The Next Phase of the Web

William Grosso @ December 21, 2008

I spoke at SDForum on December 4. It happened like this:

• Sometime over the summer, I was unemployed. I had just left Engage, wasn’t yet at Twofish, and was playing around with some ideas and some technologies.
• Paul O’Rorke, who ought to know better, invited me to speak at the SAM SIG.
• I accepted and said something like “Yeah, I’ll talk about the future of the internet.”
• When it came time to send an abstract in, I wrote up something truly grandiose and thought “Okay. Now I have to figure out what I think.”
• Then I decided the real point of talking in December about the future of the web was to ramble, speculate, and otherwise try and be a little disjointed (e.g. make the audience think too).
• Since I didn’t have anything to sell, or any particular axes to grind, I decided to do a historical retrospective and try to figure out what the trendlines show.

Here’s the short version of the talk:

The first 10 years of the web were about rapid evolution of core technologies that everyone used (both standards like HTML and ubiquitous technologies like cookies or FastCGI). A second major focus of the first decade was just on people getting used to things (having websites, using search engines, losing any and all vestiges of privacy, and so on). In addition, most of the basic business models on the web were explored and, by 2001, everything was pretty stable.

The next stage, from then until right about now¹, was much less about core technologies and a lot more about applying the basics. To the extent that there was technological innovation, it wasn’t around standards or ubiquitous technologies, it was about individual frameworks and application stacks.

In the next 10 years, we’re going to see a vast increase in the number of web-services, an incredible elongation in the value chains that provide web pages (e.g. websites are going to, more and more, be aggregators of back-end content and service providers, who themselves will aggregate …. etcetera), and the emergence² of microtransactions as a legitimate business model on the web.

The longer version of the talk rambled a bit, and lasted about 2 hours. It had some significant omissions (for example, I forgot to mention E-Bay), but mostly held together.

I’ve put the slides onto slideshare (here).

1. Why is now the end? The recession pretty much forces an increase in innovation and a willingness to try different things. While that sucks for us right now, it helps move history along quite nicely.↩
2. Finally! Pax, millicent↩

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