In its relatively short history, the World Wide Web has gone from being a cozy, virtual community for researchers and computer geeks to a high-stakes, high-concept digital frontier to a source of rage for unfortunate stock market investors.
Through it all, it's easy to forget that the web -- and, more to the point, the Internet -- has indeed transformed communications. No, it isn't the most important invention since the wheel and it hasn't swept away the underlying forces of the market economy and it won't turn many of us into dot.com millionaires, but we can't dismiss its power and potential. The Internet has become so deeply interwoven in our lives that we've begun to take it for granted. Just as the telephone went from being a technological marvel to a modern necessity, the web is fast becoming simply another means of communication.
Ironically, that's largely what the early pioneers of the web had in mind. When the pieces of the World Wide Web first came together in 1993, the Internet still had the feel of a small university town. Most active users were based at government research centers and academic institutions. The computer programmers and engineers who pioneered the web's infrastructure believed that the technology they were creating would primarily serve the cause of scholarly collaboration and intellectual exploration. Although the web's age of innocence has long since passed, the concept of the web as a communications tool remains valid. So do many of the precepts that have guided thoughtful web developers since the days when surfing was something you did in the ocean.
Simple Truths
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Content is still king: The success of the web is due mainly to its ability to deliver information and facilitate interactivity. Not convinced? Consider that the most popular destination on the web is Yahoo! -- the online equivalent of The Wall Street Journal in terms of appearance. Moreover, the most popular Internet application remains e-mail, a technology that predates the web by nearly two decades. In other words, most people don't come to the web to be dazzled by the latest cutting-edging technology. They come because they're looking for something.
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It's the network, stupid: The web pioneers were also on the mark in understanding that the power of the web lies in the cables, servers, and routers that make up the Internet. For the moment, the face of the web is the browser, and odds are that Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator will be around for at least a few more years. But already, new interfaces are emerging -- personal device assistants, web-enabled cell phones, WebTV, Internet appliances, and who knows what else is on the horizon. The key to success is to remain flexible and adaptable. Web sites that are designed for specific browsers or rely heavily on this week's favorite cybergimmick will soon show their age.
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Find your niche: With a couple of dozen web sites grabbing most of the Internet-related headlines, you might think that there are more cable television channels to surf than worthwhile online destinations. Of course, that's what the Internet giants want you to believe. The truth, however, is that the web is not like TV or any other form of mass media. On the contrary, the web was conceived to provide targeted content to a limited audience.
In practical terms, that means that you should probably give up on the notion of selling diet books or Top-40 CDs on your web site. Sorry, but those ideas have already been taken. However, you may find a niche offering publications on 16th-century Italian architecture or recordings of the mating calls of Antarctic penguins. That's what the web was made for.
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Revenge of the nerds without stock options: The Internet giants also want you to believe that building an effective web site requires hitching your wagon to the big software companies. They've spent many millions in advertising dollars to convince us that only Fortune 500 computer companies are capable of mastering the complexities of the web. In reality, most of the web's underlying protocols and programs were the invention of a single programmer, Tim Berners-Lee, and the web continues to be run largely with free software. You won't find shrink-wrapped software packages for Unix, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, and XML at your local computer superstore, but they are nonetheless the workhorses of the web.
Who is responsible for the success of free, or "open source," software? You guessed it -- it's the same folks who created the web in the first place. They're still staffing the computer labs at universities and government research centers. Only now, their ranks have been swelled by thousands of additional graduate students, researchers, Internet junkies, and assorted social misfits. Fortunately for the web, they have a few things in common: intellectual curiosity, quite of bit of time on their hands for experimentation, a knack for passing off pet projects as serious work, and a burning resentment of Microsoft's Bill Gates and Oracle's Larry Ellison. They've contributed the improvements and innovations that have kept open source software on the technological cutting edge. In other words, they're precisely the type of people you would want on your team. Isn't the web wonderful?
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