Copyright 1995 Richard Seltzer
This is chapter two of a book entitled The Way of the Web. Permission is granted to make and distribute complete verbatim electronic copies of this item for non-commercial purposes provided the copyright information and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. All other rights reserved. To correspond with the author, send email to seltzer@samizdat.com Comments welcome.
My Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities (B&R Samizdat Express, 2002), on CD ROM, includes the full text of this book plus Take Charge of Your Web Site, Shop Online the Lazy Way, The Social Web, and hundreds of related articles. It is available from Amazon and from our online store http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat.
How to translate this article into French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, or GermanComment traduire en français, Cómo traducir a los españoles, Come tradurre in italiano, Como traduzir em portuguêses, Wie man in Deutschen übersetzt.
A Web site that changes your frame of reference may or may not be eye-catching or exciting or of immediate practical use to you. But it is so different from what you have experienced before that it permanently changes how you think about the Internet and what can be done with it.
You wake up one morning and realize that the world has changed radically. No, you didn't sleep for 20 years, but technology took an unexpected leap forward, and capabilities that you thought were years off in the future are suddenly there at your fingertips. Such an experience changes your basic assumptions and stimulates you to imagine new business models.
In this chapter, I'll take you down the path of my personal experience with the Web over the last couple years and the sites which had this kind of effect on me -- sudden wake-up calls.
This is not an exhaustive list. Other people may have had similar experiences in encountering different sites. And there may already be other very creative and innovative sites that I have not yet seen and that will hit me this way as soon as I do come across them.
What matters here is that "changing frame of reference" is a phenomenon that is characteristic of the Internet in general and the Web in particular. You should expect the unexpected. You should always be prepared to alter your assumptions about what can be done in this medium and to shift your business models and projections accordingly.
Here we'll focus on changes of this kind that are innovative applications of existing technology -- powerful ideas that others on the Web could quickly imitate. Later we'll look at changes in technology which also alter our frame of reference. They involve new software and/or hardware, which can then become the basis for new and totally unexpected uses of the Web -- new wake-up calls.
This project demonstrated that a physical event could have a virtual counterpart that transcends the limitations of time and space. The Internet-based exhibit would continue to exist long after the physical exhibit had been moved to another site or dismantled. And anyone anywhere in the world could access it immediately, without having to travel.
The designers deliberately tried to mimic the physical exhibit in the electronic medium. The opening page welcomed you to the main exhibit hall and told you "From here you can go to several rooms." The rooms, with focused exhibits, appeared as a list of hypertext phrases. Clicking on one of them loaded the text and graphics for that new "room." You could also choose to go to the "Book Store," which was a catalog of merchandise that could be ordered by postal mail or telephone. Later, after the creation of more high-quality on-line exhibits, you could click on the "Shuttle Bus" to go straight to the others. The "Bulletin Board" provided a means for "visitors" to share their reactions. This interactive capability was limited to users who had X-Windows or UNIX systems and were running the Mosaic browser to leave "annotations" for others to read. When later versions of browsers let users input information using "forms," they added a "Post Office" -- a simple way to send electronic mail to the people running the electronic exhibit.
During the 1992 presidential campaign, the term "information superhighway" had become popular. And in general, at these early stages, metaphors linking the electronic world to the physical world helped to stimulate the imagination, helped people who were unfamiliar with computers and electronics to feel comfortable in this new environment. They also helped people visualize new ways they could use this new medium. However, such metaphors could become a barrier to further progress, encouraging people to think in terms of just mimicking traditional ways of doing things rather than pioneering new approaches that take full advantage of the unique capabilities of the new medium.
