'Be wary of social media application trap'

Christen Krogh, chief development officer, Opera Software, the keynote speaker of the second day of Spark IT 2011, who spoke on ‘The Future of the Web’, asked the audience to be wary of the social application trap that is so much in vogue today. And he asked the developer community to innovate new things instead.

For a while he dwelt over the statistical report of a ‘Global Survey 2011’ that mobile Internet browsers are outgrowing PC browsers and that 49 per cent of the total 81 million Indian Internet users prefer mobile over PCs as the mode of access, especially now that smartphone production has overtaken PC production globally. 

While he brought out an interesting aspect that social media is driving a growing number of Internet users to make this choice, he also cautioned the community to be wary of the social app bug. He asked the developer community to dwell on innovation along with brain, tool, knowledge and perspective to succeed.

Web is not dead, but is growing

Krough preferred to differ from the very idea brought out in the article, ‘The Web is Dead, Long Live the Internet’, from Wired.com, wherein the writers reasoned out how the world wide web is thinning out its proportion for telnet, DNS, news group, e-mail, video, FTP, peer-to-peer and others.

He maintained that web is not dead, instead is dynamic, mind-boggling, and infinite, and that the writers of the above articles made a mistake in understanding this fact because they looked at the proportion and not the absolute value. Moreover, Opera finds that as more and more people prefer to use video, it needs to work on making video a part of the web. 

He also added that today, where total number of global Internet users stand at two billion, there are about seven billion web users across the world. So there are about five billion prospective Internet users out there to be tracked.

Internet users vs Web pages

Krough finds it intriguing enough that the two billion web users and infinite amount of web pages and a trillion million addresses are in a disconnected state.

He says that only four technologies, namely WbKit from Google and Apple, Trident from Microsoft, Gecko from Mozilla and Presto from Opera, can bring them together.

Along with open source technologies, one also needs Open Standard technologies in the marketplace so that it is possible for a new company to come in and make browsers, added Krough. 

He said that going forward web and apps will not just co-exist, but also overlap. He is also foreseeing a situation wherein more and more people are moving to online discarding newspapers in this process. He also added that though this is not yet so prevalent in India, it is not far either.

During his talk Krough also brought in an interesting angle where in he said that people use Internet for various purposes ranging from getting access to information from the likes of Google, Wikipedia etc, to pay bills via online banking, to stay in touch with friends over social networking platforms, to shop, to do their jobs, to get stuffs done, and to be entertained.

And of all people he is telling this to us is because, “Sometimes we tend to forget to look at the forest, for all the trees. In the same manner, we forget to look at the web and see how fragile it is”.

And so, “Don’t panic. Choose Opera,” he signed of.