the web is still an infant

The first web pages were built in the late 1980s.  In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee unveiled the world-wide web, and by 1993 the US White House was online.  In 1995, only 12 years ago, Yahoo! and Amazon were just getting started; America Online,CompuServe, and Prodigy were starting to offer dial-up service; and Microsoft released Internet Explorer 1.0.  How many kids born from this point forward will know what dial-up means - other than the brief moment that they keep it in their short-term memory to answer the bonus question on their 4th grade history test? 

It is easy to look back and marvel at the amount of growth in every dimension of the web over the past 10 years or so.  It is also easy to forget that the web is still an infant.  Fred Wilson recently posted a good example of how the best search technology in the world - Google - still is far from optimal.  Of the areas that today's web reaches, which will look like dial-up in our rear view mirrors 10 years from now?  Today's Google's current search technology?  Hard to imagine, but very possible.  And how about the areas that are barely touched by today's web?  Impossible to know, fun to think about, and important to keep in mind that there is a long way to go. 

Are we past the stage of the most explosive web growth?  Most of the people driving web growth over the past 10 years have been early adopters - and early adopters are always responsible for a tremendous amount of innovation.  However, only recently did we get to 50% broadband penetration in the US, so there is certainly a long tail full of innovation that has not been tapped - and it is innovation from a much more diverse group than the early adopter group.    Tom Evslin posts here about his upcoming testimony about a bill that would make Vermont the first e-state in the country, providing adequate, affordable, pervasive Internet access to their citizens, similar to the way that states have supported other necessities such as power and transportation infrastructure (links to the series of posts with more details at the bottom of his blog post).  Considering how railroads and highways changed America, what happens when broadband Internet access is that widely deployed?  And what happens when we all have mobile broadband access?  How about when there is a critical mass of devices that are always feeding their data to the web in real-time - sensors, probes, digital cameras and camcorders, GPS devices, etc?  Keep in mind too that today's "broadband" download and especially upload speeds will be considered to be a slow crawl in future years.

I'll blog about some of the areas that are on the verge of being radically changed by the continued growth of the Internet in future posts - some of the big ones that have already changed, but still have a long way to go: health care, education, local communities, government, and media.