It’s perfectly normal to associate the internet with web browsing. After all, isn’t the internet the place we go to look at websites for fun, for research, for commerce…? Of course it is.
And to prove this connection there’s still a battle going on for the best web browser - is it Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s FireFox, Opera Software’s Opera or something entirely different?
In fact, the internet is a network. A network to which millions of computers around the planet can connect.
So what? I hear you say!
Well, networks allow computers to talk about anything.
Banks use networks to perform electronic funds transfer.
Telephones connect to each other through networks so we can speak to our neighbour or a relative on the other side of the world.
Businesses run their accounting systems, customer systems, HR systems and much more using their networks.
When you expand your view of the internet as a network with the ability to connect just about any computer in world to any other, does that expand what you might like to do with it?
In our business, like many others, we use a VOIP service. VOIP stands for Voice Over IP; IP stands for Internet Protocol; for Internet Protocol, just read Internet. So, VOIP is simply ‘telephone services over the Internet’.
We have telephone support for our ValuedClientSystem.com e-business software. The support professionals are based in the USA. And using our internet phone service someone in the United Kingdom can call a local telephone number and actually speak with support in the USA.
If you use Microsoft Windows you’ve probably used Windows Media player or something similar. If you put a music CD in to your computer, it will go an find the album cover graphics using the internet. It’s not a web browser, it’s using a service over the internet.
Perhaps you use an email reader like Microsoft Outlook. It’s using your email provider, e.g. Hotmail, AOL, GMail etc as a service over the internet.
You may have seen Google’s Google Earth application that runs as an application on Windows - not the web browser version, the application that runs on your Windows computer. Google also have a client application for their AdWords advertising product called the AdWords Editor.
Software like Keyword Elite and SEO Elite are common tools for internet marketing that use services available on the internet and are not web browsers.
So, the word ‘Internet’ might lead us quickly to think about Web Browsers and Web Browsers have been about HTML. But we all use services on the internet that are beyond the browser. And I think this trend is going to continue.
What’s my Point: the next generation of applications follows these example beyond the capabilities of today’s web browsers using the internet as a network to deliver user experiences and capabilities beyond the browser.
I’ve listed several of beyond the browser examples above. And there is a trend to extend the browser to host applications that have nothing to do with HTML.
In fact Adobe’s Flash is a very common example of something we often see via a browser, but in fact doesn’t use HTML - the raw language of a web browser.
Microsoft recently released a technology called ‘Windows Presentation Foundation’. Not quite as nifty a name as ‘Flash’ but certainly clever technology. If you have broadband and are running Windows Vista (or Windows XP with Microsoft’s .NET Framework 3.0 installed) then feast your eyes on the British Libraries ‘Turning The Pages‘ application for a sample of the technology.
It uses beyond the browser technology (Windows Presentation Foundation) to make precious texts like Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, that you could previously only be see by physically visiting the British Library available to a much wider audience… enjoy.
-Mark
