Is the website (as we know it) about to die?
I know it might be a very unpopular opinion, I’m a technologist and my colleagues look at me when I say it, like if I am crazy. Well maybe I am, but I have seen many information technologies die and be replaced by new ones, it’s evolution. Probably nobody remember the BBS, FidoNet or the french Minitel, networks with their own protocols, applications and interfaces that were there before the internet, coming to our companies and homes with plenty of information. They went away, and nobody miss them.
It was in the late nineties when the WWW made its big entrance in our lives (at least in Spain) before that I just can recall UseNet (the news), Gopher and the FTP over the growing Internet, and I’m sure you just remember the FTP the only one surviving. Gopher was the WWW ancestor and it stills alive, but who uses it? I remember using Mosaic, and then NetScape for surfing the WWW and I can remember the times when websites had no advertsing banners!! Can you believe it?
The WWW was a giant leap, indeed, best invention ever and it helped to popularize the Internet along with the electronic mail and other services, without the WWW it just wouldn’t happen, but well the concept is aging, very well it has found how to adapt to the times, but eventually it will leave room to new concepts and interfaces allowing a more natural way for human interaction with data and information.
The only reason why it looks like this can’t happen is because in the transition to the cloud and serverless architectures, it stills being a wonderful interface for multiplatform, escaping the previous fenced gardens of the different Operating Systems and Platforms, allowing real interoperability, saving costs, acelerating development cycles and yes, it almost killed the desktop application if it wasn’t because it’s own nature is becoming the essence of the new desktop and mobile multiplatform application, escaping the boundaries of the browser and allowing new ways for presenting and interacting with data and Information. That’s it, JavaScript.
I don’t really believe that website technology is dead, but it’s evolving, along with other technologies as Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Text to Speech, new devices as Smart Home Hubs, wereables, Smart Assistants, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, etc… We’re not simply string attached to a simple Graphical Interface and a click on a mouse or touchscreen anymore. Things doesn’t need to happen in the internet browser anymore. We can interact with bots and Smart Assistants everywhere just by speaking or writing to them and they should show us those things that might be relevant for us, just by telling it to us on speech, or displaying it on any of our smart gadgets or computer desktops, instead of loosing our precious time surfing the web, we have loads of other more interesting things to do.
But well, maybe not quite yet, but in a short period of time… for when this may happen, then we’ll be ready for the next big thing, machine implants interacting with our brain, displaying things in our eyes or creating images, knowledge and data in our brain, just in the way that our brain naturally manages information and knowledge. Who knows?
So well the WWW is not probably about to die, but it has undoubtly evolved from what you think that it is, no more browsers, no more internet domain names with the “www.” or the infamous “.com” nothing to remember about how to retrieve the information, we’ll just have that information as if it is part of our knowledge and consciousness, and we’ll share it in the very same way to others.
