People think about what the next generation of the Internet will be, but it will not. More precisely, it will cease to exist in our usual form. The web-based space we currently have will gradually be replaced by a world -oriented world stream . This is already happening and began with a live stream (lifestream), which Eric Freeman and David Gelernter thought about on the pages of Wired 16 years ago.
Live stream - a heterogeneous stream of real-time messages - arrived in the form of blogs and RSS feeds, Twitter and other microblogging services, spread on Facebook and news feeds. Its structure is represented on the “plain, known as the desktop” (where our interfaces do not pay attention to the time dimension) in the form of flows that flow and are a specific manifestation of the passage of time.
A bit like a magic diary. Diary, the pages of which automatically record your moments of life from moment to moment, until you see. As soon as you take the diary in hand, the pages stop their activity. The diary becomes a kind of reference, a complete guide to your life. Close it and the pages will start to chronicle again.
Today, this diary structure translates into the dominant paradigm of the cybersphere. All information on the Internet will soon be built entirely on time. In the world of bits, spatial structures are static and temporal, dynamic, constantly flowing, like Time itself.
The network will become history.
Computer as a metaphor
Until today, the Internet has been spatial, like a bookshelf, like a magazine stand. We say “second from the right” to point to a specific book. But if we are talking about a diary that depends on time and is its representative, we introduce pointers such as “on Thursday”, “last spring” and other dates to identify the content.
Metaphorical time becomes apparent. We consider it absolutely normal to tell about your life stories arranged in time. In order to come to this, it took 20 years of development of computer technology. We have finally moved from conservative preservation to creative waste of resources. And in this new environment we can find the best, not the cheapest way to organize the work of the Internet.
Today, one of the most important functions of the Network is the delivery of fresh information, which will tell us what is happening right now. That is why so many time-dependent structures have appeared in the cybersphere: to satisfy our needs with fresh information. All stream are designed in such a way as to inform you about new products in people's lives, whether it be a news feed or a tweet feed.
Of course, “Yandex remembers everything,” so nothing prevents us from searching in the past. On the Web, time moves back and forth. Any information is born with the status of "now" and gradually slips back - like a branch falling into a stream - into the past. You yourself add sources to your stream.
But what happens if all these blogs, feeds, chats, feeds and streams are merged into one? When everyone acquires such a stream (including a personal live stream), we get a common global stream: the only way to characterize the cybersphere in a slice.
No one sees the global stream as a whole, because most of the information flowing in it is private. But everyone can see part of it.
Imagine an old-fashioned well with a bucket on a rope that sinks lower and lower into the well. This well of time is infinitely deep, so that the bucket will sink endlessly, and the rope will always be the right length. The endless scrolling of news feeds on many sites is the same rope. The bucket plunges deeper and deeper into the past as you scroll through your tape. The bucket is your head.
Instead of today's static Internet, information will gradually and constantly float into the past through the global stream. What does this mean?
Streams completely changed the rules of the search game
Today's operating systems and browsers — search patterns — are outdated because people no longer want to be connected to computers or websites. People want to be in the know. In the future, our main program will be a streaming browser - like a modern, only designed to add, combine and manage streams.
Finding information in a time stream is a task of flow algebra, which is much simpler than the algebra of spatial structures, like the modern Internet. Combine the two threads and get the third. Content search turns into stream subtraction. Both the main and most convenient function of algebra of flows is the provision of information on order.
Each new source is a live stream. Stream browsers will help us configure the information that we need by combining streams, as if in a coffee machine. We select thousands of streams and they are boiled in one pot, providing us with the unforgettable taste and aroma of a solid dish.
E-commerce is about to change. We do not have to look for something new, because the Internet itself will solve this problem for us. Logically, this is similar to the fact that you do not walk in a thousand stores in different cities, but sit and accept the gifts of the Magi carrying the very best of these stores. Time-based world flow will allow you to plunge into the world of fashion, individually created for you.
The world stream will simply allow you to mix and customize information in any convenient way: news of your favorite football team, new movies, shopping recommendations, mail, other messages, documents, posts, calendar notes and so on. Do you think there is at least one application that solves this problem? Not. Not yet, because there are not a million more streams broadcasting their own stories within the same interface. Like a streaming browser.
Does this mean some limitations of the nature of the web? To some extent, yes. But it is a function of time. “Bring me what I want” is much better than “let me look around and see what is there.” Regardless of the time spent searching, any search is a waste of time. Roughly speaking, we spend time to waste time.
Instead of endlessly opening the search box, we will set up your browser to display information that is perfect for us. Such a future will not just kill the operating system, browser and search in the form in which we know them - it will change the very essence of the “computers” that we know now. Regardless of size, the main function of the computers of the future will be the ability to fine-tune within the global flow of information. Computers will inevitably become a built-in mechanism, but the future Internet will show you how to search or provide information.
The network will cease to be a chaotic web. Already there is a certain organization of algorithms. Billions of users will tell their own fairy tales, and all this will smoothly flow into a great endless story: the story told by the planet.
Source: wired.com
The article is based on materials .
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