After the gold rush, page 3
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The biggest cliché in the book of online-industry wisdom is that old consultant's standby: Define your goals. That's what executives are always told to do before entering the uncharted Web waters. The funny thing is, the Web itself has no defined goals. We don't yet know something as basic as whether it's primarily a publishing or a communications medium — or some novel hybrid. As a result, two very different groups are emerging with different ideas of how to drive the Web forward: call them the information peddlers and the community builders. The former see the Web as a conduit to distribute information and sell products on a few-to-many pattern; the latter see it as a place to exchange information, many-to-many — to yak. The information peddlers are certainly getting better at what they do. When the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal launched Web sites they didn't repeat Time Warner's mistakes (the Times, for instance, didn't wrap its home page together with the Boston Globe's simply because it owns the paper), and both papers have made provision for interactive forums. Users are still unhappy with the experience of reading on screen, and rightly so; the you-can't-take-it-to-the-bathroom argument remains irrefutable. But screens will continue to improve, eyestrain will fade and sooner or later — in 20 years if not in five — we will have a portable electronic document reader that puts these complaints to rest. Digital publishers also dislike the Web's "browsing" model, in which users go out and get information rather than waiting for publishers to ship it to them. Thus the rise of a whole wave of "push" technologies like Pointcast or Marimba's Castanet, which deliver customized information at regular intervals to your desktop. "Push" is convenient all right, but it sacrifices one of the Web's great strengths: Today, when people come to a Web page, the odds are good that they want to be there — that they're interested in the material. With "push" delivery, people may request a service, but who knows how much attention they're paying? Anyone who's ever subscribed to an e-mail list and then let the messages pile up unread in his mailbox will understand how quickly "push" can come to shovel. The other development information-peddlers welcome is the arrival of easy, high-bandwidth Net access. Whether you get it through your TV cable, as @Home plans, or through faster phone or digital connections, the result will be the same: better, faster video and audio on the Web. Once the Web looks and sounds as good as TV, the argument goes, it will become as profitable as TV. The trouble is, the more you make the Web like TV, the less reason people have to leave their TVs for the Web. To the community builders, the Web's most important trait is not that it's digital or that it's multimedia but that it's two-way. They see it as a platform for distributing personality as well as information. For years now they've worked at a disadvantage, since the people who invented the Web were in fact scientists who wanted to share research information. As a result, the Web has only laboriously adapted itself to chat and conferencing. That it has done so at all is a tribute to the strength of the desire to connect, commune, gossip and quarrel. Now we're on the threshold of a boom in new, graphical chat rooms — like the Palace, Worlds Away, Worlds Chat and V-Chat — where people can play around with sound and pictures as well as words. The new version of the VRML standard for three-dimensional Web worlds finally allows for avatars, little iconic projections of the self onto the screen; and when the VRMLites and the Java coders put their heads together, you can expect some amazing innovations. Three-dimensional worlds will attract a lot of energy at first, through novelty alone. But in the long run, they will survive only if they can make the technology less clumsy, give people reasons to contribute and make it possible for those contributions to last over time. Right now these worlds are stuck in a rut of "Where are you now?" pleasantries, which is all that their awkwardness and anonymity allow. Inevitably, the most exciting places to be on the Web are those where the information peddlers and the community builders are working together. That's one reason so many different companies are busy launching sites devoted to specific cities and regions. The Web may be world-wide, but communities tend to be local. Sites like CitySearch, AOL's Digital Cities, Yahoo and Microsoft's Cityscape aim to peddle useful local information like events listings and restaurant guides while building communities of local interest — supporting it all, logically, by selling classified ads. It's a promising idea. It also places them in direct competition with local newspaper sites, and they will quickly learn what newspaper people already know — that high-quality local information is expensive to produce. Howard Rheingold's soon-to-launch Electric Minds is a different kind of experiment at yoking information and community, more international and cerebral, closer in spirit to existing Web magazines like Feed and Salon but with a more determined emphasis on connecting professionally written articles with open-mike discussions. If Electric Minds' forums on technology can whittle down the distance between the Web 'zine and the Web bulletin board — which will require breaking down barriers that are both technological and psychological — it will be a site to watch. Neither Electric Minds nor most of the other producers of original Web content aim for an audience on the scale of TV. The Web remains a "niche market," with anywhere from 5 to 10 million regular users, depending on whose numbers you believe, and no one knows whether it will ever evolve into a true mass medium. If it doesn't, though, that's no reason to close up shop — unless your business plan requires a TV-sized audience. Nonetheless, the Web's health is directly tied to the number of people plugged into it. As Netscape founder Marc Andreessen likes to put it, "Every time a new user arrives, the whole Net gets more valuable to everyone on it." Considering how important such numbers are, it remains remarkably difficult to nail them down. There is, at least, a small cadre of Internet demographers like Donna Hoffman and Tom Novak who are doing the important spadework of figuring out just who is on the Web — and how we can measure where they are. If the Web does start to ail, they'll be the first to know.
The Web is the great mutant baby of the technology industry; look at the pundits' forecasts from, say, 1990, and it's nowhere on anyone's horizon. As it grows, it continues to mutate in ways that are sometimes disturbing and sometimes wonderful. As for reports of its death, they remain, as Mark Twain would have said, greatly exaggerated. A thousand separate dreams of what the Web might become will unfold over the next few years, and almost as many will fade. But the Web itself can't and won't die until the number of people connected to it begins to drop — and that day is nowhere in sight.
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