Mark Suster: The Social Network: Facebook To Fragmentation

Image via WikipediaMark Suster's three pieces on TechCrunch are a nice summary of what has happened, and what is happening, although if any of this is news to you, I have to ask, where have you been?

When he starts talking about the future, it gets trickier. Social has so much buzz right now that it is hard to imagine the post-social buzz. But that there will be is for sure. There always has been. Social itself will morph. Social is one thing. Social and mobile as a combo is a case of two plus two being five. To that cocktail add local and global and you end up with two plus two equals 22. And it is not easy to figure out.

One good news is I see many, many players emerging.

A Fragmenting Web?

Image via Wikipedia

The web is not dying, (Dead Web?) and it is not fragmenting in an alarming way. What is happening can be compared to biological evolution over long periods of time. The end result is a richer ecosystem. The same is happening to the web. (Is The Mobile Web In A Category Of Its Own?)

The iPhone apps do not take away from the web. They might be these little, walled gardens but those little, walled gardens - most of them - do interact with the web in limited ways if not fully.

The birth of the web was like the Big Bang. There is no going back. I am not worried.

The Economist: The Future Of The Internet: A Virtual Counter-Revolution: The internet was a wide-open space, a new frontier. For the first time, anyone could communicate electronically with anyone else—globally and essentially free of charge. Anyone was able to create a website or an online shop, which could be reached from anywhere in the world using a simple piece of software called a browser, without asking anyone else for permission. The control of information, opinion and commerce by governments—or big companies, for that matter—indeed appeared to be a thing of the past. ........ the “cloud” is code for all kinds of digital services generated in warehouses packed with computers, called data centres, and distributed over the internet. ...... Only Apple’s latest iSomethings seem to inspire religious fervour ...... it appears to be balkanising, torn apart by three separate, but related forces. ..... governments are increasingly reasserting their sovereignty ...... big IT companies are building their own digital territories, where they set the rules and control or limit connections to other parts of the internet ...... network owners would like to treat different types of traffic differently, in effect creating faster and slower lanes on the internet. ...... Before the internet and the world wide web came along, this balkanised model was also the norm online. For a long time, for instance, AOL and CompuServe would not even exchange e-mails. ..... had telecoms firms, for instance, suspected how big it would become, they might have tried earlier to change its rules ...... Individuals have access to more information than ever, communicate more freely and form groups of like-minded people more easily. ...... In a more closed and controlled environment, an Amazon, a Facebook or a Google would probably never have blossomed as it did. ...... China’s “great firewall”. The Chinese authorities are using the same technology that companies use to stop employees accessing particular websites and online services. ........ allowed domain names entirely in other scripts. This makes things easier for people in, say, China, Japan or Russia, but marks another step towards the renationalisation of the internet. ...... Try viewing a television show on Hulu, a popular American video service, from Europe and it will tell you: “We’re sorry, currently our video library can only be streamed within the United States.” ..... “net neutrality”..... one of the internet’s founding principles: that every packet of data, regardless of its contents, should be treated the same way, and the best effort should always be made to forward it...... “the Tony Soprano vision of networking”... If operators were allowed to charge for better service, they could extort protection money from every website. ..... large internet firms like Amazon and Google have long redirected traffic onto private fast lanes that bypass the public internet to speed up access to their websites. ....... net neutrality has become far more politically controversial in America than it has elsewhere. This is a reflection of the relative lack of competition in America’s broadband market. .....“A technology is invented, it spreads, a thousand flowers bloom, and then someone finds a way to own it, locking out others.” ...... Android, Google’s smart-phone platform, which is less closed than Apple’s, is growing rapidly and gained more subscribers in America than the iPhone in the first half of this year. Intel and Nokia, the world’s biggest chipmaker and the biggest manufacturer of telephone handsets, are pushing an even more open platform called MeeGo. And as mobile devices and networks improve, a standards-based browser could become the dominant access software on the wireless internet as well.... There is just too much value in universal connectivity .... just as world trade can collapse if there is too much protectionism.

This article just tells me why Android is so important and why net neutrality is worth fighting for.

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