It’s been only a little over a decade since its inception, but we already live in a world where the Internet is something we can’t live without. We communicate, share media, influence people and research every possible topic with the click of a mouse.
But the web is an ever evolving, almost live organism. There’s a change, an undercurrent, that has been forming in the past two years. It is still invisible to most people, but an army of developers and futurists are tapping into it. It will revolutionize, once again, the biggest network of all.
I call it the Cloud Area Network.
The Cloud Area Network is an array of nodes (either clients or servers) that, through the combination of certain technologies and protocols, allow the bidirectional flow of data between each other.
In a nutshell, it’s the Web without the Websites.
There are many examples of this in sites you visit every day. You just can’t see it at plain sight or even looking at the web page’s code.
In it’s simplest form, this technology allows you to read your favorite blog in your My Yahoo! or iGoogle page, using a technology called RSS.
But it also powers thousands of shopping sites which leverage information from Amazon and Shopping.com, generating thousands of dollars in revenue.
Have you heard about Twitter? It’s a simple platform that connects you to hundreds of people answering the simple question “what are you doing?”. If Twitter had been a destination site, it probably wouldn’t have gotten so popular so fast. But their brilliant designers made it open since its inception, allowing third parties to read and write those short messages from anywhere. Twitter is used 10x more from outside programs and websites than from it’s own URL.
Facebook made ripples throughout the Web when it announced its platform. It opened up it’s information so that any developer could tap into its user data, from photos, to status updates to newsfeed. Hundreds of developers started writing all of sorts of mini-software apps — some useful, some really annoying — but did you know the most popular ones get millions of visits and generate revenue for their creators?
The list goes on and on. Businesses are turning to the Cloud Area Network to grow in unexpected ways. The New York Times sees it as its survival.
In the coming weeks, and probably months, I will try to tell you how the technology was born, how it’s been used and most importantly, how you could make it your own. I might start a new blog for it, or even –gasp– write a book about it.
The important thing to remember is that the Cloud Area Network is about setting your data free. It’s a scary concept, but you will be amazed to see your information used in ways you could have never imagined.
