Are you still excited by the internet?

When the internet first started and there were all these possibilities, dancing chipmunks, second life, MySpace, friends re-united, pamela/tommy video, etc. What would be next? 3D? Virtual reality? Ooooh. \/ Limitless information.

Now 20 years later, it all seems to have petered out and most people only look at a couple of websites. Maybe the news, Youtube, Wikipedia and Facebook. And that limitless information? Turns out nobody knew anything anyway. 100 friends on facebook, 200 friends on facebook, parents on facebook... quit facebook.

It seems to have fragmented too. First it was just HTML+Javascript. Now apps are in c++, java, object c, webgl, lots of incompatible languages.

Have we just reached a plateau. Is this it? Has the internet died? Is all that's left apps? Did the iPhone kill the internet?

 

I'm not sure if we reached a plateau... or people have gone numb with so much information. Also as time passes, things surprise you less. Technology is so available nowadays that it's easy to take for granted everything we have at our disposal... I don't even remember what was like not being able to call someone on a cellphone at any given time or location; or not being able to check their facebook status; or how the only possible way to play a game was to buy a physical cartridge... I mean that was bonkers! Now you have a bizillion games of any flavor, some even free to play, and come in the platform of your choice.

 

Yes. Its kind of like, when bananas were first available in Europe everyone thought it was sooo exciting. But now nobody gets excited by a banana. <--(I know that sounded strange!)

 

I use it for what I need to use it for mainly, with a few regular hangouts like here, or using it as a way to find out information. But one of the really big problems with the web is discoverability, and I have absolutely no idea what stuff it out there that... I don't even know is out there, or to look for. Search engines help some, if you have something in mind. But it's not like a shopping mall where you can go and look and see all the stores or notice something you weren't looking for specifically... I'm sure there's cool stuff out there but I like most people rely on `curation` by third parties, like facebook, google, etc.

 

The Internet was exciting when it was first becoming popular, because it was new and everything was unheard of.
It isn't so exciting any more because we use it all day, every day, and everybody including your mother and your dog use the Internet. However, I don't think it is correct to say that things have slowed down or petered out.

There really is limitless information, between e-books and wikipedia and all the blogs and so on.
Everyday there is a new fad messenger system or social media app or free-2-play game designed to trick those with obsessive spending disorders to empty their bank accounts. I'd say that it most ways the Internet has vastly exceeded what we thought it would be. (for example, I buy practically everything on Amazon. I never thought that day would come).

The only thing that never caught on was 3D VR to replace the point-and-click desktop and flat web pages.
It was tried a few times, but the fact is, it was a stupid idea to begin with. A few movies in the 90s like Hackers and books like Gibson's Neuromancer made a 3D internet look awesome, but that was just fiction.

 

I think the 3D internet is still to come. I would like a 3D version of Wikipedia. Such as the entry for cat, would show a 3D cat model that you could zoom in and look at the skeleton, eyes, whiskers, or internal organs. Or the entry for St Paul's would have a 3D model of St Paul's cathedral, with all the parts labelled. Or the entry for Earth would have a holographics projection of a spinning Earth like they do in sci-fi movies. Perhaps in Windows 10? Perhaps this is not possible not because the lack of technology but lack of know-how for the general public to create such things.

 

I agree that some good 3D models next to the photographs on wikipedia would be cool. Also some quicktime-VR style panorama photographs for articles about places on earth. With WebGL, I'd say we could do this right now.

But this isn't the 3D internet that we dreamed of back in the day. The concept then was that there are no icons, web pages, documents, or any 2D metaphors. Everything is a 3D object and the Internet is a huge MMO game. Instead of Amazon being a web page, it would be like a VR shopping mall. Instead of browsing a list of google search results, you would fly over landscapes, looking down at the nations, businesses, homes, and so forth that would take the place of web pages. As I write this, it sounds pretty cool to me Its just that it wouldn't really be faster or easier or better, aside from the wow factor the first time you see someone demo it... until you sit down and realize you'd rather just type in a URL and click links.

