Relax, Everything Is Deeply Intertwingled

A Brief History Of The Web, 1996 To 2004

Media Metrix celebrated its eighth birthday. The number of U.S. Web users has grown from 20 million in 1996 to 150 million today. (150 million, isn't that over half of America? Wow!)

In January 1996, the top 10 websites were: AOL, Webcrawler.com, Netscape, Yahoo!, Infoseek, Prodigy, Compuserve, UMich.edu, Primenet, and Well.com. Contrast that with today:

While information and content delivery have surged in popularity, e-commerce properties such as eBay, Amazon, TicketMaster, Orbitz, Expedia and others now rank among the most popular destinations on the Web. In fact, online spending (excluding auctions) is on target to break the $100 billion threshold this year -- another spectacular growth story tracked by comScore Networks.

In January 2004, the top 10 "online properties" are Yahoo!, MSN, Time Warner, eBay, Google, Terra Lycos, About/Primedia, Amazon, Viacom, and the Weather Channel. Look at the brand equity developed:

In January 2004, 83.5 million Americans, or 55 percent of the Internet population, visited either eBay or Amazon, making these sites among the most heavily trafficked retailers in the country -- online or offline... Online travel agencies, such as Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity, have revolutionized the travel industry by giving more power to consumers and driving down prices of airfare, hotel rooms and car rentals. Consumers have responded positively and, as a result, the online travel industry has grown from a fledgling business in 1996 to $41 billion in consumer sales in 2003.

There has been a tremendous amount of consolidation, and it turns out the 99ers were right: the first movers now have a huge advantage over anyone hoping to build a brand on the Internet. No wonder Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! are working so hard to file as many search patents as possible. The big will continue to get bigger... and battle each other for more share of a growing market.

On the other hand, between off-the-shelf components and cheap and/or free infrastructure, it's fairly easy for anyone who wants to, to set up a small site or shop on the Web. That's quite democratizing, when you think about it.

A Boy Named Foo

Foo Camp. I wonder if heaven looks like this.

Message Queues Or Stovepipes

Steve Wilhelm (a friend of Tommy's working on TB technology) wrote some observations on software design with the pithy rule of thumb, "When trying to scale a n-tier system, there are two approaches: build several independent layers will message queues between them, or configure several parallel stovepipes."

Token Me

Joel Spolsky: "A token is like a shortcut or alias that you can send via e-mail or instant message. With just one click you can create a token, and no matter how large the files you want to send are, the token representing them will be very small—just a few KB. Anyone you send a token to can then download the free Creo Token Redeemer software, and with one click redeem the token and download the files. It works for anything—a single file, an entire folder, a huge movie. It's quite cool. When you send a token via email your computer becomes a server, holding the files until the recipient redeems the tokens to get the file. The UI is really really simple, and you don't have to worry about whether the recipient already knows about tokens (if not, they'll get a link to download the free redeemer) or if there are firewalls in the way (if there are, the file transfer will automatically bounce off of Creo's giant-reflector-in-the-sky). This is a great implementation of a simple idea that brilliantly solves the nagging problem that it's just not easy enough to transfer large files down the hall, let alone halfway around the world."

Fun With DHTML

I've been playing with some great DHTML apps lately: Kurt Grigg, JavaScript games, and Quek.

Three Words: MS-Linux 2006

Microsoft uses Linux. Not sure what the big deal is, it sounds like a win-win for everyone. Mark my words, one day there will be a Microsoft Linux. Embrace and extend, baby!

Is Six Apart Shopping?

Might Yahoo! buy SixApart? "Names such as Xanga and TypePad are possibilities, with Six Apart's new TypePad service, although in early days, seeking widespread critical acclaim and increasing market share at the cost of its competitors strongly."

Oblomovka: pl vs py

Danny O'Brien: "Most of the people I can imagine maintaining this code will know Perl but not Python. Python doesn't take that long to learn, but reading Python to take on someone else'se project just isn't much *fun*. Sitting down to learn someone's Perl, while tough, does teach you about the way they were thinking when they wrote the application. Python's clarity, I think, cuts down on its expressiveness in depicting why certain decisions were made. When I had to hunker down and learn POE or Moveable Type, for instance, I came away with a very deep understanding of how it was supposed to work. It was fun, albeit time-consuming. I sometimes have problems doing the same with slabs of Python code, just because they can be very lacking in personality." I note that he ended up choosing Python. Good call. ;)

Lintel Vs Wintel Showdown Coming

Newsfactor: "Despite a gain of 35 percent in Linux-server factory revenue in the first quarter of 2003, to US$583 million, Microsoft still is sitting pretty, according to market statistics from IDC. During the same period, the Windows server market grew about 10 percent to $3.2 billion, (Unix-server factory sales declined about 13 percent, to $4.3 billion.) Why has Microsoft been able to hold onto server market share when it is competing against a more secure, lower-cost alternative like Linux? Any number of reasons can be cited -- inertia on the part of CTOs, a dearth of applications that run on Linux, an aggressive ad-hoc strategy by Microsoft to thwart defections to open source -- take your pick... The truth is, Windows is getting squeezed at the high and low end. Linux is not just entering enterprises in low-end, low-cost Intel boxes, but also as the replacement for Unix in high-end processing environments. So, Microsoft is going to have to battle it out on both ends to maintain its market share."