The web is alive, I tell you! Alive!

Last week Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and famous author of The Long Tail, wrote a compelling piece of link bait called "The Web is dead." Anderson's hypothesis was that apps like those found in the Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) App Store were changing the way we interact with the Internet. Gone is the browser and the search engine, replaced by vertical applications that no longer require the web to operate. On it's face, it seems like an evocative argument, but is it accurate?

All apps, all the time

Anderson opens the piece with a tidy little scenario about using your iPad to access your entire online world. He suggests that you could spend your whole day inside these applications without once ever having to go to your browser or conduct a Google search, but how realistic is this to your average person?

First of all, even when you take into account how many iPhones and iPads have been sold (and there have been a lot), I'm betting we are talking about a fraction of the world's computer users. Secondly, how many of us go through a day without having to conduct a search. I know, personally, I do it countless times throughout the day. As a journalist, I need to find links, read blogs and online publications, and find stuff. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. Finally, how many people do their jobs with an iPad on their desks--for work, I mean. I'm thinking not that many.

Lies, damn lies and statistics

To further bolster his argument, Anderson suggests that web traffic is going down when he writes:

"Today the content you see in your browser--largely HTML data delivered via the http protocol on port 80--accounts for less than a quarter of the traffic on the Internet...and it's shrinking. "

Unfortunately, Anderson leaves out pesky attribution to account for these numbers, which might be nice to, you know, check.

When in doubt, quote an analyst

Finally, Anderson uses the tried and true analyst projection. He says Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS)--a strange source for technology predictions--states that within five years, the number of users accessing the Internet from mobile devices will surpass those accessing it from PCs. This is not exactly clairvoyant, given that in many parts of the world, the cell phone is the only way to access the Internet.

But neither does it mean we need to turn exclusively to apps, which become increasingly unwieldy the more we download to our devices. Anderson doesn't deny that we will continue to use the browser, the search engine and links to move about the web; he just believes the web as we know it today will continue to shrink as a way to access online content and applications such as Google Docs.

Does Anderson really believe we are witnessing the 'death of the web?' I doubt that he does, but when someone with his clout says it, in a magazine with the reach of Wired, it's going to have the desired effect. In reality, however, we live in a world where people and organizations change much more slowly. And maybe, just maybe, we'll look back at this article in years to come and find that rumors of the web's death might have been greatly exaggerated. - Ron