 

lol i hate that games and software are so digitally distributed now... (yeah its good business side)
as a consumer, it feels LAME to buy a cdkey ... >< .. i want a BOX
and it feels like everything should be like... instead of $60 .. $10 max .. cause i know youre not really buying anything, its just a duplicate that can be duplicated infinite times .. .lol ... yeah yeah, but that fact always stands out so vividly to me ..

 

The old cartridge felt more like ownership. It was your game, you had to take care of it because they were few hard to acquire. Now, you buy the rights to download it to your computer, you can delete it, and download it again as many times as you want... it's just borrowed data you can't redistribute, and you can only download as long as their servers are up. It has its advantages, but it loses the sense of value over owning a game.

 

You guys are being short sighted.

Internet is nowhere near stagnant and wont be for a long time. Internet is not only websites but it's also the back-end for pretty much every app you use. Still a long way to go.

 

Still excited but any long lasting relationship waters down after a while. And for some reason saying this feels like telling my wife after 15 years I still love her but deep inside I ask myself is this everything there is? But then I say to myself: thank god I'm not married and the internet is not my wife.

 

The internet made me smart. The story there is too offensive to discuss, but I'm sure it's one shared by most.

 

Indeed, you can learn almost everything. Creating the game I am working on for 6 years now would be impossible for a single person without all the information available out there.
For me by far the biggest drawback of the web is that there is no easy way to google for mathematics when you don't understand (or better don't know how to read) some formulas - it is hard to find an answer when you can't type the question.

 

Agreed. Forget book learning, knowing things was possible easily before the internet. What makes us smarter now is the exchange of ideas, culture and ideology. I no longer have the desire to burn group xxx at the stake. I understand there are practical benefits to a wide variety of government types.

This is perhaps the most significant change. Todays being educated is not about knowing how to do something. Its about knowing how to find out how to do something. In my day job I rely heavily on Google, Wikipedia and the like to identify the information I need. I'm paid for my ability to learn new to do new tasks, rather then the ability to do the tasks I've already mastered. Interesting change.

I'd imagine the education system will cotton onto this soon. By the time my kids finish school their exams will include a tablet and an internet connection, and an assignment to write an essay or solve a problem on a topic they have never encountered before in the classroom.

Either that or global warming will wipe out the world food supply and they be fighting for their lives in a world that's gone back to cave man days. Exciting times!

 

I'm sure wolfram alpha in the future will have an app for your phone so you can take a picture of a problem, solve it and show the steps

Haha I wish I could say the same. I'm constantly taking in the bad news of police executing people, foreign countries threatening each other and beheading their citizens, stupid laws passed based on personal preferences to target groups of people... there's a lot of bad stuff to learn. There's some nice things, like scientists engineering a cure for cancer by altering AIDS and measles to attack only cancer cells. It's interesting, but doesn't quite make up for the horrible story about that tacobell employee with aids who uh... spread it to several people who ate at tacobell that day.

There's also the little charming thought where just about every major accomplishment in the area of 'civil rights' is something we're making up for in the past lol. I really just can't wrap my mind around the history of this species. With the way some old people slip up, like Don Sterling, there's no denying that history haha.

The internet makes you smart, but sad. Hopefully one day there will be some super progress country run by individuals like us.

The internet really kills your empathy, too. I wouldn't mind a mass extinction event at this point. Climate change would be the best way to go, because it would be fast enough for me to witness the end in my lifetime, but slow enough for even the most stubborn people to acknowledge that they're screwed.

 

For me the tech is by the by, it will progress as all tech does, from waiting 1 hour for a picture to load on Compuserve to loading a browser based 3D game in seconds . The one overriding factor that the internet is and must continue with is the ability to share views and mix with people all over the world. But the one thing I find so funny is, people say "don't always believe what the papers say", but a lot of people take the Internet news Content as being 100% true. Interesting.

