Institute For The Future

Pushing the Web to the Periphery

We're spending a lot of time this year in the Institute for the Future's Technology Horizons research group thinking about how we will experience the Internet in 2020.

A lot has been said recently about the decline of the web as the Internet becomes a more mobile, social, and app-based experience. Chris Anderson's August 2010 WIRED cover story "The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet" set the discussion ablaze. Facebook's $1 billion acquistion last month of virally popular mobile app Instagram seemed like the last word.

That deal, and Facebook's wobbly IPO, has people chattering about a new Internet bubble, and the possibility it might pop. Facebook's lowered expectations ahead of its IPO point towards a slowdown. In Technology Review, Michael Wolff argues that "Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it." (Thanks to@greg_lindsay for the pointer to that piece) 

There's certainly reason to worry that the shift to mobiles is one in which we pay a lot less attention to the screen and a lot more attention to the world around us. I spent much of the morning looking at the latest iteration of Mary Meeker's incredibly useful annual Internet Trends report. What caught my attention most was slide 20, which looked at a host of web giants (Pandora, Tencent and Zynga) and estimated that these businesses made anywhere from 1.7 to 5 times less money per mobile user than desktop user. (A few slides later is a rather unconvincing apples and oranges slide that all will be fine in the end - because a single Japanese company, in a highly urbanized country where 3G covers 95 percent of the population and mobile has always reigned - now makes more money off mobile)

What struck me is that while web companies like Facebook strugle with the transition to a more fragmented mobile experience of the Internet, this is as good as it's going to get. Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell have pointed out that ubiquitous computing is already here, its just incredibly messy. If any company, like say, Google, tries to make a play to bring order to the mess - as it proposes to do with Google Glasses as the browser for world - it is going to have to operate in the periphery of our attention. Anything more instrusive will likely be rejected by users, especially when the intent of the app is to augment our experience, not completely screen us from it. Computing is going to become more contextual, and more aware of its demands on our attention, not less. (It may even evolve, as former IFTF colleague Alex Pang likes to say into something more "contemplative".  As much as we today wander unaware down the sidewalk, our faces buried in devices, our present experience of the phone and tablet as small, portable versions of a desktop terminal may just be a transitional phase. Perhaps Wesier was right, and computing will fade into the background.