Technology Takes - WWW & Internet (Take 1)

This post is the first of a 2 part post. I will touch base with historical developments that pushed the internet to become what it is now. I will also, in the second part of this post, expound in detail about technologies that I think will power the evolution of the internet for the next 5-10 years.

The WWW and Internet have metamorphosed in countless ways since the invention of the concept of networking in 1969 at ARPA , development of the first TCP/IP specification at Stanford in 1973-74, adoption of TCP/IP by the US Department of Defence as standard for military networking in 1983 and the invention of the web by Tim Berners Lee at CERN in 1990. The internet has certainly created a border less world, becoming ubiquitous in and radically transforming the way we lead our lives. What is incredible about the evolution of the internet is that this evolution is linked to and is the result of the invention of newer technologies.

The invention of Mosaic, a graphical web browser, released in 1993 propelled the internet to definite glory. Most popular browsers today retain the primary features of Mosaic. This was the beginning of a revolution because browsers in the early 90's were still text based. Mosaic was entirely different because it was based on point and click functionality.

Then in 1995, the invention of WebCrawler, a search engine that could search web content. Before WebCrawler, only web page titles could be searched. Lycos, which also offered web content seach also was introduced the same year and achieved critical business success.
Search was big business, and was ruled by Yahoo until 1998 when big daddy Google entered into the fray with a search engine powered by PageRank and started selling search ads (Google CEO Eric Schmidt estimates the size of this business in the next five-ten years to run into billions of dollars) in 2000.

The web in the end of 90's became the pretty much the in thing and made a lot of commercial sense. A lot of applications were built, and email became pretty ubiquitous. Businesses invested in the web, starting with a bang and a frenzy and ending with the 2001 dot com bust. This I think pretty much sums up what is known as Web 1.0.

Collective failure in any industry always results in critical introspection. The from the shadow of this failure emerges light and a newer outlook of things. The dot com bust in 2001 changed the internet in a number of ways. The most important was the emergence of new technology (or existing technology applied in newer ways). And so descended upon us thus the wisdom of crowds, or as I like to think - "From Collective failure arose Collective intelligence". Enter the Web 2.0.

RSS, AJAX, CSS, SOAP, REST, XML, PHP and Cloud Computing. These together, with other newer technologies make the new web extremely different, from a technical perspective in 3 ways - Rich Internet applications, web syndication and web services. I am sure non of this makes any sense :-). The point I am making here is that these allow you as an end user to do the following -
1. Experience applications like GoogleMaps, Orkut and Facebook
2. Actively distribute content that you put on the web to people who want to access it.
3. To socialize and network on the internet, exchanging information and ideas in ways never possible before.

Such collective efforts result in applications like Wikipedia and characterize Web 2.0. The web becomes a platform in its current avatar. Being a platform, Web 2.0 applications engage users and transform them into co-developers. Web 2.0 applications also become more rich in terms of the functionality they offer when more people use it. In effect, a Web 2.0 application is the result of the collective intelligence of the crowd.

Then there is also the phenomenon of virtual worlds like Second Life on the internet. The underlying concept is not new. The availability of cheap bandwidth which is only going to get cheaper, and advances in graphics and processor technology are making this possible. More on this in Take 2 of this topic.