Google has become constant part of my internet experience

Quick poll, how many tabs do you have open in your web browser, and how many of them are Google services?

I have 9 tabs open, and this includes Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader. Oh, and those 3 tabs never close.

Leave your answers in the comments

Evolution of Communication

Social interactions between individuals can really be broken down into one simple thing: communication. As time has gone on, communication has evolved along side us. The simplest form of communication began with body language and other visual cues, next came spoken language. In 105 A.D. paper was invented, thus beginning the spread of written documents. In 1450 A.D. The printing press was invented making written material widely available. In 1835 A.D. the telegraph and Morse code brought about the beginning of fast long distance communication. The newspapers, telephone, phonograph, radio, and television were all new forms of communication, all of which had fierce opposition.

A quote from 1920 in regards to the radio:

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"

A Western Union internal memo from 1876 says:

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”

Lee de Forest, the inventor of the cathode ray tube, said that television:

“Theoretically, television may be feasible, but I consider it an impossibility - a development which we should waste little time dreaming about.”

All of these quotes can be found at Things People Said, along with many other interesting (and completely wrong) quotes.

As we know now, all of these technologies have increased the amount of communication in nearly every country in the world. With the introduction of ARPANET in 1969, and the World Wide Web in 1989, the amount of communication has increased again, and as these technologies continue to grow, more and more communication occurs online. Some people have raised concerns that the various forms of communication online has degraded the social interactions between individuals. If this statement was true, we would see a decline in either quality or quantity of conversations, or both.

The quantity of conversations has clearly not decreased, the number of newly enabled conversations created by the communication tools on the Internet far outweighs any loss of communication that may have previously occurred face to face. An article entitled Are We Just Jumping On The Social Media Bandwagon? appearing on SheGeeks written by guest Colin Walker states:

“The internet, and social media on it, merely allows us to extend the range of our conversations. Instead of chatting over the garden fence we are chatting across oceans; instead of meeting in pubs and bars we gather in virtual spaces.”

The harder question to answer here is if the quality of communication has decreased due to use of communication tools such as email, instant messaging, social networking websites, chat rooms, BBS, IRC, SMS, blogs, and many other technologies and systems that facilitate not only personal, but also public conversations. Quality is a subjective term, so it would be impossible for me to provide a complete argument that the quality of conversations has decreased.

It's my personal opinion, and that of many other people, that a change in how or where communication occurs does not imply a decrease in quality. I would go as far to say that the quality of communication can not be decreased. Sure, we can be annoyed when we see the large amount of sophomoric communication online, but these seemingly useless conversations should not distract you from the inherent value of nearly instant communication with nearly anyone around the world. The ability to find almost any information about nearly any topic by simply searching on the Internet more than makes up for the lack of quality in a small group of Internet users.



The prompt for this article was to "Make a point about" how "Email and other forms of electronic communications have degraded the social interactions between individuals."

From Web 2.0 to Web 3.0

Recently the term Web 2.0 has been becoming more and more often used when referring to the current state of the internet and specifically new trends in web design. The term Web 2.0 often refers to the use of AJAX, which itself is just a term used to refer to a set of technologies; including JavaScript and XML, which allows a web page to retrieve and display extra data, without having to reload the entire page. It also commonly refers to websites which have social networks, wikis, or blogs. However

“The Web 2.0 meme has become so widespread that companies are now pasting it on as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of what it means.”
-Source http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

If I was going to sum up what I think best describe the changes that have happened to the internet in the last few years, which is what I think has led to what people are calling Web 2.0, it would be that the internet has moved from static pages which serve content that the publisher wants you to see, to now being a place of content submitted by the users, and websites are now services that aim to aggregate and display this information as efficiently as possible.

Now people are starting to talk about the term Web 3.0, which is completely not defined, but is just a term that is used to refer to the general future of the internet. I have seen the term Web 3.0 used as a marketing tool in many places, an example of this can be seen at http://onebuckwiki.com/blog/2007/11/13/we-are-goin-web30/ where the term is used to try to hype up new features that will be implemented in future releases of the website. Some people have tried to define what they think Web 3.0 is going to be. But all of these definitions are just predictions of where people think the internet is going to be in a few years. These predictions range from simple explanations with no references, such as

“It basically means web browsing with 3D experience”
-Source http://www.profy.com/2006/11/24/web30-is-a-coming/

to the more complicated, and filled with as many buzzy catch phrases as possible

“Web 3.0, expected to debut in 2007, will be more connected, open, and intelligent, with semantic Web technologies, distributed databases, natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, and autonomous agents."
-Source http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0689.html?m%3D3

If you want to check out more of peoples predictions, Wikipedia has a couple on it's Web 3.0 page. All of the many references to Web 3.0 only have one thing in common, and that is they speculate about the future of the internet.

That being said, I think that it shouldn't be too hard to find the differences in Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. Web 2.0 generally refers to the current set of trends within the internet, and Web 3.0 is just a term used by people who want to continue using this style of naming the phases of the web, and would like to make predictions about where they think these trends will lead in the future. So if Web 3.0 is the future, what will be the impact of it? Unfortunately, I do not have the answer to this question, although I'm sure whatever happens that things will change, since that is really the only constant in as time passes.

In conclusion, do I think that Web x.y is just a marketing gimmick? To be blunt, yes. The term has been used to refer to the new age of the internet, and it has been used so commonly and without thought or definition that to most people it has very little meaning. Web 3.0 currently has no definition, so it is just a term that people use to attract people who have followed the crowd of Web 2.0, which is most often used as a marketing tool. The internet will always continue to evolve, and unless a major change causes everyone to access or publish on the internet differently, I see no reason to use version numbers on the web. When I open up my browser, I still go to the same internet as before, the content has changed, and it will continue to change in the years to come.

Scheduled Downtime

It was 3am on Sunday night and, for whatever reason, I wanted to see if my landlord had cashed a recent rent check. I pulled up my online banking with Citizen's bank and was greeted by this far-too-common message:

Online banking is down for scheduled maintenance.

Ryan S and Eric V, co-posters on this blog, happened to be present for this and each of them suggested we check their respective online banks: TD Bank North and United bank. They were down for "scheduled maintenance" too. Getting a bit worried about the nation's banking infrastructure we checked a couple more banks: Bank of America and Sovereign Bank. Both, from what we could tell without accounts, thankfully were up. Now this was by no means a scientific survey of uptime for online banking at 3 am on a Sunday (though I'd love to see one - it would likely be quite illuminating) but 3 out of 5 banks, all of them fairly major, having online banking downtime at the same time is unacceptable.

Online banking should never be down for scheduled maintenance. Really, no serious public-facing service should have scheduled downtime. There's just no reason for it. Load balancing, redundancy, rolling upgrades - there's no need to take down a whole service. At worst, there should be a performance hit during maintenance. There's no big trick to avoiding scheduled downtime: you just need a decent infrastructure with decent people managing it. It's really not that hard.

A company's public facing web services are easily as important as a flagship branch in meat-space. In fact, I would say that a company's web-based location should be considered the international flagship branch. Every single customer has the potential visit the web-based location - that cannot be said about any physical flagship location for a global, national, or even large regional organization, no matter how optimally it is located geographically. If companies aren't spending equal or more money and effort on their web-based locations as they are on their most premiere physical locations they are making a critical error. Scheduled downtime is a clear sign that they are making this error - it is simply shoddy workmanship of the sort that would never be tolerated at a physical flagship.