Wednesday, May 02, 2007
What is the New Network?
The theme for Supernova 2007 is “Defining the New Network.” What does that mean?
The basic concept is simple. Networks are central to everything significant in technology today. There are physical networks (the Internet, the telephone system, wireless links), virtual communications networks (Skype, Fon), social networks (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn), advertiser networks (Google AdSense), information networks (Digg, Craigslist, Wikipedia), and video content networks (YouTube, Joost), to name just a few. Not to mention networks of organizations, of systems, and of people (like the Supernova community itself).
About 15 years ago, two monumental shifts began. The personal computer went from being an isolated device for individuals to a node in a global network of networks. And the telephone went from being a dumb network endpoint to a powerful computer in its own right. These changes created pressure to restructure both the infrastructure linking all those devices, as well as the software stacks and end-user services on top of them. We take it for granted now, but it’s utterly remarkable that I can pull a mobile phone out of my pocket and speak to three billion people, or type a search query to scan the full text of billions of documents on computers around the world, or run an entire business on remote web-based tools.
So, what now?
The networks we depend on today could only take root with enough available and affordable computing power, bandwidth, and storage. Yet those networks are also the precursors for further developments. The PC and the phone were the starting points for today’s ubiquitous Internet, which is tearing apart industries like telecom, media, enterprise software, games, and retailing like (to borrow the title of a paper I once wrote) a digital tornado. If the starting point is a broadband Internet, with massive aggregation and services platforms like Google, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo!, and a host mechanisms for linking data in powerful ways, what appears now that couldn’t take hold before?
The New Network is broader than [fill-in-the-blank] 2.0, because it’s less about comparisons with the past, and more about describing the future. Developments like virtual worlds, social networks, federated digital identity systems, search engine marketing, microblogging, zombie botnets, conversational marketing, and data centers in shipping containers don’t have clear antecedents, nor are they just about user control and open standards.
To understand the New Network, we must step back and reconsider every aspect of the technology-driven world, from the physical attributes of the Internet to the ways of turning content into revenue. And, we need to challenge ourselves not to be complacent. Huge legal, economic, moral, technical, social, and strategic questions cloud the future of every corner of the technology, media, and telecom worlds. Optimism is warranted, but so is a sense of urgency to tackle the hard problems.
That is the starting point for Supernova 2007. In future posts, I’ll dive into the sessions and agenda in more detail.
For now, I welcome your comments and feedback. Is this a useful way to think about the challenges companies will face in the next several years? What other unappreciated developments do you see as part of the New Network? And what topics should we be sure to cover at the conference?