Also sometimes people are just not ready for the tech/app. For example many many years ago Yahoo turned of their chat channels (or groups so long ago i forget exactly) as it was seen as unsafe, now we have chat/websites/forums all under the banner of Social Media. So things can come and go and just be re marketed. One day perhaps we will have "Virtual Social Media" ie no more face book but in browser virtual worlds with all the features of FB and Twitter etc but with full 3D life like models of real people, scanned in my the 3D webcam prior to login, ooo im wandering off soz

 

It's interesting that stuff about searching for formula. One thing that's still a pain is searching for algorithms. And then when you find them you have to translate them into your particular programming language. It would be kind of cool to have a Wiki of algorithms, so you could say, search for some formula and it would automatically put it in your programming language, press a button and it inserts it into your code. Then people could submit more optimized versions of algorithms and you could choose to update your code just by clicking "update algorithms". Probably the technical hurdles would be too much and also the checking of the algorithms that they don't contain errors.

But aside from that, I think it's disappointing that early attempts at AI like "Ask Jeeves" have lost out to sledge hammer approaches like Google search.

It was interesting that the AI that won Jeopardy lately, had no real intelligence, just used statistical analysis to guess answers. Very disappointing.

 

I'm definitely still excited by certain parts of the Internet. Like, the parts I browse in Incognito mode...



But seriously, folks.

As a web developer, I don't think the Internet is even close to being disappointing. The reason it seemed so exciting in its early stage was because there was so much unknown potential. Now we're realizing that potential, which for some reason doesn't get people as worked up. Kinda like how people seemed to care about going to the moon more before we'd been there. (People, we put men on rockets and set them down gently on a giant rock in space! Then we got 'em back home!)

I don't understand the suggestion that the iPhone killed the Internet at all. If anything, it let you take the Internet with you everywhere you go. Maybe it's just like anything... when you have it all the time, you don't appreciate it. But mobile technology is expanding the possibilities of the Internet exponentially, not damaging it.

 

I wouldn't say 'never caught on', more like for every step forward it's 2 steps back. for example: you get this really great api to be used for web, but then it's hobbled to death by the security implementations etc..

another reason would be; lack of browser consensus. They all handle things a bit differently. Hell, even html standards aren't fully fleshed out yet.

When dealing with content heavy stuff like a 3D Internet you almost *have* to have gigabyte Internet speeds, because if you *are* going to have a 3D internet, it has to be immersive and believable to at least the same level you get in games.

Content and editors. This is yet another app *along* with the browser that needs to be written in a way that most folks can grasp it quickly. If they can't, they won't use it. Additionally, some things are just better in 2d. Books or whitepapers etc are good examples, which also means you'd still have a 'partial' 2d internet.

Infrustructure. You need more than a typical server than what they currently have now. Because what it will be doing is keeping track of you in 3D space just like a game has to do, which brings up:

Security and the perception of being spied on. Because in a 3D world you have to start thinking of objects and places as actual physical locations, so that your buddy can hook up with online to go do something together, be it shopping or watching a concert etc..

Money. It takes a lot of it to convert older infrastructure over to what would be needed, just at the company level. Not only that, but it would take having someone/company be first. And going to shareholders to spend millions on an untested venture/gamble like that is almost doomed to certain failure. And let's be honest; unless a large enough company gets behind something like that, with the funds and patience to show folks that it's not a gimmick, it won't take hold for the vast majority.

Favoritism. Because yout have to enter the virtual world somewhere, where would that 'there' be?

Consumer requirements. Consumers would need to spend additional monies for advanced Gfx cards to handle what the current on board cards, that handle a 2d internet fine, could not.

How do I know all of this stuff? Not that I'm anyone, I don't posit that I am, but I was a lead developer of a 3D browser called 'Magellan' for a now defunct company called walrus corporation. I have several patents in content delivery since at the time (remember voodoo Gfx cards?) There were no standards and even crappier internet. Hell, folks were still playing quake tournament.

