Bill Joy, the inventor of Berkeley Unix, the founder of Sun Microsystems, and now a partner at Kleiner Perkins, that most blue-blooded of venture capital firms, is describing a taxonomy for the Internet. He calls it "the six Webs." I...
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Bill Joy, the inventor of Berkeley Unix, the founder of Sun Microsystems, and now a partner at Kleiner Perkins, that most blue-blooded of venture capital firms, is describing a taxonomy for the Internet. He calls it "the six Webs." I have heard him give this speech before - most distantly at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 1999. I am a little surprised that he's still delivering the lecture - but his ideas are not uninteresting, and are worth noting.
Bill Joy's six Webs are:
1. The Near Web: This is the Internet that you see when you lean over a screen - like a laptop.
2. The Here Web. This is the Internet that is always with you because you accesses it through a device you always carry - like a cell phone.
3. The Far Web. This is the Internet you see when you sit back from a big screen - like a television or a kiosk.
4. The Weird Web. This is the Internet you access through your voice and which you listen to - say when you are in your car, or when you talk to an intelligent system on your phone, or when you ask your camera a question. Joy concedes that this Web does not yet fully exist.
5. B2B. This is an Internet which does not possess a consumer interface, where business machines talk to other business machines. It is chatter of corporations amongst themselves when they do not care about their human drones.
6. D2D. This is the Internet of sensors deployed in meshes networks, adjusting urban systems for maximum efficiency. This Web also does not yet exist. Joy says that it will embed machine intelligence in ordinary, daily life.
Joy concludes by saying that, of all six Webs, number 2 - "the Here Web" - is by far the most interesting and productive of new innovations.
Incidentally, in person, Bill Joy's affect is remarkably like Jeff Goldblum's performance of Seth Brundel in The Fly.
Comments
Guest (Somkiran) on 11/06/2005 at 2:32 PM
1
Web needs to become like the jelly in a jar that accomodates a steel ball when somebody puts in it.
Could this be achieved by different forms of the web?
Guest (Somkiran) on 11/06/2005 at 2:32 PM
1
Web needs to become like the jelly in a jar that accomodates a steel ball when somebody puts in it.
Could this be achieved by different forms of the web?
Guest (Gary Delooze) on 01/25/2006 at 12:00 AM
1
What IS interesting in Bill's description is that he links user interaction (1-4) and user-independent machine or device interaction (5-6). Personally I am more interested in these modes of interaction (and others, such as device-to-business) than I am in the mechanisms for rendering the interactions based on the device.
Oh, and of all, I can see a state in the future when D2D, D2B and B2B generate more traffic than that which we generate. Perhaps we need to think now about how this will work, before device generated spam takes over the net....
Guest (????) on 07/20/2006 at 12:00 AM
1
Guest (xxx) on 07/28/2006 at 12:00 AM
1