July 2025 - FYI, I have decided to close this blog and migrate content back to my main website. I'll be updating the location of blog posts as I go along. You can read more about this here.
Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Traits in the Struggle for Life (on the Web)
Peter Merholz has given his view about
how the web is evolving. The most interesting of the 3 trends he identifies is that "the web is moving away from big 'sites' with lots of 'pages', towards applications with interfaces". This seems to reflect the fact that people are now happy to use the internet in a much broader way than heretofore.
Not only is the web seen as an information repository (for news, books, articles), it is used as a genuine lifestyle support. Many behaviours that formerly could only happen offline, are now done online.
This includes activities as widespread as
banking, submitting
tax returns,
project planning,
finding a girl/boyfriend,
writing documents,
making phone calls, etc.
Given how the environment is changing, only those websites that are suitable, or are able to adapt, will survive. What Peter is doing is pointing out the traits that such sites are likely to possess.
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