The Past, Present, and Future of the Internet

When I first signed up for dial-​​up Internet access at home back in early 2000, hav­ing an online pres­ence meant hav­ing a per­sonal home­page. Whether through Geocities, Tripod, Angelfire, or Lycos or through a paid host, peo­ple would set up web­sites with var­i­ous sta­tic pages… Articles they’ve writ­ten, photo col­lec­tions, ((Man, oh, man were pic­tures online uglier back then.)) shout-​​outs, favorite links, and so on.

When I came across the con­cept of a weblog, I didn’t think the idea would catch on. I don’t recall what it was that seemed so unap­peal­ing, but I dis­tinctly remem­ber being turned off to the idea.

I wish I would have seized the oppor­tu­nity back then to start blog­ging. Maybe I’d under­stand it bet­ter today.

When wikis and social sites started to popup, I felt the same way, and by and large, I missed the boat. For seven years, I’ve been in the Internet’s slow lane, par­tic­i­pat­ing in the “next big thing” long after that big thing has become the accepted norm.

Over the past cou­ple of months, I’ve had my turn sig­nal on, and I’ve been mak­ing my way across the InterTubez Freeway ((Is “Information Superhighway” ever used to describe the ‘Net any­more?)) into faster and faster lanes thanks largely in part to Chris Pearson & DIYthemes.

Daily I’m inter­act­ing with a grow­ing vari­ety of Web pub­lish­ers, ((Read: Those peo­ple who make the Web inter­est­ing, those with modern-​​day home­pages who give the Web a per­sonal touch.)) and I’m see­ing first-​​hand the sorts of things peo­ple are expect­ing out of their Websites and those of others.

Through all of this, I’ve noticed there are mainly three ways peo­ple are now build­ing their pres­ence on the Web. The first is via a blog, upon which is pub­lished every­thing from essays, links lists, com­ments, and so on. The sec­ond is via social net­works; for exam­ple, Facebook & MySpace both pro­vide mech­a­nisms for pub­lish­ing con­tent in var­i­ous forms. The third is through a wild mashup of some or many of the avail­able ser­vices; links are posted to Delicious, prod­uct reviews on Amazon, favorite con­tent to StumbleUpon or Tumblr, pic­tures on Flickr, essays on your own blog, and so on.

Each approach has its pros and cons.

If you’re cre­at­ing your online pres­ence by mak­ing use of exter­nal ser­vices, ((I.e., those such as Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, or LinkedIn which are owned by another party and upon which you cre­ate an account, build a pro­file, and per­haps con­tribute con­tent.)) you have these advantages:

• Ease: Adding con­tent is as sim­ple as fill­ing in a few pre­de­fined form fields, and let’s not for­get the biggest time saver of all: There’s no site to setup & main­tain as it is all done for you.
• Connectivity: With other users of the same ser­vice, con­nec­tiv­ity is usu­ally a mouse-​​click away. Connecting with users across ser­vices may be just as easy thanks to pow­er­ful APIs which may allow for all sorts of inter­sys­tem communication.

Then there is the oppo­site side of the coin:

• Lack of Control: What hap­pens to your con­tacts, com­ments, and (most impor­tantly) pic­tures if Flickr ever shuts down? What hap­pens to your notes, links, and friends if Facebook ever tanks? There is an inher­ent risk in trust­ing third par­ties with your infor­ma­tion and pub­lished materials.
• Decentralization: Some may view this as an advan­tage, but I don’t. Few ser­vices sup­port a broad range of pub­lish­ing and social­iz­ing. Flickr allows images and now videos plus com­ments there­upon. YouTube allows videos. Twitter allows microblog entries of 140 char­ac­ters or fewer. They all may excel at what they do, but to take advan­tage of these ser­vices serves to dilute your online pres­ence. If Kingdom Geek didn’t exist, where would some­one link to when ref­er­enc­ing me? Would it be my Facebook account? What about my Flickr feed? Twitter feed? Delicious links? LinkedIn pro­file? Rather than max­i­miz­ing a sin­gle pres­ence, time and effort are divided across numer­ous media.

The dis­cern­ing reader may have already deduced that the pros & cons of the “per­sonal home­page” approach to build­ing an online pres­ence are the oppo­site of those stated above. Rocking your own Website grants you the con­trol and cen­tral­iza­tion lack­ing from mas­sive social media sites, though the site takes more effort to cre­ate and maintain.

Perhaps most notably, though, are the dif­fi­cul­ties regard­ing con­nec­tiv­ity or social­iza­tion inher­ent in rely­ing upon a per­sonal home­page (read: blog) as an online presence.

