The Next Internet Is TV
John Herrman,
The Awl,
Feb 07, 2015
"What was even the point of websites, certain people will find themselves wondering. Were they just weird slow apps with nobody in them?? Why?" This is from an article on the Awl that is making the rounds. Steve McCarty wrote me to say that it was "dangerous if not delusional." He adds, "if the Net were more like TV, a centralized monopoly of few-to-all broadcasting, would it not be a regression from the increasingly participative Net?" The problem with apps, in my mind, is two-fold: first, access to gated app marketplaces is limited; your app must be 'approved'. And second, the apps do not form a seamless network the way the web does, but instead creates a gazillion incompatible silos. So I'm hoping the web remains relevant.
Interestingly, some related writing: The Web is Dead (Wired, 2010), The Mobile Web is Dead (Business Insider, 2014), The Web is Dying (Wall Street Journal, 2014), Why the Web is Dead (TEDx, 2014), The Corporate Website is Dead (Forbes, 2014), Firefox Creator Says the Web is Dead Meat (ReadWrite, 2011), The Mobile Website is Dead (ZDNet, 2014), The Web is Dead, Long Live the Cloud (Big Think, 2010), Is the Web Dead? (NY Times, 2010), The Web is Dead? No (Pew, 2012), Don't Pull Out the Coffin Just Yet (TechCrunch, 2010), The Web is Dead, Long Live the Web (Gartner Symposium, 2012). There's a pretty persistent desire in some parts of the business press to kill the web. Not surprisingly. But the web is resilient.
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