Wired: The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet

[RJN]

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1

Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting.
...
And the shift is only accelerating. Within five years, Morgan Stanley projects, the number of users accessing the Net from mobile devices will surpass the number who access it from PCs. Because the screens are smaller, such mobile traffic tends to be driven by specialty software, mostly apps, designed for a single purpose. For the sake of the optimized experience on mobile devices, users forgo the general-purpose browser. They use the Net, but not the Web. Fast beats flexible.

[Chris Peterson]

I don't buy it. The graph shows percentages of total traffic, but what we really need to see is actual total traffic. Just because the network infrastructure is carrying relatively more data that isn't HTTP doesn't mean the web is dead or dying. It only means that data is sorting itself into more appropriate channels. Stuff that works best in a browser will continue to be seen in browsers- and nothing here suggests that this web traffic (in absolute terms) will decline at all.

[geckzilla]

Yeah, they need to somehow weight transmitted data based on its actual importance and usefulness. I get more emails (real emails, not just spam) now with all these mobile devices sending me email than I ever did five years ago. Of course the data usage by YouTubers is going to dwarf that. And how the hell is video going to happen without the websites that provide them? It's actually kind of silly to count video as a non-web entity. No one's counting the bytes of data required to transmit images which dwarfs the text data and saying that images are killing the web. Why video?

Edit: Read the article, doesn't seem to have that much bearing on the graphic.