rMarch 1997We interrupt this magazinefor a special bulletin-!JI03~UI II—k. Andc74820 08887 6,., ,,, .place . . .IJKk put bfwww ymlbp“k Akd ‘j!.ltws !)fJwdkl i)+mld Ma w)y Fha 3LHW5 U} Mid3.Remember the browser warbetween Netscape and Microsoft?Well, forget it. The Web browser/12continued from cover. . . broader .n,d,,p,rn,~interf.,e,,orelectronic media are being born. BackWeb and PointCast,propelled by hot young Silicon Valley start-ups. Constella-tion and Active Desktop, spawned in the engineering labsof the browser kinqs. And from the content companies,prototypes powered by underlying new technologies -Castanet, ActiveX, and Java.What they share are ways to move seamlesslybetween media you steer (interactive) and media that steeryou (passive). They promote media that merrily slip acrosschannels, guiding human attention as it skips from desktopscreen to phonetop screen to a car windshield. These newinterfaces work with existing media, such as TV, yet theyalso work on hyperlinked text. But most important, theywork on the emerging universe of networked media that arespreading across the telecosm.As everything gets wired, media of all kinds aremoving to the decentralized matrix known as the Net. Whilethe traditional forms - broadcast, print - show few signs ofvanishing, the Net is being invaded by new media species.-The Web is one. Yet with each additional node, each new T1line, the media the Internet can support become richer,more complex, more nuanced, The Net has begun offeringthings you simply can’t browse.Networked communications need interfaces that hopacross nodes, exploiting the unique character of distributedconnections. Technology that, say, follows you into the nexttaxi you ride, gently prodding you to visit the local aquarium,all the while keeping you up-to-date on your favorite basket-ball team’s game in progress. Another device might chimeon your wrist, letting you know that the route home is con-gested with traffic, and flashing the address of a restaurantwhere you can eat cut-rate sushi while waiting it out. Athome on your computer, the same system will run soothingscreensavers underneath regular news flashes, all the whilekeeping track, in one corner, of press releases from com-panies whose stocks you own. With frequent commercialmessages, of course.Sure, we’ll always have Web pages. We still havepostcards and telegrams, don’t we? But the center of inter-active media - increasingly, the center of gravity of allmedia - is moving to a post-HTML environment, a world waypast a Web dominated by the page, beyond streamed audioand video, and fast into a land of push-pull, active objects,virtual space, and ambient broadcasting. You might not wantto believe us, but a place where you can kiss your Webbrowser goodbye.No, the 150 million Web pages now in existence won’tdisappear. They’ll only proliferate, and at an increasing rateworldwide. We can expect a billion Web pages by 2000.Some of them will even be worth readinq. But supersedingthose billion pages will be a zillion nonpage items of infor-mation and entertainment. Think video. Think text flickeringover your walls. Think qames at work. Think anything wherea staid, link-based browser is useless.But hanq on. The qood old paqe browser won’t r/is-1appear. It will migrate. The little strinq of code that fetchesand displays HTML documents will qo forth and multiply,makinq what your browser does today second nature to allyour other applications. The browser becomes invisible bybecoming ubiquitous. It submerqes inside other proqrams,removing itself from our consciousness. The browserbecomes the intellectual equivalent of a telephone switch-board. The operator who once connected your long distancecall was a selection device to find the right person at theother end. Now, when your modem dials an ISP, phone com-pany switches are still selectinq, but the switchboard - oncethe defininq experience of telephony - is gone. H becomesa historical legacy. Just as in the new networked media,the browser - now the Net’s defining metaphor - is dyinq asthe main event, to be reborn as a subsumed function andoccasional option.Of course some kind of interface is absolutely vitalto life on the screen. The desiqn of what is emerqing - whatqlyph sits where or which icon does what - is now neitherIclear nor important. All kinds of designs are beinq tried. Thelabs of PointCastr ESPNET SportsZone, and CNET buzz as20-year-old hotshots conjure up specific manifestations.What is clear is that regardless of what they come up with,the outlines of a new type of media are visible. A practicalinterface for distributed, point-to-point media will blossomand thrive. What is about to disappear is the defininq role ofthe old Web.------- ------- ------- ------- ---------------------------- ------.Push here!------ --r-- ----- ----- ----- ----- -------------------------------Riqht now the Web means information framed on a two-dimensional hypertext paqe. It means users navigating viablind clickable links and search-engine requests, drillingdown to try to find what they want. And it means contentdisplayed within an application on a computer screen. Thesetraits - the page, clicking, and the PC screen monopoly - arealready retreating into the bowels of the Net.In its place, a new medium is arising, surging acrossthe Web in the preferred, many-to-many way: anything flowsfrom anyone to anyone - from anywhere to anywhere - any-time. In other words, a true network like the telephone sys-tem, rather than a radiating system like radio or TV. Thisnew medium doesn’t wait for clicks. It doesn’t need comput-ers. It means personalized experiences not bound by a page- think of a how-to origami video channel or a 3-D furry-muckers VR space. It means information that cascades, notjust through a PC, but across all forms of communicationdevices - headlines sent to a pager, or a traffic map poppingup on a cellular phone. And it means content that will nothesitate to find you - whether you’ve clicked on somethingrecently or not.It means, in short, a more full-bodied experiencethat combines many of the traits of networks with those ofbroadcast. The buzz phrase for this convergence is “pushmedia.” Content is pushed to you, in contrast to the invita-tional pull you make when you click on the Web. The pushcan be cjentle, in-your-face, intermittent, in the background,or always on.The 1.7 million downloaded copies of PointCastdemonstrate how a gentle