Not sure how I suddenly stumbled upon this one from early 2011, but it’s interesting nevertheless. A database developer’s (Couchbase co-founder J Chris Anderson) take on the future internet:
Remember “web accelerators”? They’ll be back with a vengeance. So when you pull out your screen thingy, it’ll already have a copy of Hacker News and all the articles it links to and all the articles they link to, that it fetched in the background the night before. New updates will trickle in in real time.
It’ll be interesting, because the further you get from your habitual browsing patterns, the slower the net will get. As you start using a new site more frequently, your browser will up its fetch priority, so that it will already be on your device too, with updates streamed in in real time.
The upshot is that everyone’s phones will have a copy of the slice of the internet they care about on it. The good news is that the interoperability required to make this happen will make web-app vendor lock-in a thing of the past. Eg: once you have all of your flickr photos on all your devices, and they are synchronized around in a standard way, if flickr were to shut down, you could just sync them to photobucket instead. (Or directly to your friends, if you prefer.)
via J Chris Anderson’s answer to Future of Internet: What will the Internet look like in 2020? – Quora.
Realtime incremental updates to data stores is coming big time, whether that’s caches as above, or analytic data stores as in Monash’s ELT example that I wrote about the other day.
Comments
2 responses to “What will the Internet look like in 2020?”
Interesting approach. We had some first impressions years ago when Firefox started to prefetch pages linked to the current one. With the increasing bandwidth and processing power even in the mobile devices such approaches could be a nice add on.
One of the largest show stoppers could be again the content industry. Storing files on external devices are always a big risk to loose control over the data. The trend to stream movies and music is currently the main way to protect content from being stolen.
You will have a copy of all your favorite music and pictures, but every time you like to have a look at it the main server will be contacted to get the decryption key and to charge you some cents. Once again you will be 100% depending on the contents source – when the main server fails, your device will only keep useless bit crap.
I didn’t even think about multimedia content but news… but who knows, your pessimistic view could even apply to both!