Internet: Applications

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Internet: Applications

The Internet has many important applications. Of the various services available via the Internet, the three most important are e-mail, web browsing, and peer-to-peer services . E-mail, also known as electronic mail, is the most widely used and successful of Internet applications. Web browsing is the application that had the greatest influence in dramatic expansion of the Internet and its use during the 1990s. Peer-to-peer networking is the newest of these three Internet applications, and also the most controversial, because its uses have created problems related to the access and use of copyrighted materials.

E-Mail

Whether judged by volume, popularity, or impact, e-mail has been and continues to be the principal Internet application. This is despite the fact that the underlying technologies have not been altered significantly since the early 1980s. In recent years, the continuing rapid growth in the use and volume of e-mail has been fueled by two factors. The first is the increasing numbers of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offering this service, and secondly, because the number of physical devices capable of supporting e-mail has grown to include highly portable devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cellular telephones.

The volume of e-mail also continues to increase because there are more users, and because users now have the ability to attach documents of various types to e-mail messages. While this has long been possible, the formulation of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) and its adoption by software developers has made it much easier to send and receive attachments, including word-processed documents, spreadsheets, and graphics. The result is that the volume of traffic generated by e-mail, as measured in terms of the number of data packets moving across the network, has increased dramatically in recent years, contributing significantly to network congestion.

E-mail has become an important part of personal communications for hundreds of millions of people, many of whom have replaced it for letters or telephone calls. In business, e-mail has become an important advertising medium, particularly in instances where the demand for products and services is time sensitive. For example, tickets for an upcoming sporting event are marketed by sending fans an e-mail message with information about availability and prices of the tickets. In addition, e-mail serves, less obviously, as the basis for some of the more important collaborative applications that have been developed, most notably Lotus Notes.

In the near future, voice-driven applications will play a much larger role on the Internet, and e-mail is sure to be one of the areas in which voice-driven applications will emerge most rapidly. E-mail and voice mail will be integrated, and in the process it seems likely that new models for Internet- based messaging will emerge.

Synchronous communication, in the form of the highly popular "instant messaging," may be a precursor of the messaging models of the near future. Currently epitomized by AOL Instant Messenger and Microsoft's Windows Messenger, instant messaging applications generally allow users to share various types of files (including images, sounds, URLs ), stream content, and use the Internet as a medium for telephony, as well as exchanging messages with other users in real time and participating in online chat rooms.

Web Browsing

The web browser is another Internet application of critical importance. Unlike e-mail, which was developed and then standardized in the early, noncommercial days of the Internet, the web browser was developed in a highly commercialized environment dominated by such corporations as Microsoft and Netscape, and heavily influenced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). While Microsoft and Netscape have played the most obvious parts in the development of the web browser, particularly from the public perspective, the highly influential role of the W3C may be the most significant in the long term.

Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the original architect of the web, the goal of the W3C has been to develop interoperable technologies that lead the web to its full potential as a forum for communication, collaboration, and commerce. What the W3C has been able to do successfully is to develop and promote the adoption of new, open standards for web-based documents. These standards have been designed to make web documents more expressive (Cascading Stylesheets), to provide standardized labeling so that users have a more explicit sense of the content of documents (Platform for Internet Content Selection, or PICS), and to create the basis for more interactive designs (the Extensible Markup Language, or XML ). Looking ahead, a principal goal of the W3C is to develop capabilities that are in accordance with Berners-Lee's belief that the web should be a highly collaborative information space.

Microsoft and Netscape dominate the market for web browsers, with Microsoft's Internet Explorer holding about three-quarters of the market, and Netscape holding all but a small fraction of the balance. During the first few years of web growth, the competition between Microsoft and Netscape for the browser market was fierce, and both companies invested heavily in the development of their respective browsers. Changes in business conditions toward the end of the 1990s and growing interest in new models of networked information exchange caused each company to focus less intensely on the development of web browsers, resulting in a marked slowing of their development and an increasing disparity between the standards being developed by W3C and the support offered by Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.

Now, the future of the web browser may be short-lived, as standards developers and programmers elaborate the basis for network-aware applications that eliminate the need for the all-purpose browser. It is expected that as protocols such as XML and the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) grow more sophisticated in design and functionality, an end user's interactions with the web will be framed largely by desktop applications called in the services of specific types of documents called from remote sources.

The open source model has important implications for the future development of web browsers. Because open source versions of Netscape have been developed on a modular basis, and because the source code is available with few constraints on its use, new or improved services can be added quickly and with relative ease. In addition, open source development has accelerated efforts to integrate web browsers and file managers. These efforts, which are aimed at reducing functional distinctions between local and network-accessible resources, may be viewed as an important element in the development of the "seamless" information space that Berners-Lee envisions for the future of the web.

Peer-To-Peer Computing

One of the fastest growing, most controversial, and potentially most important areas of Internet applications is peer-to-peer (P2P) networking. Peer-to-peer networking is based on the sharing of physical resources, such as hard drives, processing cycles, and individual files among computers and other intelligent devices. Unlike client-server networking, where some computers are dedicated to serving other computers, each computer in peer-to-peer networking has equivalent capabilities and responsibilities.

Internet-based peer-to-peer applications position the desktop at the center of a computing matrix, usually on the basis of "cross-network" protocols such as the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) or XML-RPC (Remote Procedure Calling), thus enabling users to participate in the Internet more interactively.

There are two basic P2P models in use today. The first model is based on a central host computer that coordinates the exchange of files by indexing the files available across a network of peer computers. This model has been highly controversial because it has been employed widely to support the unlicensed exchange of commercial sound recordings, software, and other copyrighted materials. Under the second model, which may prove ultimately to be far more important, peer-to-peer applications aggregate and use otherwise idle resources residing on low-end devices to support high-demand computations. For example, a specially designed screensaver running on a networked computer may be employed to process astronomical or medical data.

The Future

The remarkable developments during the late 1990s and early 2000s suggest that making accurate predictions about the next generation of Internet applications is difficult, if not impossible. Two aspects of the future of the Internet that one can be certain of, however, are that networkbandwidth will be much greater, and that greater bandwidth and its management will be critical factors in the development and deployment of new applications. What will greater bandwidth yield? In the long run, it is difficult to know, but in the short term it seems reasonable to expect new communication models, videoconferencing, increasingly powerful tools for collaborative work across local and wide area networks, and the emergence of the network as a computational service of unprecedented power.

see also Animation; Film and Video Editing; Graphic Devices; Music Composition.

Christinger Tomer

Bibliography

Berners-Lee, Tim, and Mark Fischetti. Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1999.

Loshin, Pete, and Paul Hoffman. Essential E-Mail Standards: RFCs and Protocols Made Practical. New York: Wiley, 1999.

Oram, Andy, ed. Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates, 2001.

Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates, 2000-2001.