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For those who have never seen the short film “Powers of 10″, take a few minutes and watch the clip below. The film was made in 1977, and is a simple, clever idea. It starts with a couple sitting in a park in Chicago, zooms out on a logarithmic scale (one power of ten every minute), then zooms in at the same rate. It really helps to put things into perspective.

After watching the film, the Simpsons couch gag below will make more sense.

There is quite a bit of talk about the “Web 2.0″ and the “next generation of internet services” floating around lately, especially among the popular media. All this talk has, for whatever reason, made me nostalgic for internet technology of yesteryear. Many of these old technologies were simple, effective, and certainly useful today.

For example, I think that the old Gopher protocol died an early death. For those who never played around with a university computer connected to the Internet back in the late 80′s or early 90′s, gopher was a menu driven internet application. While it was sometimes difficult to find things, gopher had the advantage of being efficient, especially when modem speeds were measured in bits per second (and there weren’t many bits per second). Gopher was also nice in that it worked well for small viewing displays. Today, a gopher-like technology would be ideal for cellular phones, since they suffer from both low data bandwidth and limit viewing capability.

Another technology that seems to have fallen by the wayside is Usenet. Long before the word “blog” was being abused by the media, Usenet was the place to go for online collaboration. It was also the original file sharing system, and today it largely serves the same function. While Usenet technically is in use today, it has been all but eliminated by more interactive, feature-rich, and web-driven applications. Usenet had quite a culture surrounding it, and the purists claim web-driven forms of Usenet, such as Google Groups, as having killed the system. Despite all of this, Usenet does have a very strong, albeit small, following, mostly among old techies and younger geeks.

The beauty of these and other internet technologies is their simplicity. The modern internet seems to be moving to a completely web-based system. While there are independent protocols for many applications, it is possible to run almost any user-application in a web-based interface. While this does lead to great convenience, it does add to the complexity. And while websites have gotten much more attractive and approachable (take my site), the element of content is often overlooked (again, take my site). Not having a flashy patina was an advantage, since the only thing to look at was the content of the medium.

The one oddity in the evolution of internet technology is email. Email, for whatever reason, has survived longer than any other internet application. It does represent the simplest use and purpose of the internet: communication. I’m not sure why it is that email survived and other internet technologies, such as gopher, did not.

The internet will continue to evolve, but I’m not sure what will happen. It is easy to say that the web will continue to dominate the application of the internet, but I think that might be a bit shortsighted. After all, recent technologies like Bittorrent have become quite successful. The key to innovation is, however, freedom to innovate. Web browsers as we know them today came from the University of Illinois (aside: the funding for this project came from a bill sponsored by Senator Al Gore, ultimately leading to the “invented the internet” misquote). Gopher and Usenet, too, were graduate school projects. Modern technologies, Bittorrent and RSS, are pet projects. These projects represent the ultimate power of the internet: as a medium for innovation. The developers of these applications found a use for the internet, and others found it to be fun or useful. We cannot limit what the internet can do, and we should not try to put restrictions on its usage, for fear of losing out on future innovation.

Rest in peace, gopher. You have served us well, but now it is time to move on. Perhaps we can learn from you and your success.

UPDATE (5 Aug 06): The BBC has posted a nice article about Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s original code for the web. The article also has a nice discussion about the state of internet technology in 1991.

There is a great deal of software floating around the internet. Some of it good, some of it bad, some of it just hype. I thought I’d make a quick list of the software that I use and describe why I think you should, too.
Adium X by the Adium team
Cost: Free!

When it comes to chat instant messaging programs, Adium is the most versatile, feature-rich program I have encountered to date. Adium supports almost every instant messaging protocol out there. It is easily expandable, and a rich amount of content has been developed, all of which is easy to install. For those who have used the PC program Trillian, you’ll be right at home. I think this program blows it away.

Best of all, it’s free!

SubEthaEdit by TheCodingMonkeys
Cost: $35*

SubEthaEdit is a text editor that includes support for syntax highlighting. The most interesting feature of the editor is the collaborative editing feature, allowing real-time, multiuser editing of a single document (via Bonjour). Since the application only uses plain text, it is not necessarily a replacement for Apple’s TextEdit; it is, however, a replacement as far as coding and editing is concerned.

I’m currently using v2.2 of SubEthaEdit, which is free for non-commercial uses. The current version is 2.5, which advertises Applescript support. It’s got a 30-day trial, so give it a shot. If you don’t need the more advanced features, stick with the free v2.2.

ecto by Kula Co, Ltd.
Cost: $17.95

ecto is perhaps one of the most useful applications I use today. It is feature-rich blogging application that makes drafting posts as easy as can be. Using WordPress’s XML-RPC interface, I can easily draft a post, add, edit and resize images or other media content, and post with the click of a button. I can, of course, edit offline, which allows me to write drafts when I’m on the train (since I’m “too cheap” to spend $79.99 on Cingular’s high-speed data service) and post when I get to/from Baltimore.

I haven’t made the plunge and bought the software yet. It operates on a 20-day renewable trail. Version 3 of ecto is supposed to come out soon, so maybe then I’ll consider making a purchase.

Energy Fiend is a neat site. This link will tell you how much of your favorite caffeinated beverage you’ll need to consume to kill you. I only need 21 Grande coffee’s from Starbucks, but I’m a lightweight.