At a time when many people are saying innovation is dead along with the economy as we knew it, I can’t help but feel the hot breath of a surge in the power of the network. As Marc Andreessen reminds in his fascinating conversation with Charlie Rose, the Internet didn’t take off until the browser. The infrastructure was in place for some time already, but when the browser appeared, the TV generation sat up and took notice.
Now we’re at the threshold of the realtime moment, and history seems to be repeating itself. For some of us, the advent of a reasonably realtime message bus over public networks has changed something about the existing infrastructure in ways that are not yet important to a broad section of Internet dwellers. The numbers are adding up — 175 million Facebook users, tens of thousands of instant Twitter followers, constant texting and video chats among the teenage crowd — a semi-secret economy of interactive media that is sucking the chewy chocolate center out of the one-way broadcast sector.
