Brain Candy #58 - The State of the Web

I'm going to make a few comments about the state of the World Wide Web in this month's column. They aren't especially profound, but I think we're at a critical juncture that will determine the future of the Web, and many other things besides.

1) In the past few days, I've been contemplating the dominance of the search engine Google (www.google.com). I've recently read several articles from technical sources on how to use Google better. New search engines are targeting Google by name. AOL just announced that it would use Google's search technology for all its 34 million customers. Google is getting major attention lately. Google now appears to be the top general-purpose search engine, at least in the Western world.

Google is dominant because it is the best performer of the well-known general-purpose search engines. A novice can easily get very good results with Google. A skilled veteran user can get excellent results. In my opinion, Google is one of the biggest technical successes of the Web to date.

2) The commercialization of the Web moves forward. Junk e-mail volume grows every day. The ugliness of pop-up ads is intensifying. Instead of one pop-up ad when you visit a web site, you now might get two or three. There are some obnoxious sites that bomb you with pop-up ads - every time you close one, before it dies, it sends a command to pop-up another, or two others or more. Why do advertisers think this makes me want to investigate their products? There are software programs you can use that block all pop-up windows, but pop-ups have some desirable non-commercial uses. If you do get a pop-up blocker, try to get one that allows selective blocking, since a large percentage of the most obnoxious pop-up ads come from a small number of sources.

Here's a related problem I'm getting tired of. A news site that I otherwise like is constantly asking me to install Macromedia's Flash plug-in, an animation player that the site's ads want to use. I've done this at home; a Flash-enabled browser also has desirable non-commercial uses. At work, I can't do this, because I don't have the authority needed to do this kind of installation. I regularly get spammed by Flash installation requests. It cheapens this web site in my opinion.

3) The Web is now mature enough that its potentials are becoming clear even to those who initially chose not to pay attention to it. Some of these interests now see aspects of the Web as a threat to the status quo. By harnessing various legal tools, there are attempts being made to suppress technologies that, given some more time to grow, might provide far superior alternatives to consumers than what we currently have. In most cases so far, round one has gone to the status quo. Unfortunately, American society seems to have reached the point where protecting the status quo is more important than developing new ideas and concepts. In my opinion, this is how societies start to decline. Such battles will be quite interesting, when one constituency with clout sees benefits in the new technology while another is threatened by it.

4) The economic downturn as well as the maturation of the Web makes it necessary for many formerly free sites to seek revenue. This is why ads are becomming more common and why some sites would like to register their users (often for ad purposes) or even charge their users. Only sites that have value can succeed in charging for access or even in getting significant numbers of users to register.

Sites that charge, or plan to charge, usually want rather large monthly fees. As an example of a service I find worthwhile, I subscribe to Safari offered by O'Reilly & Associates (safari.oreilly.com) that provides me on-line access to computer books by a number of publishers. For $15 per month, I can access ten books from over 650 titles. Typically, buying one of these books would cost two to three times that. I've often found that a title that looked good in the store actually wasn't worth purchasing - after I bought it. Using Safari, I can review books in depth, buying only the ones that are worth having, and at least in theory saving some money. Once I've taken a good look around the large number of books, I can reduce my subscription to the minimal five book level, for $10 per month. In short, I'll spend money to save money, or to get something really useful that I can't get otherwise, but most web sites that want to charge offer neither to me. I wonder if we won't see a de-commercializing of the Web in time - some things just aren't even worth micropayments (a cent or two per page), which the Web has never figured out how to do successfully anyway.