The graphic elements included in the exhibit -- rare maps, manuscripts, and other artwork -- were important in attracting "visitors." Much of this visually striking and historically important material had previously not been available anywhere but in the Vatican itself. Yes, it had been possible for Internet old-timers to share graphics of this kind before, using such command-line applications as file-transfer protocol (ftp). The point-and-click Web browser environment made it far easier to download pictures (which you could save, manipulate, and print at your leisure). And the visual metaphor and organization was designed to make it easy for casual users to find and retrieve what they wanted quickly, without having to understand obscure commands or complex directory structures. For ease of use, the designers included small versions of the pictures side-by-side with the text; and by clicking on the picture you could download the full-size version to your own machine. At that time, many people had slow connections to the Internet and the browsers themselves were much slower than they are today; it could take 5-10 minutes or even more to download a single full-size graphic. So it was very important to give users and quick a preview of the picture and then the choice to get the full image if and when they wanted.
In addition to great graphics, the exhibit included extensive, clearly written explanations of all the materials. The words came straight from Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture, a book published by Yale University Press, which served as the catalog for the physical exhibit. While the text made the on-line exhibit much more useful and understandable than it would otherwise have been, it also demonstrated a new way to market printed books, using on-line samples. Having seen this sample, the user could click to go to the "Book Store" and learn how to order and pay for the full printed edition. Many bookstores and publishers would soon follow that model, posting catalogs and samples to promote sales of traditional books.
The designers also included a hint of how this new medium could go beyond simply mimicking print. Words with footnotes were followed by highlighted (hypertext) numbers. When you clicked on a number, you immediately moved to the footnote at the end of the text. And at the end of each footnote was the word "Back" as a hypertext link to return you to the point where you were reading before. That handy feature was later taken a step further by students at Hillside Elementary School and many others who provided "footnote" links directly to remote Internet resources and electronic versions of books, rather than to plain text that referred the reader to traditional paper books.
The Vatican exhibit was a model for how to open up artistic, scientific, and scholarly treasures to a wide audience. Materials that before only a handful of experts would ever have been able to view and appreciate were now available directly to the public, as part of its cultural heritage. In succeeding months, other exhibits -- most, but not all, from the Library of Congress -- were added to the collection: the Soviet Archive Exhibit (previously secret KGB documents), the 1492 Exhibit (celebrating the anniversary of the discovery of America), the Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibit, the Spalato Exhibit, and the Paleontology Exhibit. And this application of Web technology, so ably showcased by the Vatican Exhibit, was soon adapted by other museums, libraries, and universities around the world. One of the best was the Web Louvre, with on-line versions of many of the world's greatest paintings. Later, commercial art galleries, clip art services, and individual artists would use a similar approach to market their wares.
But O'Reilly saw the potential of the Internet not just as content for traditional books, but also as a new marketing and publishing medium -- a new environment for doing business and making money. In the fall of 1993, they went on-line with the prototype of a new kind of service: the Global Network Navigator.
Based on the metaphor of "information superhighway," they saw the need for "on-ramps." A wealth of interesting material was already available on the Internet in a variety of formats, from plain files that could be copied, to newsgroups where people with common interests could share their thoughts, to the latest and greatest -- the World Wide Web. But it was hard to find what you wanted when you wanted it. It was even harder to know if the kind of information you wanted was even available. That difficulty made guide books like Ed Krol's indispensable.
Rather than simply ring up the profits from that book and watch its market dwindle as competitors published other similar books, O'Reilly put the most useful part of the book -- the catalog of resources -- on-line for free. They even made the on-line version far more useful than the printed one, by providing hypertext links to all the resources mentioned, and by continuously updating the on-line information. (New sites were being created and old Internet addresses were changing at a rapid rate. No matter how fast a publisher produced a traditional printed Internet guidebook, many details were likely to be out of date before it reached the stores.)
They provided this service to encourage people to come to their Web site, to make their site the first place people went to when they connected to the Internet, to make it the "on-ramp" of choice. And at that on-ramp, they started to build the basic elements of the first electronic mall, where retailers could market their merchandise, and perhaps eventually add the ability for direct on-line sales. They would provide Internet news and an on-line magazine, and other information services to encourage cybervisitors to linger and look around. They'd provide all these services for free to attract large numbers of users, and would ask the users to "register" -- to volunteer information about themselves. With an established "audience," they could then sell advertising. And depending on how the medium evolved, they could later choose to charge subscription fees for some of their information services.
