Nova Spivack remains one of the most clear-headed analyst of where the internet/web is heading.
From a much longer analysis, here’s how he summarizes the current ongoing transformation from the Web into the Stream.
Nova Spivack (excerpt):
“The Internet began evolving many decades before the Web emerged. And while today many people think of the Internet and the Web as one and the same, in fact they are different. The Web lives on top of the Internet’s infrastructure much like software and documents live on top of an operating system on a computer.
And just as the Web once emerged on top of the Internet, now something new is emerging on top of the Web: I call this the Stream.
The Stream is what the Web is thinking and doing, right now. It’s our collective stream of consciousness.
Perhaps the best example of the Stream is the rise of Twitter and other microblogging systems including the new Facebook. These services are visibly streamlike — they are literally streams of thinking and conversation. In reaction to microblogs we are also starting to see the birth of new tools to manage and interact with these streams, and to help understand, search, and follow the trends that are rippling across them.
To meet the challenges and opportunities of the Stream a new ecosystem of services is emerging rapidly: stream publishers, stream syndication tools, stream aggregators, stream readers, stream filters, real-time stream search engines, and stream analytics engines, stream advertising networks, and stream portals are emerging rapidly. All of these new services are the beginning of the era of the Stream.
Just as the Web is not any one particular site or service, the Stream is not any one site or service — it’s the collective movement that is taking place across them all.
The Web has always been a stream. In fact it has been a stream of streams. Each site can be viewed as a stream of pages developing over time. Each page can be viewed as a stream of words, that changes whenever it is edited. Branches of sites can also be viewed as streams of pages developing in various directions.
But with the advent of blogs, feeds, and microblogs, the streamlike nature of the Web is becoming more readily visible, because these newer services are more 1-dimensional than normal websites: they are generally quite linear series of posts, and in they change faster than typical Websites — often many times per day or hour or minute.”