The Changing face of Internet Usage

Back in 1990, there was no web traffic on the Internet because web sites didn’t exist. The Internet was then (and is now) simply a way of transferring data, a piece of infrastructure, electronic plumbing.

As a proportion of overall traffic, web site activity peaked almost 10 years ago. Since then, other applications have made more use of the Internet as a way of transferring data. Back then, that was peer-to-peer file sharing (think movie, game and music downloading), increasingly now it’s video streaming and ‘other’ stuff.

The author of a Wired article, Chris Anderson argues that this ‘other’ traffic is increasingly driven by proprietary applications that reside on our smart phones, computing tablets and e-readers.

Anderson says we’re abandoning web sites accessed via a browser and turning to purpose-built applications because the latter are simpler to use, often faster, and because we prefer to consume some content on mobile computing platforms instead of at the desktop or laptop.

It’s a viewpoint that anyone with a smart phone, an iPad or a Kindle will easily resonate with, and I agree that there’s a game-changing ‘something’ happening, but I’m not sure that apps are the whole answer.

Computers are too complicated

I’ve always thought that computers are too complicated for most people – myself included. When I say computers, I’m specifically referring to Windows-based PC’s and laptops.

I’ve little direct experience of Mac’s or other operating systems – but what experience I have had with both of these would make me lump them in with Windows PC’s in the ‘too complicated’ category.

The problem is that, unlike the toaster in your kitchen, your computer is a general purpose device. Because it can do a whole variety of things, it tends to do none of them particularly well or intuitively.

As the applications on our PC’s have grown in complexity, so to has the underlying operating system and all the bits and pieces required to make all these applications from all these vendors and suppliers play nicely together.

What that looks like is a computer getting fatter and fatter on security updates, anti-virus software, firewall software and updated device drivers BEFORE the beleaguered human even starts to use the computer to create a word document or send an email.

You see, most people only use a handful of applications on their computers, yet they are saddled with the full overhead of a bloated operating system and clumsy hardware – whether they use the computer once a week to collect email, or have multiple business applications open every day.

For many people, that overhead is too high when the computer is working OK. When ‘something’ goes wrong, the computer is rendered close to useless.

Enter the smart phone

The smart phone uses a purpose-built operating system running on a purpose-built computing platform. These are not general computing devices in the same way that PC’s are because we’re not aware of the operating system in the same way, and because the device itself is closed. Other than inserting a memory card (perhaps) we can’t play with or change the hardware at all.

It’s this limited set of choices from a simplified device which makes the smart phone a simpler computing device to interact with compared to the PC.

When we download apps to run on our smart phone, we’re sacrificing the choice, flexibility and options of the PC application for a simplified, faster and more reliable experience on the smart phone. In essence, the smart phone and its apps have largely solved the complexity and feature-bloat of the PC.

More mobile devices

Now that mobile devices are available in more formats and are capable of more tasks, we continue to see apps delivering a simplified and back-to-basics experience compared to their PC counterparts.

On my desktop PC, I frequently use Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Currently a £70 purchase, Excel is packed with features and functions I’ve never used, and probably never will. However, I’ve got it and I doubt I’ll be changing it any time soon.

On my iPad, I downloaded Apple’s Numbers application for £6 – and it does the vast majority of what I want to do with Excel – at a fraction of the price and in a much simpler and more intuitive way.

It’s the same for many ‘light’ applications and the occasional and recreational requirements that many people have of their computing device.

App Limitations

In my opinion, the app revolution doesn’t cover all the bases. My iPad is a great travel tool and a good all-rounder at most things, but for business use, my PC is faster and easier to use.

The limited screen size restricts what I can see and interact with compared to my desktop’s dual monitors, and the iPad touch keyboard is way more clunky than a full PC keyboard.

I prefer to travel with the iPad instead of a laptop because of its size, versatility and long battery life.

Not all mobile platforms and apps are created equally though. I recently dumped my Android smart phone in favour of a regular ‘stupid phone’ because I found the smart phone too complex and vague. It provided me with features I didn’t want to use and it wasn’t very good at its main function of making and receiving calls.

Add to that its poor battery life, poor screen and, in my opinion, clunky operating system, and its applications didn’t stand a chance. It had many of the downsides of my bloated desktop PC without many of the upsides I’ve already mentioned.

So apps aren’t always the answer, neither are proprietary computing platforms and operating systems. They all have to be well-executed to outperform their desktop counterparts, and they still don’t service full-on business needs.

Real estate apps?

Of course, I’m thinking about all this in connection with Kyero.com and whether building a mobile app would make sense? Would a significant number of people prefer to access Kyero.com on their mobile devices? With a limited feature set, what features could it do without? How would it best make use of mobile computing’s ace, GPS combined with 3G networking?

I’m aware of many of the existing mobile real estate apps used in Spain, but most of them suffer from a general lack of data about the Spanish property market. Most sites don’t have accurate GPS location data for their properties, and none have accurate sold prices – because that data is not publicly available.

Faced with this lack of underlying information, most of these apps just allow for a different computing platform to be used. They look pretty, but the killer functionality is missing.

In the US, the UK and other parts of Europe where more underlying data is available, mobile real estate apps serve a real purpose and provide useful functionality. Until some of this data is opened up in Spain, I believe that real estate apps will remain pretty but non-essential downloads.

Google implications

There’s another implication of people moving away from their desktop PC and their browser-based consumption of the web towards apps on mobile devices. It’s a world where Google doesn’t reign supreme. It limits Google’s view of what they’re doing.

While Google (and other search engines) can access and index all sorts of data, they can do nothing if that data is contained inside a proprietary application. It becomes invisible to what currently drives the web – search.

Can you remember using the web before Google made it useful and searchable? It was mostly useless and frustrating – even after Yahoo’s initial efforts at helping us find stuff.

Well, an all-app world could present the same problem. It’s already a bit clumsy and tricky to find new, worthy applications but if the data you want is contained within an app, there’s almost no way of getting at it. In short, a lot more information could become unfindable.

What’s more, the vast majority of traffic to the majority of websites is search driven – that’s certainly the case for Kyero.com. If people stop searching the web and start consuming data via apps, what’s the future of online marketing?

I don’t know the answer to that one – but I’m pretty sure that the future will be dramatically different from the current Google-dominated world of search.

It’ll certainly be a new challenge for web sites like ours if a significant number of people prefer the app approach to the web site one.

Conclusion

Even if the proportion of Internet traffic carrying web site data is decreasing, the overall volume is increasing. This isn’t a zero-sum game when an increase in app traffic requires a corresponding decrease in web traffic.

Of course, as more and more people get faster and faster connections to the Internet, more of everything will be consumed in absolute terms.

However, the trend towards the app experience and away from the browser-based web experience is difficult to argue against. There’s no denying that it’s happening and that it will impact our current working models of marketing and monetisation.

To succeed, these new computing platforms and their apps must offer a superior experience. If they don’t, they’ll fail – much as my early experience with an Android phone was a failure.

That’s also the secret behind great web sites – a great user experience. Web site owners and those behind the ‘open’ web versus the ‘closed’ app are hoping that HTML5 will be the holy grail for web sites: App-like functionality on an open web platform.

However, all the time we’re stuck with bloated Windows on the desktop, user experience will be sub-optimal and no amount of technology will be able to compensate for an over-complicated operating system lurking behind even the simplest of applications.

Martin Dell, founder of Spanish portal http://www.kyero.com. Find more of Martin’s insightful look at the internet and its relation to his own business at the Kyero Spanish property blog

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