These were just some of the more major issues we ran into, that still exist today.

*Will* it happen? Most assuredly. Some very astute company or entrepreneur with major funds will do it, but is that time now? I personally don't think so. We're still a few years out imo, but it's getting closer; )

And remember this: the folks that do this also get to set the rules/standards. *If* someone can pull this off? You think Facebook's initial valuation was big? Yeah..these guys would make so much money that the govt would go to them for loans instead of China lol

 

I think it is just YOU who is becoming uninterested in Internet.

it is like marriage, or any relationship - the beginning is always sweet and exciting, limitless possibilities! You could almost shout out :



And then relationship gets to the mid phase where it is tested - and that's where a lot of relationship fails as parties gets uninterested....what used to be exciting is now annoying..and it becomes monotonous....

What I can suggest - is to find something exicting. Internet is like a sea, there is always something interesting you can find. It just takes an active mind and an interest to find it.

 

@I am da bawss the internet is such a vast place, and always growing! I can see people being fully explored at some point and thus some people become bored... but how can the internet ever be boring? I agree, it can't, it's limitless!

Though I do get tired of all the terrible news world wide.

 

I strongly agree with your point about lack of editors. Everyone seems to say that HTML5 is a vendor-neutral standards-based replacement for Flash. And while HTML5 may indeed have enough procedural graphics ability to replace the flash clients... the thing that makes flash so great is the editor. I have never seen such a intuitive interface for drawing 2D vector images. I severely doubt that your typical flash developer would be happy if you give them a code editor and say "type javascript to create your interactive animation", when they are used to having the flash editor to draw things.

 

Although, do people born after the internet revolution get the same enthusiasm for latest technology? Or do they grow up acknowledging it as a normal every day thing?

Sure, they witness better internet speeds as time passes, some improvements in consoles, screens with even more resolution,etc.
But they never lived in a world where screens were absolutely rare to begin with, and watching pixels animate and interact was something you didn't see everyday; they'll never experience chatting where instant messaging with several people simultaneously was unheard of; or actually receiving a mail electronically was an intriguing idea people would be skeptical about.

So what will get people super excited now? VR? Augmented reality? 3D printing things at home? Is that making people go nuts?... or maybe we've reached some sort of plateau, where existing technology does improve a lot, but few things are truly new? The wheel has been invented already, now we just improve it.

 

Most people don't realize how much they use or rely on the internet. If I lose power or connectivity for a few hours, I start sweating. It's no big deal now to know people on the complete opposite side of the world, and to talk with them every day. There are billions of people connected, and even more webpages than people. It continues to get more pervasive - my car is connected to the internet, and it just loves to text me and tell me it needs to be plugged in, or that someone touched it (creepy). Seems like it's still getting cooler to me.

 

I'm sorry for spamming your phone with the touching text messages

 

Only if you spoil them lol. Start them with no phone, move them to a flip phone, then move them to a touch screen mobile super computer. It's shocking how I'm only like 4 years older than some of the most spoiled people I've ever met who's first phone was the first Droid. I don't remember what my first phone was called, but the 'sidekick 1' was the one I upgraded to afterwards lol.

Lots of young people are bored and depressed these days, while being surrounded by technology. It's definitely an interesting thing to think about. Would I have been a 420 yolo swag mlg dunce if I was born just a few years earlier? *shudders*

VR might interest some people. Hopefully parents learn to keep THAT away from their kids until they're at least 12 or 16 or whatever. People, spoiled people specifically, don't have the easiest time interfacing with the world they live in now. Can you imagine the social problems someone would have if they grew up partially in this world and partially in some crazy happy fantasy VR world?

 

The only thing I have been excited for are twins peaks season 3 and ash vs evil dead.

