Welcome to the Stream « The SiliconANGLE

Description

Welcome to the Stream

The Internet began evolving many decades before the Web emerged. And while today many people think of the Internet and the Web as one and the same, in fact they are different. The Web lives on top of the Internet’s infrastructure much like software and documents live on top of an operating system on a computer.

And just as the Web once emerged on top of the Internet, now something new is emerging on top of the Web: I call this the Stream. The Stream is the next phase of the Internet’s evolution. It’s what comes after, or on top of, the Web we’ve all been building and using.

Perhaps the best and most current example of the Stream is the rise of Twitter, Facebook and other microblogging tools. These services are visibly stream-like, their user-interfaces are literally streams streams of ideas, thinking and conversation. In reaction to microblogs we are also starting to see the birth of new tools to manage and interact with these streams, and to help understand, search, and follow the trends that are rippling across them. Just as the Web is not any one particular site or service, the Stream is not any one site or service — it’s the collective movement that is taking place across them all.

To meet the challenges and opportunities of the Stream a new ecosystem of services is rapidly emerging: stream publishers, stream syndication tools, stream aggregators, stream readers, stream filters, real-time stream search engines, and stream analytics engines, stream advertising networks, and stream portals are emerging rapidly. All of these new services are the beginning of the era of the Stream.

Web History

The original Tim Berners-Lee proposal that started the Web was in March, 1989. The first two decades of the Web ...

Original URL

http://www.siliconangle.com/ver2/?p=4983

http://www.siliconangle.com/ver2/?p=4983