinity’ last week I couldn’t help being drawn back into this ultimately mind aching thought process. If space is expanding, into what is it expanding and just how big is it exactly?
Just as the universe is expanding, so too is the web. It’s an enormous and continually growing mass of interconnected static and dynamic websites with communities and links that bind it all together. Here’s a visualisation of the web universe. Attempts to figure out how big exactly are probably as difficult as calculating the size of the universe, well almost. Google had found 1 trillion URLs by the end of 2009, and the ‘WayBackMachine’ that archives most of the net has 2 ‘quadrillion’ bytes of information consisting of just regular pages that exclude, for instance, video content.
In the beginning Yahoo! was able to index most of what was important on the web in its directory of links, but it was never going to be able to cope with the tide of people and information that surged to it over the late 1990’s and since. Not only are organisations moving their content and records online for people to access, but users are increasingly contributing their own content. We’re all authors now, which is incredible. Our day to day lives recorded for posterity.
Technology has developed at such an incredible rate over the last 300 years, and the pace of development is only getting more rapid. We’re now hurtling towards quantum computing which will harness atoms and molecules to perform calculations more rapidly than we can imagine, certainly via the current silicon versions. The web landscape itself has also changed shape even during its short life, evolving over last two or three years in particular into a place where it’s not just about computing power but people who are interacting more and more online. This trend, or shift in culture, has not come about due technology developing specifically, so much as the way that we’re harnessing it. We’re all doing what comes naturally.
Look at the estimated 275,000 people working on open source projects. People are writing code, building parts of an application that ultimately contribute to previously unseen whole. For free. Linux, the operating system, is the probably the best example of this. These people, I imagine, do it mostly for the kudos and to a lesser extent the experience, but it’s Marxian in its concept isn’t it? People working for the good of ‘the people’.
Social networking websites have developed at an astonishing rate over the last couple of years. The ‘sun’ of the community world, ‘Facebook’ has now reached over 400,000,000 users worldwide and has overtaken Yahoo! as the second most popular website in the U.S.1 Facebook could quite possibly have reached its zenith and burn out in two years, but the reason it became so hot in the first place will not. Facebook would simply be replaced by other websites that allowed people to interact more easily and more intuitively.
One of the reasons Facebook -and multiple other websites that enable interaction- are as popular as they are because they allow us to communicate one to one but also in a way that would have previously been very difficult indeed. They allow us to keep on top of what’s happening, and whose doing what on an unprecedented scale that ignores time, geography and physical relationships. Consequently we’re all becoming more connected, and it’s a trend that will not diminish. The momentum for TV, internet and mobile to converge into one lovely anarchical mesh of interconnected people and platforms that all create, consume and cultivate content and information is growing all of the time.
All of the time Google’s machines are recording the content that we are creating in a manner unprecedented in human history. Recording, analysing, understanding, indexing and subsequently returning that content to other users in their search results. The web ‘machine’ is continually learning from us, so we’re all contributing to each other’s development. Times really have changed. We don’t just consume information and advertising anymore, we want to be part of the conversation. It’s in our nature, and woes betides companies that think that these cultural shifts don’t affect them. Companies that persist in a communicating one way as the web universe grows will find themselves increasingly disconnected from the websites where people discuss them. They won’t be invited to the conversation anymore, and they will wield increasingly less influence within everyone’s personal galaxies…
1. (Compete.com.)