They soon added mirror sites around the world. In other words, they encouraged large corporations with high-speed Internet connections (like Digital Equipment) and entrepreneurs who were looking for new ways to make money (like Oslonett in Norway) to provide full copies of the Global Network Navigator (GNN) content on their machines. This approach reduced the load demands on the main machine in Boston, which improved response time; and users connecting locally say in Norway, rather than half-way around the world, avoided transmission delays. Faster response made the service all the more attractive to users. And at the same time, this approach made it possible to set up local franchises. A local entrepreneur like Oslonett could benefit from the rich GNN content to attract users and could add local content and sell local advertising. In this model, GNN operated like a television network, and the local site operated like a local television station, each providing content and each selling advertising.
As the Internet grew and evolved, GNN adapted and expanded its offerings. In the summer of 1995, O'Reilly sold this service to America Online which apparently has ambitious plans for "the design and development of innovative on-line applications, inventing new forms as well as developing original content on the Internet," according to the explanatory letter they posted for their readers.
Once potential customers had read marketing information on-line and were ready to buy, they had to look for the merchandise in a store, or order by phone or FAX. Of course, the audience was still relatively small -- at that point, probably less than a million people worldwide had Web browsers. But that audience tended to be concentrated in education, high tech industries, and Northern California. Companies appealing to those audiences could increase their sales immediately by combining Web marketing and traditional sales methods. For instance, with the help of Digital, a small store in Palo Alto, California, the Future Fantasy Bookstore, put its catalog on-line and was soon doing about 30% more business than before, including orders from customers overseas whom they had never dealt with before.
It seemed that retailers could generate far more business by making it convenient for consumers to order straight from their Web browser using credit cards, and that this would be increasingly important as the potential audience grew and broadened. But many businesses and users were hesitant to transmit credit card information over the Internet because of concern that hackers could eavesdrop and then use the information for fraudulent purposes.
Experts were certain that they could find ways to securely transmit credit card information over the Internet using existing encryption technology. The problem was that many companies would have to agree on standards, and key players from the banking and credit card world would have to become involved.
Rather than wait for such a solution, the Internet Shopping Network, a little startup company with about 10 employees, went on-line in May of 1994, selling computers, software, and peripherals from several different manufacturers. Users became "members" by Faxing credit card information. The Internet Shopping Network Faxed back a password. Once connected with that password, the user could securely make credit card purchases on-line. This simple solution -- a breakthrough in the use of common sense rather than new technology -- opened a whole new business.
Shopping for computer products over the Web was a lot easier than digging through hundreds of pages of catalogs and magazines and then trying to order by phone. All the information you needed about products which competed with one another was in one place, with hypertext links to product reviews. And once you made your choice, you could select the delivery method (with associated costs), which included the option of next-day delivery through Federal Express.
Others were speculating on the fate of "middlemen" as Internet use expanded. The Internet would put customers in direct contact with manufacturers, eliminating the need for distributors and stores -- a process known as "disintermediation." In that same environment, the Internet Shopping Network created a new kind of "middleman" business. They operated with no inventory. They took the on-line orders and forwarded them on-line to distributors, who then fulfilled them. In some cases, it was weeks or months before the manufacturers found out that their goods were being sold this way and that customers could get quicker delivery and maybe even a better price by ordering on-line from this startup than by calling the manufacturer's 800-number catalog operation directly.
Sales numbers were never made public. But in about four and a half months the company was bought by the billion-dollar television retailer Home Shopping Network for four and a half million dollars. Today The Internet Shopping Network offers "access to a broad range of products, including: over 25,000 computer products from more than 600 companies like Lotus, Symantec and Microsoft; flowers from FTD, steak and lobster from Omaha Steaks International; unique gift items from the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog..." Instead of FAX, they now use secure Web server software (from Netscape Communications) to handle credit card transactions directly on line. And they say that "orders are processed within 15 minutes of being received and shipped the next business day from one of 12 distribution centers in the US."
