Marc Cuban recently declared the death of the internet. “The Internet’s for old people,” he said at the CTAM Summit closing session last Wednesday. His point: innovation online has slowed in terms of building complex, interactive systems. Linked cable and satellite systems are where it’s at. From Multichannel News:
In effect, Cuban said, cable networks are “intranets,” which, by their nature, operate more efficiently than the Internet. Cable-system operators can control the quality of service they supply and the amount of bandwidth that developers can use. Plus, there is no friction in transporting services and data within their networks.
Cloudware
Cuban’s statements echo a Wired article about the Cloudware movement. Massive datacenters are being built by companies like Google, making the planet’s ever-growing data pile vastly more searchable. They are essentially the CPU expanded over the earth’s surface, linked by the Internet.
In the PC era, the winners were companies that dominated the microcosm of the silicon chip. The new age of petacomputing will be ruled by the masters of the remote data center – those who optimally manage processing power, electricity, bandwidth, storage, and location. They will leverage the Net to provide not only search, but also the panoply of applications formerly housed on the desktop. For the moment, at least, the dawning era favors scale in hardware rather than software applications, and centralized operations management rather than operating systems at the network’s edge.
The truth is, youth are leading this decentralization movement. They are placing widgets on their blogs, SNS, desktops, obviating the need for the homepage. Peer-to-peer systems fueled by young users, e.g. Limewire, Fon, Joost, are breaking down the need for centralized hubs of data. Youth thrive on endless streams of live information and applications that are specific to their individual interests. Cloudware is in their DNA. In the future we could pay a fee to Google to use web-based software, rendering Microsoft’s operating system useless.
Web3.0
Blogs, photos, videos, music, RSS, SNS… They are all being mined, remixed and tied to an interconnected set of databases. API mashups let users combine web date from more than one source to create an entirely new, integrated experience. (Check out WiiSeeker, Tagnautica, We Feel Fine, and of course, Twittervision). Yahoo! Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator that lets you rewire your favorite data sources and “rewire the web.”
These feeds pump a global brain that helps young people think. They are networks. The web brings together not only media but information. It is a convergence by way of divergence as it is spread across multiple properties by way of centralized hubs (i.e. profiles). Thus, distributed commerce is the next big development. Linked friends can see what others like, recommend stuff themselves, and buy new items. Favoritethingz, Kaboodle and Wists are already tapping into this social e-commerce trend.
Indeed, content for a young person is a form of currency. If brands want to reach youth , it needs to be through useful, engaging, information. Media companies should take a cue from the cloudware movement. First free up content, then next monetize it but without forcing it into slots. Youth want independence, and they want ownership. Let them have control, make your brand their own, take it where they like… to the next generation of the web.
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.
Leave a Comment