The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet | Magazine

A thought provoking article on Wired. Quotes don’t do justice to it, it’s got to be read in full…

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule.

According to Compete, a Web analytics company, the top 10 Web sites accounted for 31 percent of US pageviews in 2001, 40 percent in 2006, and about 75 percent in 2010. “Big sucks the traffic out of small,”

And because Google so dominated the Web, that meant building an alternative to the Web. Enter Facebook. The site began as a free but closed system. Google was forbidden to search through its servers. (…) And then, at some critical-mass point, not just in terms of registration numbers but of sheer time spent, of habituation and loyalty, Facebook became a parallel world to the Web.

The Web almost perversely discouraged the kind of systematized, coordinated, focused attention upon which brands are built — the prime, or at least most lucrative, function of media.

The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet | Magazine