Today we’re living the Internet revolution, which started only fifteen or twenty years ago, so who are more than 25 years old still remember how everything was before.

Can you remember people going to banks to pay bills? Do you remember the first website that you loaded? Or have you though possible 10 years ago the idea to be hosted while you travel for free by people in the more remotes parts of the world thanks of an online network? I had printed on my mind a teacher from high school who told us that she had to study what email or chat were because they were “on theory” when she was at university.

Internet changed people and how we communicate. Internet became the platform to link, in the beginning the linking was between people only by emails, then by chat, when social media became popular, Facebook or Linkedin let you keep most of your contacts tracked and today, twitter, buzz or the project where yahoo is still working, are letting you keep all your “links” updated and what is more impressive, everything is happening in real-time. The world is moving fast, so fast, and now search engines are moving them platforms to offer real-time searches to adapt to this new stage.

This speed affects everything and in completely different scales; I remember a group of musicians playing on Queen St (one of the principal St. from Auckland) the day after the earthquake in Haiti, to raise money in New Zealand to send to Haiti. Couple weeks ago I wanted to buy an Internet domain, I didn’t do it in the first time, and a week later it was sold, and couple days ago I started receiving comments on pictures that I uploaded, don’t even 1 minute after the loading bar had finished.

Today everything is happening at real-time, which is teaching us how to take fast decisions with the most information available, because if not someone else is going to take it before us.

Updating this post I want to add two videos about internet and the social media revolution showed by a friend, thanks Simon!

To summarize:

• Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content (he lived in China for 3 years).
• Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app seamlessly.
• Within five years distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.

It is also important to analyze the patrons of how internet works and Bernardo Huberman, Senior HP Fellow and Director of the Social Computing Lab at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, studied about them and he wrote: The laws of Internet (edited by MIT, 2001). His research concentrated on the world wide web, with particular emphasis the dynamics of its growth and use. I found an interesting review by IBM with his six principals laws:

1. Power Law of Distribution. This law posits that, despite the seemingly arbitrary way in which the Web grows, there are clear patterns that reflect hidden regularities. You can determine the anticipated growth rate for a given site, for example, by creating a skewed distribution of current size, its growth (in terms of pages, visitors, etc.) to date, and the number of links per page, and then applying a fixed mathematical formula (1/n^ß).
2. Small World Law. This law is analogous to the “Six Degrees of Separation” theory: It says that members of a large population are connected by short chains of acquaintances. In relation to the Web, this is based on the derivative of the shortest link path to various “small worlds” and communities. The mathematical model Huberman proposes for this law is useful for studying Web navigation; in particular, it has potential for improving search engine and e-commerce site designs.
3. Law of Surfing. The perceived value that a user gets with each click is randomly related to the previous one; therefore, the value of subsequent clicks is based on a probability factor. According to this law, one can then determine the number of pages that a user is likely to visit within a site by looking at the probability that any visitor will surf a given number of pages within any site.
4. Law of Congestion. This law relates to the way people weigh global good vs. cost/benefit to themselves as individuals. When people dine with a group, for example, and there is an unspoken agreement to divide the check evenly at the end of the evening, some people deliberately order an expensive meal, while some deliberately choose a cheaper one, thereby lowering the per person cost. When it comes to the Internet, users are not charged proportionally to their use, so some “greedy” individuals thoughtlessly consume as much bandwidth as they can. According to the law of congestion, this can create high-consumption patterns called Internet “storms”. Often, when they encounter a storm, large numbers of users defer surfing until a later time; they relinquish bandwidth almost synchronously, thereby relieving the congestion. Although they don’t do this deliberately to help others, these people are analogous to those who order the less expensive meals. This law of congestion is helpful in designing algorithms for speeding up traffic on the Internet.
5. The Free Ride Law. This is closely related to the law of congestion. When using network applications such as Napster and FreeNet, some people will download a lot of material and hog a lot of bandwidth without contributing anything in return. The author proposes several solutions, from market-based, fee-per-use architectures to alternate cost structures that require in-kind contributions.
6. The Law of Downloading. This law relates to the typical travel time between any two computers and its effect on site usability/performance. When a user clicks on a link and nothing happens, he or she will typically halt that download and click again to reload. This manual restart process needs to be factored into sites handling e-commerce, for example. Some sites use an automated reload mechanism that anticipates this user behavior and makes the download appear to be progressing more quickly.