As a casual observer of the Web 2.0 boom and fizzle, I’m left to wonder if the Internet as we know it is as mature as we all think it is. However you slice it, the Internet still utilizes the same metaphor as notepad: a page. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against pages—working for a newspaper, pages keep me employed. But you have to wonder if a page is really the peak of innovation or if maybe we could come up with something better.
Does it make sense to load GMail on a page? Sure, I’m reading my email, but GMail is a full-fledged web application. I’ve never heard it called a “web page”. My newspaper can’t automatically mark the sports section as read or filter out all the unwanted ads tucked in between stories. It just sits there. Many web applications, like GMail, Yahoo! Mail, and BaseCamp, have been painstakingly built on top of this page metaphor—not necessarily because it’s the best platform for building web applications, but because the delivery mechanism is so prolific.
The changes have been slow and incremental, but there has been a steady push away from the original concept of a web page. Macromedia, er, Adobe has made tons of money with Flash. The Web 2.0 craze brought us AJAX. Java applets run on countless intranets worldwide (thankfully, less are being seen in the wild). Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and many other companies all have plugins that let you watch video on a web page. All of these things are great examples of innovation, but if you look a little closer, they all share another common trait. Each one seeks to add a feature or some new functionality that was not part of the original page metaphor.
It’s getting crowded in the browser. Plugins are great; I love ‘em. But when you need all these extra applications running inside your web page, you have to wonder if we’re just polishing a rusty relic. Perhaps the Page has run its course and we should be looking for its successor, whatever that may be. Or perhaps we’re entering an age where the metaphor doesn’t matter. Have people become so acclimated to computer technology that tried and true metaphors like the desktop and folders are loosing their cachet? When a web page isn’t a page at all, is anything lost?