 

Remember having to go to the library?
Remember Card Catalogs?
Remember Having 5 channels on TV and they were all reruns?
Remember Long Distance charges?
Remember writing letters that took a week to get anywhere, then another week to get a reply?

...I don't know what you guys are smoking! The internet is AWESOME!!!!!!

 

Right but eventually everything plateau's it becomes normalized and blasé. Its not what have you done for me, what have you done for me lately.

 

Hmm... I'm pretty young, just turned 18, and started using the Internet in 2000's as a child. What kinda sucks is that I was born in between where the Internet was created and where it is today, so I never got to experience the "Awestruck" of the Internet.

Therefore as a child, I was never excited about the Internet, and today I'm no so excited about it either.

Obviously this will happen between generations forever... (Unless our technology reaches a peak)
The older generation being "Wow, that's absolutely amazing!!" and the younger generation being "Why are you so excited for? It's just the internet!?" and then the cycle continues.

Anyways... In conclusion, I'm not excited about the Internet anymore, because I was born into it. I also understand why some people would still be excited about it.

...Maybe one day when teleportation becomes a reality, I'll be talking about how we used to drive cars.

 

UNACCEPTABLE ANSWER!

 

xD I was reading your post before and I was like...

Remember having to go to the library? NOPE
Remember Card Catalogs? What's that?
Remember Having 5 channels on TV and they were all reruns? NOPE?
Remember Long Distance charges? What?
Remember writing letters that took a week to get anywhere, then another week to get a reply? NOPE

 

uhhhh... that's it, I just officially became "OLD".... there's nothing left for me but to carve my own tombstone and compile my memoirs. But the internet is still awesome, you people are whack!

 

Now I'm feeling old.

How about:

The time where you had to know someone's email address to get hold of them. When you actually had to know the address of a website to get to it?

The time when messaging services cost an apreciable amount of money. And you only had a limited number of characters per message. So we invented this crazy shorthand language for every thing?

Remember the robot like tones of a dial up modem. Remember not being able to use the landline and the phone at the same time?

Remember snake?

So even over the last ten years there have been some amazing advances on the net. Defenitely still exciting times.

 

Yes. Haha, books and public computers without discreet graphics cards.

Born in 1992. Should I know what a card catalogue is?

Actually my earliest memory of TV is having DVDs for everything because I lived in a log cabin in a forest with miles between each house. I don't think I had cable. But after that, whether it's basic cable or whatever the crap I have now, I only ever watched like 3 channels. I haven't watched TV since mid 2013. I do everything online now.

Yes. Had no one to call, but I knew about them

Yea, but now that's only an issue when I RMA a product I reluctantly bought on iBuyPower. 1 week to ship the computer to iBuyPower, a month for them to call me tell me the HD won't start, a few passive aggressive minutes of me explaining that's why I sent it to them, and now it'll be shipped back sometime between next week and May

When we first got the internet, my mom made me name 25 websites before I could use it. That was only 10 years ago lol

 

Probably not. I was 86 and remember them.

Think google in hard copy. So say I went to the library and wanted to find a book on apples. I would go to the card catalogue, open the drawer marked "A" and thumb through till I found apples. This would be a little 4x6 card printed on a type writer. It would have a list of books about apples. Or possibly a list of dewy numbers that might contain books about apples. Or it might just say "See fruit".

Either way you then had to go track down the physical location of the book in the library. It was very difficult to tell if a book was actually in or not, you just had to hope. And good luck if it was miss shelved.

At the the time a librarian was an incredibally valuable resource. A librarian could negotiate this complex system and find infomation quickly. They had a feel for what words had index cards, and what didn't. They did the physical job if crawling (reading) books to find out which index cards they belonged on. They also took care of the physical repair of books.

 

So. Depressing.

When I was a kid, you had to stick a disk with the OS into the computer in order to turn it on (that's right, no hard drives), then you had to take that disk out, and put a disk with whatever program you wanted to run in the computer, navigate and run that program by typing through the command line. Also, the monitor had 3 colors. and it was AWESOME.



