The Internet has undertaken, more or less, the same role throughout all these years: building bridges between people and data.

In the beginning, there was the RIFT: the people stood on this shore, and the data was on the far side. Few , God blessed , had the tools to reach and work with the digital data. So, bridges were needed…

The “salvation” came in the 1990s, when several significant changes took place on a global scale; first the PC penetration jumped exponentially and the second major thing was the availability of a permanent connection between these PCs through the World Wide Web. At the same time, the popularity of interconnections became stronger, laying the ground for intermediaries to jump in. A new era started, shortly followed by a war among the most important web services (Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft), basically a war of the middlemen – the battle was and still is about “Who is going to control the Bridge”.

SEARCH

In the late 1990s – early 00s, the search engines successfully served the purpose of giving the opportunity to catch a glimpse of the data. The data itself was static and, for that period of time, things were working well on both sides – the user could have a proper way of looking towards the opposite shore and spot what’s needed.

As everything had gotten more and more dynamic though, the old algorithms of the search engines started to look obsolete when compared to the increasing energy of the Internet – the blogging platform steps in and pulls up the speed of data alteration. As a response to the increasing dynamics of the web, Technorati and other niche blog search platforms emerged.

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

Around 2004, we witnessed another radical step – the first attempt of placing humans as bridges between data and end users – the beginning of the social web. It all worked according to one very powerful principle called the “collective wisdom”. It says that if many people judge something as good, it must be good in deed. And so users submitted content to one place in the web and other people rated it, determining what’s worth and whats not. So, the average mass user got to read the popular stuff.

The catch was that very shortly after, the social bookmarking platforms like digg, reddit etc have got under the control of several content lobbies. As a result, the content creators benefited, opposite to the conent consumers, who were overwhelmed by the amount of “highly rated information” which was actually irrelevant to their interests. Cause they had no control about what they get.

RSS

The Really Simple Syndication emerged as a light in the tunnel of the already overloaded information society. For first time you could actually appoint the sources to obtain content from. Unfortunately, the light quickly proved to be coming from the approaching locomotion. A gigantic portion of content is relentlessly dumping on us through our RSS-ed feeds. Probably, no more thаn 10% of the users can handle this situation effectively. Just take a look at the “unread” items in your Google Reader to get our drift.

All these patterns of obtaining information had one thing in common: a substantial human effort, time, energy and quite often specific knowledge, which were required for obtaining the interesting content on a daily basis.

Despite all the technologies, interconnecting people with data in a variety of ways, the rift has never been larger. It is because the user needs just what its interesting for him/her. On a daily basis. Presented comprehensively. Obviously a new bridge is needed…

What is favit ? from favit on Vimeo.