The iPodification of the Internet
Not long ago, Professor Ziga Turk, the Minister of Growth in Slovenia, posed a simple question to his Twitter followers: Using the Letter "I", name a characteristic of the future Internet as you want it to be.
Tweets rushed in, with many “I”deas on how tomorrow’s internet should or could be. Ignorance, Intelligence, Integration, Imperfection and even Ipodification were all tweets that came in and showed just how difficult it would be to form a consensus view on the future of the internet.
[Lynn St. Amour, ISOC CEO]
It’s not just Professor Turks followers that have different views, but also the “experts.” Deriving the future structural form of the Internet from current and anticipated usage, Chief Researcher at the British Telecom PLC, Dr. Dirk Trossen, explains that “networking communications in the past have largely been around interconnecting telephones, interconnecting machines, interconnecting servers and clients to servers. The future will be about information exchange.”For Trossen, question is whether the current network can support and provide such information exchange.
“The original Internet was based on an assumption that everybody trusts everybody. Now we know that’s not true. Collaboration is not the essence anymore in the Internet – it’s about socialization – it’s about isolation as much as it is collaboration and that opens the discussion for how a network could look where isolation as much as collaboration is key,” said Trossen.
Identity management, which Trossen believes is the key to the future Internet, has been neglected in the original design and thinking behind the current Internet.
President and CEO of the Internet Society (ISOC), Lynn St. Armour argues that even if there are security or capacity concerns with today’s Internet, it is precisely today’s structure that has spurred creativity and innovation that we wouldn’t have experienced otherwise.
Continued on the next page
Follow Technorati