One company, ReZrVoir, provided movie clips on-line from its Web site, and used this low-resolution medium as a way to provide samples of video material that they had for sale to makers of industrial movies. For instance, the user could search for an emotion, such as "joy", see thumbnail static images from a variety of selections that matched that emotion; then click on one of those images to download a one-minute mpeg file that conveyed that emotion. You could then order a professional quality tape of that segment to incorporate into your video. It was clip art for videos, marketed over the Internet.
Then Disney entered the arena, with free videoclips from their animated features. They used a different format, "quicktime," which made it possible to present sound in synch with the images. This "viewer" software was available for free over the Internet -- Disney didn't develop it; they just provided a hypertext pointer from their site to one from which you could download it. And they provided compelling content that clearly demonstrated the potential of this new medium.
Suddenly, my computer was monopolized by my five-year-old son Timmy, who wanted to watch over and over again a one-minute clip from the Lion King -- the "Hakuna Metata" song. And he wanted to download as many such videos as my hard drive could hold.
These videos were typically larger than 1.4 Mbytes, which meant they couldn't be stored on diskettes. If I wanted to keep them, it had to be on my hard disk. Overnight my need for a bigger hard disk or an alternate storage medium went soaring..
Before the appearance of such professional quality videos -- with built-in demand and appeal from exposure in movie theaters and on television -- the Internet had been primarily a static medium. Here you could retrieve text and static pictures. Video was a promising, but little-used toy. Disney demonstrated that low-resolution video with the right visual content and lively music could have elemental, attention-getting impact. They also showed that the different media could help promote one another -- Web sites could help publicize movies.
Later, Timmy downloaded videoclips of Pocahontas more than a month before that movie was released, and weeks before the first television advertising. He watched and listened to those clips backwards as well as forwards (a bizarre capability of the software) dozens of times, incorporating those scenes into his imaginative play and getting totally sold on the movie and all the related paraphernalia.
One elaborate scheme, proposed by Chris Locke and originally known as MecklerWeb, promised to serve as the home for many different industries. A professional association would serve as the hub of each major area and provide free content designed to attract a focused audience. Companies would pay a monthly fee to be included in their industry area (either hosted on that site or with hypertext pointers), and the revenue would be shared by MecklerWeb and the industry association. That seemed like an excellent model at the time, but the company running it -- Mecklermedia, publishers of Internet World Magazine -- decided to change its direction. Today, MecklerWeb is the home for that company's publications (Internet World, Web Week, and Web Developer), their Internet World conferences, and related information products and services. They also serve as the host for the Internet Mall, which acts as a yellow pages guide to businesses on the Internet.
An early Internet entrepreneur, Dave Taylor, started The Internet Mall in February 1994, as a list distributed by email to let people know about companies that were doing business over the Internet. The first issue contained free listings for 34 companies. The Mall now includes over 1500 businesses "ranging from florists to bookstores to food suppliers to crafts and hobby shops to educational video vendors." And it can now be accessed not only by email (free subscription), but also from newsgroups, gopher servers (a precursor of the Web), and on the Mecklermedia Web server. On an average day, over 6000 people visit this resource. Listings are free, and include a brief description of the business plus pointers to the individual companies' Web sites.
The Web version is designed around a department store metaphor. The first level of menus shows what's available on each "floor." The groupings make it easy for people to find the kinds of goods and services they are looking for even if they previously didn't know the names of companies. The number of businesses and the clear organization of the information helped attract the audience, and the size of the audience made this a very desirable addition for Mecklermedia. In the future, this project could be developed in a variety of ways to make it more useful for visitors and also profitable for those who manage it.
Meanwhile, in April of 1994, Henry Houh, a student at the MIT Lab for Computer Science, began an informal list of commercial sites on the Internet. This was just a bare-bones list, with no categories and no descriptions -- simply a hypertext list of company names. The listings were free for the companies and the service was free for users. Within a few months it included hundreds of companies. Many of the users came not to "shop" but rather to find out what was happening on the Internet. This was a time of extremely rapid commercial growth, and one of the main factors fueling that growth was competition -- if your competitors were on the Web, then you better get there soon. This list and its "What's New" subset provided a handy way to check to see what other companies in your industry were doing.
