152 - The Future of the Web

What this episode covers

I've been thinking about this a lot lately: what's the future of the web? Subscribe: ITUNES | ANDROID | STITCHER | RSS FEED Music and links from this episode где она мера? by Kosta T Through The Storm by P C III Open Door by Little Glass Men Line-by-line notes The web used to be like a weird piece of avant garde music Nobody understood it, and nobody could work out how to apply it to anything Until Tim Berners-Lee In 1980 there was a man called Tim Berners-Lee Tim still exists today too by the way, he hasn't vanished or anything But in 1980, he was working on something very special at CERN. He'd previously made a prototype of his information sharing network, that at the time he called ENQUIRE He'd been working on the idea of hypertext: interlinking documents and pages and sharing information When he became a fellow at CERN in 1984, he saw the opportunity to take this idea further Tim created something called the World Wide Web, by pulling together lots of different technologies like the Internet, and hypertext The first website went online on 6th August 1991. It's still online today. From there, the rest is history. And today, I want to speculate on the future. This is AADA, and I'm Craig Burgess Music 27 years later, the world wide web is more powerful and all encompassing than ever It's used for everything, from just plain old boring websites, to replacing government services, to allowing you to book holidays online To actually providing people jobs, like me I think few people would argue with me when I say that the world wide Web and the Internet are the two most important inventions of the last 30 years, And a strong argument could be made for the most important invention of all time too Think for a second You could probably just about imagine life without some of the other greatest inventions If they were gone tomorrow, you could get by without a TV Without a car Without a microwave Without maybe even a phone But try and imagine a life without the internet And that's nearly impossible On a daily basis, I communicate with people Pay bills Book cinema tickets Sometimes book holidays Upload a podcast to let you listen to it Check my bank balance Update websites and get paid to do it Make people websites and get paid to do it Doing all that without the Internet Is either really hard or impossible So that's the Web now, but what is the future? I think about this a lot Especially when I think how far the Web has come in 27 years What will it look like in another 27 years? That’s a really tough question to answer Especially when I consider that 12 years ago, I couldn’t have predicted responsive websites The way that websites now expand and contract based on the size of the screen viewing it Before that, everybody made two websites A mobile website And a desktop website Even that simple thing Was precipitated by the rise of the smart phone And popularised by Apple’s iPhone, and then the ensuing Android phones I think the future is in mobile I think in 20 years time, they’ll be no such thing as a desktop computer We’ll look back on 2017 and the 2020s and think about how weird we were I think we’ll all use touchscreen devices permanently for every task, or some other kind of input I can’t even imagine right now The laptop, the PC, that will all be gone, because we won’t need it It’s more immediate to tap a screen right on the thing you want to change Than it is to guide an arrow on a screen to that location with a mouse There’s lots of maturing that needs to happen before then in the touch screen space Apps need to get more fully featured And somebody needs to break out of the gaming and entertainment bubble, and start to explore the idea of making serious productivity apps for touchscreen devices that take advantage of the medium Rather than being hindered by it And when the web is entirely mobile When 90-100% of all people consume websites on...