The nice thing is, if you don't know what the above picture is, instead of having to walk to the library, fumble through the card catalog, and read through an Encyclopedia, you can just use THE INTERNET.

 

Porn on Compuserve was agony...

 

For me the biggest change is that the internet is now owned, whereas once it was free. Whereever I go I find targeted marketing, depending on what I've been searching for recently. A while back I failed to make a purchase for an airline ticket (problem at their end) and for the next few days when I checked the weather or anything else there would be an ad for the very flight I had tried to book. I bought some illustrations from istock recently, and most sites I visited had istock ads, fearturing the very images I had purchesed. And don't even get me started on government surveillance...

 

Maaan I don't remember any of that... Except Snake, I played Snake on my huge nokia phone, and that was the S***z lol.

When i was around ages 5 - 9, I would only use the internet to go on Nick.com, or Cartoonnetwork.com to play games xD. Then when Warcraft III came out in 2003, I would play that all the time with my dad.

I do remember VHS tapes though, still have a collection of them of Iron Giant, Lion King, Toy Story.

 

All I know is having call waiting kick in when you were dialed up on your modem and halfway through a big download was the worst!

If I want to go further back then loading Blue Max from my cassette tape drive on my C64 which I would start before dinner and hope 30 minutes later was loaded without errors when I was done eating

 

I think you are out of inspiration these days ..internet is never boring until you see a inspiration...

 

Plenty of information. Lack of motivation.

Research physics? Oh look, kittens gifs!

 

LOL! Sums up the current entitled generation perfectly.

 

Don't forget about manually typing in endless listings with stuff like DATA 1, 2, 3…
I've sold my first game as a listing in a magazine.
I've wrote my first code with this cartridge: http://www.videopac.com/games/09.html

 

Yes. I still went from time to time during the initial phases of the Internet.

Yes. At the time I started getting interested in programming though they had started phasing away from card catalogs and towards green (or amber) screen terminals for searching.

We had a few while we lived in the city, but that was reduced to one or two after we moved to a rural area. It helped that we had made a lot of VHS recordings prior to the move though.

Was too young to deal with long distance. I have a general dislike of the telephone and even now I barely use it.

Yes. I remember ordering a game from Epic MegaGames by snail mail. Only a week though? I wish it had been that fast.

I was born in 1983. Same year that "C with classes" became C++.

 

OK, question to young people. When you were a child and saw CGI like Monsters Inc, did you think they were real? Or actors dressed up like monsters? Does a child understand what CGI is? I think if I was a child and saw a CGI film today it is so realistic I would think it was real.

I remember when Terminator 2 came out and people were amazed at the CGI, but I was old enough to know what CGI was. And I knew they weren't real dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.

Yeah, I guess the best thing about the Internet is the ability to talk and share knowledge with people all over the world. Like this forum! \/

 

Without the internet there is no way I'd be able to make a game right now. Not only because there wouldn't be any access to tools like unity. But mostly because without the internet I never would have been able to understand programming.

 

Microsoft used to ship a programming language with their OSes. In the early days of MS-DOS this was primarily GW-BASIC but they eventually replaced that with QBASIC. The compiler was sold as an add-on package along with a more capable development IDE, but given that everyone had the interpreter it wasn't that important to have it.

QBASIC came with a complete help system featuring reference documentation, simple tutorials, code snippets, etc. It was very easy to learn and reasonably capable if you became good at it.

It was so popular due to how easy it was that it held onto its community long after DOS itself died.

 

nooo. Don't forget that games were simpler in those days to:

10 INPUT "What is your name ";A$
15 FOR X=1 to 20
18 COLOUR X
20 PRINT "Hello ";A$
25 NEXT X
30 GOTO 10

That would constitute an amazing "game" in those days. Well nearly.