The second+ dimension of the Internet infinity.

Here's another piece of data confirming the trend that the web (as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee in the early 1980s) is going away.

December 29, 2011. VBeat - Most interestingly, however, is the switch from browsing to application usage. In the three months prior to this current study, 42.1 percent more people used their browsers to get information, compared to the 41.6 percent that used apps. Now, however, applications have taken the lead by .5 percent. The percentage is small, but shows a significant shift in how people consume information on their mobile devices.

The new devices (touchscreen mobiles and tablets) provide  a richer set of options for user interaction than the good old web browser on PC. The old web is infinite, but linear. That is, you can jump from link to link in one dimension only. [The original web was unidirectional, but Google made tons of money by discovering a way to go back and forth between links.]

On the other hand, applications that take advantage of the touchscreen interface provide a way to explore the depth of information, i.e. zoom in and out of streams of data. It will take time to create high-performance zoomable streams, but the transition is already under way.

tags: system, evoloution, tool, s-curve, trend, mobile, cloud 


In system terms:
Tool - app on mobile touch-screen device(s); [used to be the browser on PC]
Source - cloud (high performance servers); [used to be HTTP servers]
Distribution - stream protocols over wired and wireless nets; [used to be HTTP protocols]
Packaged Payload - multi-layer data stream (vs page). [used to be HTML pages]
Control - stream orchestration software, e.g. Facebook. [used to be linked collection of docs, e.g. wiki]