'World Beam' Replacement for 'World Web', the Future of Naming

http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0507/156.html

David Gelernter pens this evocative piece in next month's Forbes hypothesizing what the next Internet might look like. It would be interesting to understand how naming and navigation occur on this "World Beam" as opposed to the the present "World Web". 

I suspect if anything is going to practically supplant the existing web in a meaningful fashion, you would have to be able to migrate existing naming and navigation elements. Give us a web, a beam, a silo or a cone .. you'll still need the ability to uniquely identify things and navigate to them. The present navigation system gets more entrenched, marketed, advertised with each passing day.

In the 70's and 80's the phone system went from analog to digital, but we all got to keep our phone numbers. Today's Internet has replaced the phone-book for finding those numbers but the digits are the same as the day on which I was born..

Here's a copy of the classifieds from the New York Times on my birthday in the late 1960's.  The image is interesting because the lower ad for a telephone answering machine shows a telephone number as we all know them today. The slightly blurred ad above shows "ORegon 4-9092". It's exactly the same type of number of course ..  the "O" stands for the 6 and the "R" for the number 7 so the phone number above was 674-9092.

Watch movies set in the 40's and 50's and you'll see people using phones asking the operator for names and numbers like "ORegon 4-9092".

History may not repeat but it rhymes. Scientists will eventually get around to inventing Internet 2, the World Beam or some other technical infrastructure for sharing information, but if history is a guide and they want people to use this new infrastructure/innovation, they are going to find a way for you to use your existing names to navigate and identify yourself.

I think some of us are going to be surprised by how much the future looks like the present, from a navigation and naming perspective. Those 100 year domain renewals are starting to look like a pretty good deal to me.  ;)

Comments

[Adam]

Great points about addressing. Also, when mobile/cell phones came out they used the same type of "addressing" as well.

Also interesting that using the web on your mobile device still relies on a URL typically with letters and not IP #s or a phone-like number which would be so much easier to enter in on a small device typically already equipped with a NUMERIC keypad . . . even the "advancements" in the mobile web with regards to .mobi are pushing forward into this new frontier using the same addressing methods . . . they just slap on another coat of lipstick on that pig to make it look like the next big thing.

[Andrew Johnson]

What in the hell does domain kiting, parking, and this other stuff have to do with click fraud? As someone who spends a significant amount of money on PPC traffic I *know* these are not fraudulant traffic sources.

The loose use of language from those on the sidelines is silly. Then they throw in a $1 billion number from BusinessWeek, which alone may be questionable, but in the context of domain names? The guys over at the ITAA need to fire their fact checker.

[Edwin Hayward]

One problem with this hypothetical "world beam" is that it makes ALL information available, which is about as useful in practice as making none available.

Right now, the average person more or less copes with finding documents, photos, old bookmarked pages etc. Sure, they might struggle (sometimes even to the point of dispair) and there is MASSIVE room for filing/search improvements, but they can probably "cope" on average even if they're not always successful in finding what they're after.

Now imagine the near future and the "World Beam" as imagined by the author (who is clearly trying to seed early interest in his company and thus more boosterish than he might have been as an independent party). Suddenly, every document you've ever written or received, every email sent/received/forwarded, every attachment, every file, every piece of music, etc. is "available" in your World Beam.

Intersecting with that are an almost limitless number of other World Beams. Your medical history, car maintenance history, bank transactions, project planning records, etc. etc. - every one of these and a thousand more interactions give rise to their own World Beams, or to connections between existing World Beams and your own.

Imagine having to find a document, not just on your own hard drive (which you just about keep straight, with careful naming, home-grown mnemonics, etc.) but in the entire corpus of every piece of data you've ever touched, however tangentially.

Now remember: HUMANS label things. HUMANS search for things. No matter how smart technology gets, it's going to take true AI (of the "Matrix" / "Terminator" variety) for a computer to label information in a manner so unambiguous that fundamentally flawed, not-quite-imaginative-enough folks like all of us will ALWAYS be able to "guess" the right labels to search for, the right information to sift from the morass of criss-crossing World Beams.

Right now, the task of finding data is like looking for a diamond in a glass of water (if you're VERY meticulous about documenting, labelling and filing all your data), a bucket (if you're above averagely careful), a bathtub (if you're about average) or a swimming pool (if your data organization skills tend to the chaotic).

But in the bold future imagined by the author, you're looking not in your own self-organized glass, bucket, bathtub or swimming pool, but effectively across thousands or millions of different data repositories covering timespans of years or decades, and containing data that has been labelled primarily by OTHER PEOPLE.

Suddenly the problem of finding anything has become exponentially exponentially (repetition intentional) harder.

In other words, my thesis boils down to this: we are able to cope with finding stuff precisely because there is a tightly bounded "data universe" in which to look for that stuff. Push back those bounds to the horizon in all directions, and it's going to become almost literally impossible for the AVERAGE person to find anything any more!

[Rob Sequin]

I like your comparison to the phone numbers. True, phone numbers changed from ORegon 4-9092 to 674-9092. Several years back my area code changed from 617 to 508.

Also 800 numbers were expanded to 888, 877 and 866.

Zip codes also changed. Zip codes started in 1963. Before that there were two digit zone codes.

Web addresses used to start with www. now no one needs the www. anymore.

I don't know what this means but I would expect SOME change to domain names but the next naming system will probably not make current domains obsolete.

I think domain extensions like .info, .mobi .tv .country code etc ARE the expansion of domains just like the addition of area codes and 800 to 888 numbers.

So, maybe the future of domain names is just more extensions.

One last thing, I think location and/or presence may have something to do with the "next" Internet.

***FS*** Location and or presence.. like .de for germany or .fr for france, .cn for china? I agree with your toll free number analogy and will go one better 888 is actually better than 800 because you only need one key to type an 888 number. To that end the word 'Web" is better than the world "com" to describe an internet site.. but .com is numero uno for the same reason that 800 still is the marquee toll free number.. this is going to continue indefinitely imo.,

[Christopher Ambler]

I am simply bursting to tell you why I think you're 100% right, even though you're completely wrong :-)

Good-natured poking aside, though, your premise is correct, but I don't think you've yet seen the implementation. Or, likely, you have, and have dismissed it.

***FS*** Chris.. I'd love to learn more!! Please share :)

[David Wrixon (aka Rubber Duck)]

Bottomline is that the domain system is not going away. It will be here in a hundred years time.

Most of those that are suggesting it won't are just sore because they either missed out or passed over on a great opportunity that is now beyond their reach.

***FS*** May well be so sir.. Something could come some day.. but I'm inclined to agree that less will change than the vast majority anticipates