The Tragic Death of Practically Everything

I think it's worth noting that most of those stories are random blog sites, which are kind of allowed (expected?) to post stupid, sensationalist stuff fairly regularly. The WIRED article was a cover story on a major technology publication, and went beyond opinion and used a totally misleading graph ( http://www.boingboing.net/2010/08/17/is-the-web-really-de.ht... ). The WIRED article is a few levels above those links in terms of stupidity.

Breaking News: Unnecessarily hyperbolic and speculative tech news sites are dead!

The chart Wired provides is nice, but doesn't really tell the full story. It doesn't tell the story they're writing, and it doesn't give enough information to really work out what's going on.

Looking at that chart, I do not see an increase in direct services traffic, such as the facebook apps they mention in the articles. I see an increase in Video traffic, specifically, eating up the other services. This is not the same thing. We need more information, anyway: is this video direct streaming? Is it video accessed over web sites like youtube? If the latter is the case, does it really count as a separate category? Why put services and types of content on the same graph, anyway?

It also doesn't tell the whole story. I'd like to see a similar chart of total data transfer. Obviously the total amount of Internet data transfer has skyrocketed over the same period, and we already know the way the proportions work out... But for all we know, web usage is growing in absolute terms. Maybe it's not growing as fast as video-specific web traffic, but it's still growing. Besides, technology to effectively store and transmit video in place in websites is relatively new. It should be no surprise that it's piece of the Internet pie is still growing!

Overall; kind of bullshit. I like the idea that non-http services are taking over the Internet, but the numbers Wired presents don't validate that one way or the other.

Definitely liked how it ended with vinyl alive.

This has been posted before recently. The title is just something flashy to attract attention, but there is no real substance to the claim that the "web" is dead (let alone that everything is dead), it's just that the web is undergoing some logical transformations, as it evolves. Sounds to be like Wired is either becoming desperate for traffic, or it wants to become act more and more like a tabloid instead of an intelligent news source.

They missed the death of blogging and Facebook, and of course the death of Microsoft.

People have waaay too much time on their hands :)