Did you see the Wired article The Web Is Dead, published Tuesday? The basic premise is that the web is falling from grace, to be replaced by… The Internet. Confused? Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff make a case that the World Wide Web is being replaced by applications that we access through our mobile devices and through internet sites such as Twitter, Facebook and the New York Times. The difference between the web and the internet, as laid out by Anderson and Wolff, is the language they are coded in: web = HTML; internet = interactive code languages such as Java, Flash, Ajax and HTML5. Most sites you and I interact with are coded in these other interactive languages.
A flurry of tweets by user experience strategist, Robert Hoekman, Jr (@rhjr), made me take a second look at the article. He made several key points about the web vs. internet question, but it was his fourth point that is essential to understanding user experiences with online properties.
“Most people don’t know there’s even a difference between the Internet and the Web. And they couldn’t care less.”
That point resonated so deeply I might have thought a tuning fork had been struck in my cerebellum. Set aside the fact that I’m a web professional. As a user, I have little concern for the technical makeup of the websites that I visit. I care what I find there and how I might use that content. My functional expectations differ by site because my motivations differ by site. While on Wikipedia, I’m not really concerned about interactivity because I’m there to consume information on a topic. All I really want to know if the article I’m reading actually has the information I need. While on New York Times, let’s assume the news item I’m reading is supported by a photo gallery. The interactivity of the album may augment my understanding and appreciation of the total piece, but again, my primary motivation may simply be to consume information. Compare that to YouTube, my intent is different. I want to watch video. If the video is good, I’ll probably want to share it. I may even expect to browse several videos until I find one worth sharing. YouTube supports this by dynamically recommending other videos to watch. Online multi-player gaming requires even greater interactivity as my characters and those of the people I play with need to reflect play commands in real-time. But as an average user, I don’t register these levels of interactivity. I act or don’t act based on my motivations, and I assess site quality according to how well it satisfies my functional expectations.
Now think about your online presence – does your customer care if you’re part of the web or the internet? As Robert says, they couldn’t care less. What they do care about, is that you provide them with the interactions and experiences they seek when visiting you. The question, then, is what experience do you customers seek when they come to your web and social sites? Do you know?
You can read the rest of Robert’s response to the Wired article on his blog, sliced.
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Heather, I wanted to jump in and make a correction to this statement:
“web = HTML; internet = interactive code languages such as Java, Flash, Ajax and HTML5″
Internet is actually the infrastructure that connects networks together into one giant cohesive network. The web, in comparison, is just one of the many protocols that can be accessed via the internet and is comprised of both HTML and interactive code languages as well as images, videos, sound files, etc.
Interesting ideas, Heather. However, that “web is dead chart” is the screwiest graph I have ever seen. Damn near meaningless. Let us hope Wired made that one (hard to tell as the link to the piece cited 404s.)
Thanks Sunny! I paraphrased that particular statement according to my understanding of the distinction made in the Wired article. Specifically, I interpreted the web as being crawl-able by navigational entities like Google, which relies mostly on HTML, while the internet was comprised of interactive code languages which define user experience.
I am a web professional, and yet your statement drives home the point that even within our profession, the distinction between the web and the internet is not universally understood. The knowledge, or lack thereof, doesn’t affect my experience of the internet, but the degree to which individual websites fulfill my expectations does.
While writing my post, I asked several very smart people what the difference was between the Internet and the web. None of them were even remotely close. I won’t name names.
And Sunny’s explanation is much more concise than mine was. I muddled through mine by way of analogies and examples.
Dictionary.com:
1. “World Wide Web” –noun
a system of extensively interlinked hypertext documents: a branch of the Internet. Abbreviation: WWW
(another definition: The complete set of electronic documents stored on computers that are connected over the Internet and are made available by the protocol known as HTTP. The World Wide Web makes up a large part of the Internet. See more at Internet.)
2. Internet –noun
a vast computer network linking smaller computer networks worldwide. The Internet includes commercial, educational, governmental, and other networks, all of which use the same set of communications protocols.
So yeah. According to the dictionary definition, the WWW is hypertext (HTML or XHTML) and presumably a bunch of files all linked together.
I personally don’t think that this is a case of the “internet” replacing “www”. This is a case of an outdated definition. The types of documents and the methods used to create, serve, and display them has expanded and evolved over the years and the outdated definition of the word “www” is too simplistic.
To summarize:
“internet” = infrastructure (think wires and routers and switches and hardware)
“www” = Any content served and accessed on the internet via a web browser and the HTTP protocol
Trey, thanks for the head’s up on the broken link. I’ve fixed it.
Robert, how interesting that people you asked were unable to describe that distinction. Just like we make time for the things we want or need to make time for, we devote energy to understanding concepts that are either essential or compelling to our livelihoods and interests. I’m sure that the difference between the web and the internet is tremendously important to some people, but it’s a small group. The rest of us, it’s simply not important, and thus, to your point, we don’t know and we don’t care to.
Heather: well, I liked your piece better than the Wired one, if that is any consolation. The only thing that strikes me about the original article is that this is old news; in fact, that is one of its central points. If “web” is defined as static content and “Internet” is defined as dynamic content (and, good God, don’t let Tim Berners-Lee hear you say that if you want to keep credibility intact), then this sort of trend is defined by emergence of the “Web 2.0″ (shudder) movement of the last decade. Nothing so revelatory, really, by those standards.
Yeah… I think Wired’s observation is more important to plumbers than it is to people visiting the bathroom (so to speak).
Speaking to the plumbers, there is one interesting “history repeats itself” aspect to this. The beauty of Web 1.0 (HTML over HTTP) is that we were finally all on the same technical standard, with low costs and understood best-practices. The predictably new complexity creates opportunity, though. You don’t get distinction by being the one-millionth company to adopt a Flash banner but rather by being the first company. Damn the cutting edge. I wish someone would just wake me up and tell me which technology won.