Surf’s not up
Back in the very early days of the web, I used to sometimes visit URL Routlette. Click the roulette wheel and the site would drop you on some random web page. I was fascinated to find out the site still exists—and doesn’t look much different than it did in 1998, although it know features Google ads.
URL Roulette is the very definition of “surfing” the web, a term that emerged from the idea of channel surfing with your TV remote. Channel surfing morphed into “surfing the web” because, in the early days of the web when we were still trying to figure out how this hyperlinking thing worked, we would follow just about any link to see where it led. That was one of the reasons URL Roulette was so useful. You didn’t have to find a link to begin with. Just click and you’re at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service; click and you’re at the Western European Union; click and you’re at the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois.
It was a recent episode of Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation that had me thinking about surfing. Mitch mused on the podcast that RSS and other social media tools might be leading to a day when nobody surfs the web. But I don’t think many people spend much time surfing the web anymore anyway. People dive the web. Like a pearl diver, web users know what they want and dive in looking for it. How many web journeys begin with Google? Or with someone typing in the URL they suspect will take them where they want?
With channel surfing, we click the remote because we’re bored with what we’re watching; what we get on the next channel bears no similarity to what we were watching on the last channel. The web is different: When we click a link, it’s because we’re interested in the topic, not bored with it; we want more information. And the link takes us to a page that is directly related to the subject matter of the previous page.
A few years back, a columnist in some newspaper or other declared the web was a fad that had run its course. Her rationale was the declining number of mentions the web was getting in press releases. To me, the fact that companies were no longer touting web this or web that in their news releases as merely an indicator that the web had made the transition from something new to a utility. People use the web to do their banking, order products, conduct business, check movie listings and other day-to-day activities because the web makes it easier than the methods to which we previously had access. Even social media is, ultimately, just a more efficient way to do the kind of networking and knowledge sharing we were doing before with less efficient tools.
As for URL Roulette, I’m done with it. In the early days, I used it to see how different people and organizations were using the web and what they were doing with design. Today, I pretty much know what people are doing online and I don’t have time to look at pages that don’t serve my needs.
What about you? Do you surf the web?
05/29/07 | 11 Comments | Surf’s not up