In August of 1994, Open Market, a startup company in Cambridge, Mass., offered to host the list and maintain it as a public service. By so doing, they would gain access to an established audience, which could help them establish their name as a company which develops and markets software, services and custom solutions for electronic commerce on the Internet. Today their index includes listings for over 10,000 businesses, and on a typical day they add 60-80 new ones. You can browse or search the list, and they are adding "categories" so you can search by the kind of business rather than just the company name.
Malls and directories such as these helped make the Internet more navigable, but the growth rate was incredible, and many useful and interesting sites were non-commercial. How could you know what to look for and where to look for it?
Many researchers tried to find a technological solution, developing "robots," "wanderers," "spiders," etc. -- programs that periodically and automatically search for everything that can be found on the World Wide Web and generate databases that users can search at their leisure. There are now dozens of such programs, and sites which try to keep track of them all. The search engines I use myself are JumpStation, WebCrawler, Lycos, and InfoSeek.
WebCrawler went on-line in April 1994, as an individual's hobby/research project. At that time, the search engine found 3486 Web servers. By July 1995, now operated as a free service by America Online, WebCrawler, it covered 40,644 servers -- an eight-fold increase in just 15 months.
For search-based operations, this incredible growth represents both an opportunity and a problem. Yes, the need for searching becomes all the greater, but either the search engine or the user must have greater and greater "intelligence" to be able to generate meaningful results. WebCrawler looks not just at the name of a site, but at the words on many of the pages residing at that site. Sometimes searches yield useful information that wouldn't otherwise be available. Other times the number of matches is in the hundreds or thousands, making it virtually impossible to sift through them all. And sometimes the result list is puzzling, including entries that don't, at first look, seem to relate to the query.
Lycos, which began as a research project at Carnegie Mellon University and now is startup commercial venture -- Lycos, Inc., has an enormous database culled from searching over 5.6 million Web pages. They report that they have half a million users per week, and are trying to establish themselves as "The Catalog of the Internet." Once again, the user is likely to get large numbers of matches for almost any search, and it takes time check them all out to see which are the right ones.
Because these systems are based primarily on "robots," they include data on sites that have not yet been announced or were never intended to be publicly announced. They also include information about many sites that have gone away or changed addresses -- there is no simple way to identify that a site which was once reachable no longer exists. Also, these systems only search the Web periodically (WebCrawler seems to do it once a month). So they don't have information on the most recent sites, and with large numbers of sites coming on-line all the time and some of them not accessible 24-hours a day, there is no guarantee that one or another of these "robots" would have visited and cataloged the site you are most interested in.
Meanwhile, in the spring of 1994, two graduate students at Stanford -- David Filo and Jerry Yang -- started keeping a categorized list of Web sites "as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet" and made it public at their "Yahoo!" Web site. As the lists became long, they developed a customized database. They welcomed suggestions for new sites from site managers. Each entry was categorized by the applicant and hand-checked by the Yahoo! team.
They didn't use robots. They just built a database from these entries -- running everything on their student workstations. Since all the sites were "registered," they were live and real, and the people who maintained them wanted their information to be seen. The search mechanism they used only looked at the Yahoo! database -- at the brief description provided by Web site itself -- not at every random page. And Filo and Yang's classification system was clear, and comprehensive. In other words, by using human intelligence -- their own and that of the people who submitted information -- they created a simple and easy way to find what you want on the Internet.
Today, Yahoo! is one of the most popular sites on the Web -- with about 3 million accesses per day, representing an estimated 300,000 users per day. And every day Yahoo! adds hundreds of new listings.
What had begun as a hobby is now a full-time business. They now have financing from Sequoia Capital, hardware and network resources from Netscape Communications, and commercial advertisers such as the Internet Shopping Network, Mastercard, MCI, and Worlds, Inc. They indicate that they intend to continue to provide their Internet navigation service for free to users. That approach should keep their audience large and growing, and hence open a wide variety of new entrepreneurial opportunities.
The rest of the Way of the Web
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