The Internet is Getting Bigger Faster

In the future, we will have multiple networks with much greater profundity than we do today. Some refer to the 2005 Internet as the baby of what is to come and this may be understating it.

Some key things are starting to coalesce into hastening the bigger better Internet. First is the already-accomplished full text-indexing of the known online world by search engines. They do a good job of finding, organizing and serving up whatever is out there on demand. That is baseline.
Right now the second factor driving the improvement and the next architectural redefining of the communications networks is the exponential explosion of available information. Everyone is getting online and writing blogs, posting photos, sharing music and videos, creating podcasts, putting their collections of books/videos/media/etc. online (á la Delicious Monster and soon to be others with expanded functionality) and soon we will be putting all of our household and business objects online. Per Adam Bosworth, the information explosion scales all right at the web server and application server layers but forces a rethink of the database underlying everything into a different format with distributed information routers or information servers or other new ideas.

The third important phenomenon that is happening now is that more is possible because there is a critical mass of users on the Internet in more and more countries. Traders would say the market has become liquid in describing the feeling of presence one gets online for maybe the first time in late 2004. The sheer presence of others online is felt in such ways as selling items on Amazon almost immediately, finding online game players immediately from a variety of countries, and seeing that 1000 people update their blogs at blogger.com each 10 minutes at almost any time. In fact the depth and breadth of those out there is even bigger and more powerful than the biggest march on Tiananmen or Red Square. The Internet liquidity allows the development and test of myriad new applications benefiting large and small affinity groups.

Fourth, new Internet R&D projects can be mentioned. There are a lot of smart people trying to figure out what the communications networks of the future need to be like.

In summary, being in the continuum of search/universe management capability explosion, data explosion and participant explosion is driving the advent of a new tier of communications networks from the currently known Internet.