While I could post any­thing I want here — essays, pic­tures, videos, pod­casts, down­loads, and more — it is largely no more “social” than the home­pages of yore, with two notable excep­tions: Instead of a guest­book, vis­i­tors can now drop their thoughts onto indi­vid­ual posts, and sub­scrib­ing to get updates is eas­ier thanks to var­i­ous imple­men­ta­tions of syn­di­ca­tion feeds.

The Tubes are def­i­nitely flow­ing in the right direc­tion, but if I choose to eschew rely­ing upon third party ser­vices such as Facebook to pub­lish my con­tent, then that means one of two things if my friends want to stay up to date: They either must sub­scribe to my site via most likely a third party ser­vice such as Google Reader, or they must visit the site every so often to man­u­ally check for upgrades.

From a strictly usabil­ity stand­point, that still doesn’t seem ideal. I think the Web could be much bet­ter. ((I came across the DiSo Project a while back, and what they envi­sion is very much what I’m talk­ing about here.)) Your blog becomes your social net­work­ing pro­file. Through blogrolls & Linkbacks, there is func­tion­al­ity anal­o­gous to “friends” and “tagged in note” func­tion­al­ity, respec­tively, for example.

More than that, though, it would be unbe­liev­able were a mech­a­nism in place in WordPress and every other con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem which allowed basic, if not com­pre­hen­sive, social track­ing right through the back­end of your blog.

It is at that point that the tech­nol­ogy is suf­fi­ciently beyond me to get me to shut up about it. Still, that seems a likely can­di­date for being the next big par­a­digm, if not the next big one after the next one.

And who­ever solves is able to answer the ques­tions nec­es­sary to make a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the Web a ginor­mous social net­work­ing is going to be set for life. I’m cer­tainly not say­ing that is me; it may be the DiSo Project or some­one inspired by them. It could be some­one who sim­ply has the right idea at the right time.

What I do know for cer­tain is that this time, I don’t want to be a few years late to the game, as I have con­sis­tently been thus far. Connectivity is becom­ing increas­ingly impor­tant in our online lives, and we as Web design­ers, Webmasters, and Web pro­gram­mers need to embrace con­cepts which move us toward that ideal as soon as pos­si­ble, for it seems these con­cepts are already long overdue.

Nearly two years ago, I learned that the Internet isn’t an after­thought in Yahweh’s plan; quite the con­trary, as we grow nearer to Daniel’s Seventieth Week, the Holy One has given Christians a great tool to ful­fill the one thing which Scripture says must be required before the Second Coming: the sal­va­tion of all the elect. ((2 Peter 3:9.)) I believe with all my heart that believ­ers who have Web access are bound by the Great Commission to use it to the best of their abil­i­ties to not only evan­ge­lize but to live out Kingdom prin­ci­ples online, just as they do offline.

A social Internet is the per­fect medium by which we can stand together and pro­claim that we are here and we will not be silent in the face of an increas­ingly apa­thetic, unbe­liev­ing world. Don’t hide the Light under a bas­ket while you’re online. Make known the wrath, mercy, grace, and love of God to a world des­per­ately, if not igno­rantly, in need of the Truth.

The future of the Internet won’t solve the dif­fi­cul­ties inher­ent in evan­ge­lism, but what it will do is mul­ti­ply the mis­sions field for count­less Christians into a medium which is much more easy to com­mu­ni­cate within for some: the medium of the writ­ten world.

In any event, being a part of DIYthemes has made me a part of the Web’s future. Chris’ vision is the one I’m glad to throw myself behind: take the world’s pre­mière blog­ging soft­ware WordPress and build for it the world’s most user-​​friendly, most cus­tomiz­able, most wickedly awe­some design with which any­one from Web neo­phytes to Al “I invented the Invented” Gore ((Yes, I know he didn’t “invent” the Internet. Please, no hate mail.)) can cre­ate a pro­fes­sional qual­ity site unique to them in rel­a­tively lit­tle time.

The learn­ing curve to putting up a Website is low­er­ing every day; the Internet com­mu­nity is grow­ing, and with a solid foun­da­tion of WordPress, how soon until the “switch is flipped,” instantly inter­con­nect­ing blogs every­where, with­out the need for ris­ing & falling third parties?

More impor­tantly, what needs to be done to get us to that point, and what can add-​​on (themes, plu­g­ins…) authors do to help core soft­ware (WordPress, Movable Type, and so on) read this new level of socialization?

Or is all of this truly a pipe ((Tubez?)) dream?