Big Web Dynamics Shift -> Fat-Cat Luminaries Getting Middle Aged

An image from a recent 'Web Science Panel' discussion at the Royal Society shows one of the interesting trends of the Web nowadays: Web/ICT people sited as movers and influencers are now getting middle aged.

The image below is from this link and provided under Creative Commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/toastkid/4419682596/

The Internet and Web are no longer the wild-west where Bill 'Sharp eye' Gates takes down the 'Netscape Kid' with a single shot. As I mentioned previously (here) even Facebook and Youtube are now 5 years old.

Here are some things I think this ageing of the Web 'it crowd' might mean - feel free to add more!

1. There is now a generation of young people who have nothing to loose and everything to gain.
2. The fat cats have nothing left to gain but everything to loose.
3. Lack of innovation is the only bar to another revolution.
4. Technical and social dilution are causing the Web to become indistinct. With age comes baggage and special interests. The Web was invented by one person but is now guided by hundreds.
5. The "leaders" of the Internet look and talk more like politicians and pundits than new, fresh thinkers. Can an 18 year old differentiate between Tim Berners-Lee and Gordon Brown's?
6. The age profile of the Internet user base must be shifting as more techno-savy baby-boomers and older generation Xers log on.
7. Web business strategies will be more conventional than in the past.
8. To keep the pace of innovation we need to make it easier for people to remain innovative by offering alternatives routes to advancement than management.
9. Governments will start to figure out how to harness the Internet and Web as more people in power understand the concepts involved.
10. Governments will start to figure out how to shackle their subjects using the Internet and Web.

Business Demands Transactional Cloud Data - Amazon Responds

Some time ago (here) I explained how cloud computing needs transactional processing for the business market. Amazon are continuing to move in that direction.

Amazon have made two interesting announcements. Firstly they are introducing more transaction like read models into their simpleDB data storage model. If this trend follows their general approach, they will try a small change and if it is successful with customers, they will do more. Maybe they will eventually manage to find the holy grail of a massively distributed transactional database. Note that this is different from a clustered database like Oracle RAC.

Amazon SimpleDB Introduces Consistent Reads and Conditional Puts & Deletes

Amazon SimpleDB now enables Consistent Reads and Conditional Puts & Deletes. Consistent Reads provide the ability to specify the consistency characteristic you require for each read call within your application, with an eventually consistent read optimized for lowest latency and highest throughput and a consistent read that provides read my last write capability. Conditional Puts & Deletes are mechanisms for inserting, updating, or deleting one or more attributes of an item with full transactional semantics using a single PutAttributes or Delete Attributes API call. By offering these new features, we aim to facilitate additional use cases of Amazon SimpleDB.

Second they are continuing to make ever larger single instances. This supports the ACID dumplings floating in BASE gravy (see linked post above) approach. Not only does it further the ability of their customers to support large transactional databases in the cloud, it also meshes well with a three tier hybrid approach: Transactions in ACID single instances, consistent read in simpleDB for slightly less critical operations and the consistent eventually read/write for the regular 'stuff' of running a web site/service.

High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large Instance

68.4 GB of memory
26 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each)
1690 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
API name: m2.4xlarge