Note: This is the first in a occasional series of quickie "think pieces" about the modern media landscape. Once upon a time I used to think about stuff for a living and I miss it sometimes. My personal motto has appeared in the signature block of my e-mails since the early 90's: "New technologies only allow people new opportunities to be people." These posts will be my attempt to explain what that means.

So Wired has decided the web is dead (again). How do I know? I didn't buy the dead-tree edition or read it on my iPad.  I read it on the web. I love irony.

In their defense, there's actually a bit of data to back up their thesis. This graphic purports to be based on data from Cisco detailing what type of traffic has historically crossed its routers.

So it's all very pretty and readable (which makes me wonder how it made it into Wired), but it is worth noting that it only includes US traffic. But let's stipulate for a moment that the rest of the world's traffic profile is similar.

Wither the website?

I'm going to say no. Not that we won't see a change, but that's to be expected.  Back in 1986 --- when e-mail wasn't really all that common --- a guy named William Donnelly wrote a book called The Confetti Generation. It was prescient in a lot of ways, but the part that's stuck with me is his discussion of how communication technologies evolve. His argument, in a nutshell, is that when a new communication medium comes along it tends to be asked to do too many things. "One technology to rule them all," if you will. As time goes on, other media come along that actually do some things better, and those functions fall away from the older media.  Radio was a big example in the book, as I recall. In the 1930's and 40's it does everything from music to news to drama and comedy. When TV comes along a lot of those functions fell away and what was left was pretty much music and news. He got a bit Kantian and called this the process of a medium finding its ding an sich, the "thing in itself." It's the process of asking "what is the thing this medium does well that other media can't?" I don't want to push the parallel between radio and the World Wide Web too far, but something else comes to mind.  The so-called "golden age of radio" lasted around 20 years (~1930-1950). The first website went up in 1990. Do the math. 

So where does all this leave us? It seems to me that there are three things bult into the web that's going to be awfully hard to replace.  First is ubiquity. If you want the web, you can get the web. On your phone. On your TV. On a desktop machine. While we're all painfully aware of how different browsers implement (or don't implement) HTML features, you're much more likely to get the same experience on two different devices running a web browser than you are using dedicated applications (if they exist at all). Second is the relative weightlessness of the presentation. Forget all the backend shenanigans of PHP, Ruby, or .NET that generate the final HTML, CSS  and JavaScript. In the final analysis, a web page is a pretty simple thing from a browser's perspective. It's not computationally expensive like 3-D object manipulation or HD video. If you think about it for a minute, the latter is why the former is true. HTML is such a dead-simple way of presenting information that you can think of putting a browser in just about anything. Finally, the web is truly and inherently interactive. One web page is nice, but it's the web of pages that makes it such an immersive experience.

So what do you do with an interactive technology that you can have just about anywhere? I think you make it a tool to help you do things. I'm a big fan of Dr. Allison Rossett, a Professor of Educational Technology at San Diego State. She writes a lot about the development of tools that help people do the things they want (or need) to do. Usually it's in the context of a job situation, but I don't think it needs to be limited to that at all. She divides knowledge tools into two categories: planners and sidekicks.  A planner is something that helps you get ready to do something (or helps you understand what you did last time so you're better prepared next time). A sidekick is something that you use while actually doing some task that helps you complete it successfully. The classic example is driving somewhere. You can check out Google Maps or MapQuest or Bing Maps before you get in the car to make sure you remember how to get somewhere. That's using a planner. If you have a GPS in the car with you prompting you when to turn, that's a sidekick.

I think websites need to start thinking about themselves in these terms. Forget pageviews and "stickiness" and and all the metrics that reward how long someone stares at a page just for the sake or staring at a page. Think instead in terms of what this site helps someone get ready to do or what tasks it helps someone complete. What you don't want to do is fall into the trap illustrated so well by XKCD:

The left side is the web we have.  The right side is the web we ought to have. Universities richly deserve the poke they're getting here, but it's not just them. Restaurants are an egregious offender. Lots of pretty pictures, but the actual menu is out of date (and locked inside a PDF). Or the site is all in Flash and I don't happen to be carrying one of the two three phones (Nexus One, Sprint EVO, Droid2) that actually support Flash today when I'm out looking for a place to eat. (Hint, my fridge is the closest source of food when I'm on my computer at home). How is that helping me walk through the restaurant's door to hand them money? Not much. What are today's specials? Is there a coupon? Where are you located? What makes you different than the place next door?  That's what I want to know when I'm trying to decide on a restaurant. That's what the restaurant's web app ought to tell me.  The fact that it's served up over HTTP and into a browser is just a detail.

Notice I don't talk about monetization or ROI or any of the things that give MBAs the vapors. It's mainly because I don't care about any of that. If your business is selling people stuff, then your web presence -- call it a site, call it an app, call it Bob -- needs to enable people to buy that stuff. Maybe it's selling it to them online, but maybe it's helping them plan a trip to your brick-and-mortar location where the thing they need will be there waiting for them. If you do it right it'll make you money and if you do it wrong it won't.

Is your website a planner or a sidekick? If not, what is it doing there?