Just recently I wrote about the web turning 25, and about how that was a big milestone in the tech world. And for sure, it is. In that time, many great people have worked in the shadows to ensure that websites are more accessible to more people and hardware has exponentially improved to turn that into a more seamless experience. Super powerful laptops now weigh just a little over a pound and we have resolutions so clear, that our eyes probably can't make use of that data and maybe one day will melt our brains. Probably. Or not. Fun times nonetheless.
Websites however, seemed to have stalled a bit. We had MySpace over a decade ago. And now we have..other MySpaces. You post text/images/videos and people see them and write messages (nice or mean) to them. You make friends, you lose friends, and now you can talk to friends. You could of done that 10 years ago too. In fact, it's probably what I spent most of my living days in high school doing. But now we have emojis. And we have filters. And we have stickers. So it's better.
I'll add that according to Google there are over 60 trillion websites now out there on the web. And just how there is probably life somewhere out there in the grand cosmos that is reality, there is life in some unknown website living on a sad 4.99 a month server.
there are over 60 trillion websites
Whats innovation now
Adding video/image capabilities to a website seem to incite panic and awe in people nowadays, so let's start there. Now when a website wants to move to the next level, they allow users to upload images. Then when images get exhausted, they introduce videos. Then when videos get boring, they allow you to draw on said videos. And by this point, they're probably worth enough money to just leave it at that.
It's almost a daily occurrence now when one of these sites gets released. But rest assured, it's not just social media sites.
we innovate, with what others innovated with
Take dating sites for example. Essentially every single one is exactly the same thing. You make a profile, and you pay, and your profile gets listed in some search page. Someone sees your profile, and "winks", or "blinks" or performs some virtual gesture and then you both go on to ignore each other. It's pretty straight forward.
The same goes for food delivery services as well. You pick an item, a "Request" gets sent, it gets "Received", human makes foods, set status to "On it's way!".
Much of the "innovative" technology goes into how people are going to be charged, and what kind of payment model is set up. And innovation usually comes from the non-technical person at your job. The "Bill" project manager, if you will. Dating sites for example have complex subscription models. And food delivery services just do a basic middle man charge.
Where is it hiding
With 60 trillion websites out and about, innovation is there, somewhere. It's hiding, waiting to be discovered. Maybe someone wrote and amazing website 5, 6, 10 years ago and we just haven't gotten around to paying a visit just yet. But the technology for innovation is there for sure. And that, is definitely improving all the time.
Communication
I don't think we've glimpsed at this next level of innovation just yet. The tools are coming in for sure. WebRTC for example. We can now add full communication video/text/audio to any website with JavaScript with no plugins required. It works on your laptop, your phone and your tablet, and maybe on your smartwatch too. But aside from customer support widgets this isn't really used by many websites.
Online games
I think online gaming has figured it out. You no longer need to install anything to play a game online. You just fire up your browser and you are in. It's safe to say we have internet nowadays, for the most part, so building with the assumption that a user doesn't need to be disconnected is key. But this is just one part of this "innovation" that I'm looking for. This seamless web, if you will.
Take Keep Out for example. A fun little dungeon crawler written with WebGL. This is how it runs on my browser on my desktop. It automatically saves my state, so if I close my browser and reopen, it will take off right where I left off.
And because it's WebGL, it is supported by any browser that supports WebGL. Which means on my Galaxy S6, it looks like the following:
I can see a future where I can start a game on my browser, and then take off with phone in hand and continue my journey from another location.
New Teaching Methods
One of my favorite websites so far is Duolingo. For many many reasons. But mainly that they found a pricing model that enabled them to earn revenue based on how good the website is. While it is a free service for us regular folk trying our best at German, they do in fact charge large corporations for translation services. Wikipedia in fact is one of their top customers, as Duolingo can now translate faster, better and more accurately than any other online source.
Here's another example that I love for a few reasons. It's a 3D periodic table, which I'm sure we're all familiar with. When I was in school, and even in college, we had these printed out and added to the front holding area in our binders. For memorization purposes mainly.
But thanks to a few web technologies, which are just sitting there waiting to be used, someone can construct each atom in real time in all of it's grand spinning motion. And that's the cool part. That this isn't new data. We know how many neutrons, protons and electrons a Copper atom has. But now, we can see it, from any browser.
And that's innovation. Innovation in web is using all of the available resources to create a new and useful experience online to help learn, to entertain and to help us communicate better. And not a useless experience, like the many that we see today.
Innovation in web is using all of the available resources to create a new and useful experience
It's getting tougher and tougher however to make this happen. Just like electric cars have a hard time increasing their market share due to the marketing efforts and the lobbying of certain companies, so does the internet suffer from the same fate. I mean, electric cars! They just make so much sense. But nope. Just buy the gas one, with is much cheaper and has more distractions which you probably won't use.
The same essentially applies to websites nowadays. For many companies the bottom line comes down to data acquisition and ad impressions. Even "purchasing" things online is a thing of the past. Now you license almost everything, or you pay a monthly fee, or a yearly fee. How we're going to make money has become much more important than "what are we building and why?".
Just recently I spent some time working on a client project with a very specific payment model. It wasn't innovative and it didn't make much sense, particularly for a website with zero marketing and zero prospective clients. And it took a good portion of my development time to set this payment system up. The only thing that the client was interested in was this. He didn't care about usability, or market research or having a good experience for his users. He just cared about how he was going to charge people.
But he's a client, so I built what he wanted and he paid, and he was happy. And sadly, this pretty much happens at almost every tech job hourly, daily and weekly for many programmers in our present day world.
Thankfully however, out of the millions of programmers out there in the wild working on ad's and payment systems, there are at least 1% working on something different. And the cool part is, if you're a programmer, and you've read this far, you too can doodle an idea, take existing data and make something that hasn't been seen before. And if you do, send me a link, and I will feature it in my soon to come "Best Damn Websites I've Seen So Far" page.