Today could be the point in history at which we look back and say, "that was the day the Internet fundamentally changed." Today is the day the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) opens up its new registry for generic Top Level Domains and it will have a profound affect on how people find and consume information on the Web. Will it be a gold rush? Is this the end of the ".com" era as we have come to know it?
A top level domain is a core part of how the Internet organizes and parses the names of websites. The most common, of course, is .com, but other TLDs are .net, .org and country domains like .CO or .UK. ICANN's new gTLDs will allow companies, governments and other organizations to register unique strings. For instance, are we about to enter the era of .pepsi? See below for everything you need to know about the new domain name system.
One of the competitors to domain registrar GoDaddy is accusing the service of purposefully delaying domain name transfer requests. Namecheap, which stands to gain a lot of accounts from businesses and consumers switching away from GoDaddy, accuses GoDaddy of withholding WHOIS information to Namscheap, delaying the transfer process.
Update: GoDaddy has responded to Namecheap's accusations. See the statement below.
Today is the Fifth Annual International Blue Beanie Day in support of Web standards. It's a day to celebrate HTML, CSS, the open standards, languages and protocols that have always formed the backbone of the Web. The movement is spearheaded by the indomitable Jeffrey Zeldman, whose work and writing champions the cause of a compatible, readable Web forever.
If you want a Web that degrades gracefully onto older systems, works with any browser on any screen, is accessible to all regardless of abilities, and doesn't load like trying to squeeze football down a garden hose, join the movement and don your blue beanies.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology may be the birthplace of the American geek. Within MIT, its Media Lab drills down to the heart of the next wave of technology from creating buildings with 3D printing to prosthetic limbs to gesture-based user interfaces. For instance, the MIT Media Lab was where the idea for the technology seen in the movie Minority Report originated.
The unofficial motto of the MIT Media Lab is "demo or die." It is akin to the classic academic model of "publish or perish," except that students and faculty at the Media Lab are encouraged to actually create the products they are thinking up, as opposed to pontificating upon them in research papers. See below to check out some of the amazing waves of technology that will be bursting out of the Media Lab in the future.
Google is making a push to be the de facto leader in real-time communications on the Web. The search giant hopes that by developing a new open source Web standard for video and audio communications it can be on the forefront of the next generation of Internet networking.
Google is doing this through a program called WebRTC, a project that was spawned from the company's acquisition of Global IP Positions (GIPS) in May 2010. Google is now ready to begin implementing WebRTC into its Chrome browser. It will augment its current video chat capabilities within Gmail and put a dent into real-time, unified communications aspirations of companies like Microsoft (Skype), Apple and Cisco.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
has put to rest three years of speculation by giving final approval to generic Top-Level Domains that they think will be the future of site addresses and brand homes on the Web.
Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) are essentially specific destinations for brands. Companies will be able to buy their brand and attach it to a URL. So instead of seeing Pepsi.com, the soda manufacturer could have Pepsi.soda or something similar. It will not be cheap to get your own TLD, with an $185,000 application fee and $25,000 a year to run the registry. Yet, some Internet advocates are crying foul, saying that gTLDs will create new headaches in cybersquatting, trademark issues and excessive spam.
Technologists have spent nearly 20 years now predicting the future of the Web. And while the Web is not dead yet, how we use it and our expectations of it are surely changing. We want what we want exactly when and where we want it. And when we don't get it, we don't hesitate taking our business - or eyeballs - elsewhere.
This has led more technologists including myself to start thinking about how the Web needs to evolve to keep up with user expectations. People hold companies to impossibly high expectations to deliver extremely personalized experiences as they browse, shop, learn and play on the Web.
We've all seen it and we've all done it - you're at a friends house with your laptop, and they don't have wireless, so you take a look and sign on to the nearest unsecured wireless network. No biggie, but certainly you wouldn't rely on this open network for all your Internet needs, right?
A report by analyst firm Mintel released this week claims that "Wi-Fi pirating" could be a main reason for the slow growth of broadband adoption over recent years.
If you're one of those people (like myself) that hasn't had cable television in a while, then you remember when everything went digital last summer and rabbit ears became a thing of the past, like rotary phones and modems. The changeover was all part of a larger plan, and part of that plan was to free up some of the broadcasting spectrum for other uses.
Today, Google is announcing one such "white space" use - a broadband network.
Forest fires in California, the plane landing on the Hudson river, the Mumbai hotel attacks - these historical events and many more have been recorded by everyday people on the ground, using Twitter. The historic record may be much, much richer as a result - but you can't access it through search.twitter.com right now.
Many people have worried that the inaccessibility of historical Twitter search results might mean that the messages weren't being saved at all. Company co-founder Biz Stone told us otherwise by email today, though. Twitter is in fact saving all the tweets. You just can't access them through search "right now."
