Is The Web Really Is In It’s Puberty?
It’s 15 years since Tim Berners-Lee published his WorldWideWeb Summary, giving a name to the web as we now know it. The Flash player and associated technology is also 10 years old today.
On one hand, web designers such as ourselves feel privileged to have been immersed in the exciting WWW and it’s ever-changing landscape for so long. On the other hand - it’s amazing that a phenomenon such as the internet has moved so quickly, completely changed modern life as we know it in much less than a generation.
So I guess that means that the Web is in that awkward ‘starting to kiss girls’ phase and sooner or later someone is going to have to have the ‘sex talk’. You would think so. But the web is really moving at such a pace that it is already starting to mature and according to some evangelists (such as Jacob Nielsen) is actually becoming more like the communication tool it was originally planned to be.
According to some of the people who were there in the beginning, the internet was intended as a force for good - to help doctors and scientists around the world swap notes and theories on best practice and new procedures, or to help people find missing family or relatives. But once the potential for exploiting the web was realised (through advertising, security loopholes and sexual desire) it could be said the sweet and innocent WWW experienced something of a rebellion and started hanging out with the wrong crowd, staying out late, getting drunk and even catching diseases.
So if the web really has had a ‘coming of age’, what evidence do we have of this new found responsibility? I suppose it could be argued that since the explosion of the web into the common household, the majority of people using this technology have begun to get over their giddy phase and are starting to go online as part of everyday life. Whether booking flights to see loved ones, ordering shopping from Tescos or checking the price of a laptop in PC World before popping into the high street branch to haggle with the 16 year old sales assistant.
Business, also it seems, has woken up to the benefits of online potential and what an intelligent, well executed web presence can achieve. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s the business world experienced a mixture of mass panic and mass abandonment (or stupidity - depending on your point of view) by spending large sums of money just to ‘be on the web’ (don’t believe me?) - as if that was enough to guarantee prosperity. Now however, the business of marketing on the web is a business in itself, and companies such as HP, Orange and Honda are making the most of that opportunity by ensuring that what they do online is benefiting the consumer too - making everyone happy.
So what happens next? As ever we will just have to wait and see. One thing’s for sure - with the recent surge in online community websites and user generated content, I don’t think the WWW is going to be settling down any time soon and moving to the county for a spot of tea on the lawn and bird watching. Do you?