Online Population now Half Billion

mattvd writes "According to CNN, the number of people with Web access at home by the end of 2001 was 498 million." Not surprisingly, Asia is growing the fastest. It's amazing that in only 10 years or so, the net has exploded so far, so fast, and now touches 10% of the earths population.

Wait

[HanzoSan]

When 600 million Chinese, 100 million japanese, 300 million indians, and 40-50 million africans get online, thats when the real online revolution will take place.

Right now we need to make sure they all have the choice to use Linux, give them some good development tools, graphics tools, and just wait for them to produce information which benifits the world, hopefully they wont be as capitalist as us and patent everything or else we'll be at their mercy.

498 million seems like so much...

[suso]

But 10% seems like so little. As John "Maddog" Hall says, that just means that 5 billion people haven't choosen their operating system yet.

technology and puffery

[Petrox]

So as I don't come off sounding too cynical, let me first say that I think the Internet is a powerful and important set of technologies. It has changed the way I work, play and interact with others.

We cannot lose sight of the fact, however, that it is not the only way to work, live and be social. As the article states, 90% of the world is still not online, and it's a safe bet to say that many of those have probably never even heard of the Internet, and perhaps have no interest in it. While the propogation of these types of technologies throughout Asia and Africa would no doubt improve many lives and perhaps even give credibility to the notion that technology can help people transcend constraining economic, social and political barriers, we must still remember that we are living in a mostly offline world in which technology and modernity has just as often been used to oppress, homogenize and destroy.

So yes, the growth of the Internet is amazing, but, as with everything else, we should no be surprised to find unintended consequences from its growth.

Re:am from india....

[PaxTech]

Why is VoIP illegal in India?

Because India has some seriously entrenched corruption problems. VoIP would hurt the phone company, and the phone company bosses wouldn't like that.

Here in the USA of course, we are MUCH more civilized and would NEVER [enron.com], EVER [slashdot.org] let a corporations concern over profits dictate our laws and regulations.

Re:Usability still an issue

[EllF]

"using a PC takes a time investment of several hours _just_ to do basic tasks"

"Still takes hundreds of mouse clicks to read email/news"

What kind of operating system are you using? At work, I develop (via cygwin, no less) on an NT box; at home I only run linux. With my work system, it takes three clicks to check my mail - a doubleclick to open my browser, and one more (which isn't mandatory) to confirm my username and password. On my linux box, it takes one click to open mozilla. That's it. Neither of these tasks take more than 20 seconds.

To address a few other scattered claims: my computer boots in 35 seconds, not 2 minutes. I do not press "buttons", although I occasionally click to open a menu. For the 5.5 billion people on the planet who to whom "it just seems too complicated" (which I doubt), the television industry is perfectly happy to turn you into a passive recepient of crap. No, stay there - we'll let you know when you should move.

You do raise an interesting point on a more abstract level, however. Should we (as computer users) drive the market towards a nearly idiotic level of "useability"? I think not. Your grandmother doesn't *need* to know how to use her operating system with the acuity and depth presented in those 400+ page tomes in your local McBookstore. She's fine with the glossy book that came in the Compaq box.

See, computers are fundamentally different from your toaster or your television. They let you *create* things - via code, image manipulation, sound editing, etc. Each of this these involves a bit of a time commitment and some learning, but they reap rewards for that. A decent analogy is higher education: would you claim that the "hundreds" of books you average college student reads are entirely too many, and that education should be dumbed down for the "layman"?

Computers are a tool. They might have shiny Widgets to play with, but they are still tools - and what you get out of them will be proportional to what you put in. Attempts to make this an uneven relationship (ie, you get out 10x what you put in) will fail. As Einstein (almost) wrote, "simply everything as much as possible, but no more."

Re:A little perspective...

[segonds]

I think reality is, we'll always have a large percentage of people falling into that classification. Some of it is due to the geography. There are certain places in the world that just aren't good to inhabit if you want to earn money and live a good quality of life.

Canadian endures cold winters and it is a developed country. Texas is quite warn and is part of a developped country. Israel tamed desert.

In a word, poverty has little to do with location and much more with history.

Thinking in the box...

[univgeek]

A lot of people here seem to say that the net is needed at each home and that most people will never be able to afford that, so they will never have access to the net.

What is possible and helpful is community shared internet/information access. After all isn't the internet abut information?

This is what is happening in the developing countries with cyber-cafes. In Bangladesh, because of the poor phone infrastructure, there are people who operate pay-phones, but with CELL phones because the infrastructure to provide land-lines is simply too expensive but setting up the base stations is cheaper. In India Wireless in Local Loop is picking up as a big concept, due to the low cost of deployment. As one Professor in India said, "The developed nations do not need to reduce the costs any further for the basics, 40$ per phone line is fine for them, but we need to use the latest technology, not to increase the features but to reduce the cost." And this needs to be done by the developing countries as no company in the deveoped world will take this on (low profits).

But till this happens, the developing world will be a part of the digital have-nots, and there will be a digital divide.

Re:Wait

[HanzoSan]

You act as if the USA is better? People in the USA are hypocrites,, I mean the USA has done stuff in its past that was as bad as China, remember slavery? Remember the Cival war? All the stuff that happened in the USA, Sure we may be 50 years ahead of China as far as our governments developed, but we cannot say that we always had more freedomm than China because in the past we were as bad as China, we were as bad as China up until around 100 years ago.

I say we shouldnt worry about China, let China be China and deal with their own problems, The reason we have the Al Qaeda problem is because try to influence other countries and force our culture on them.

I understand we have slightly more freedoms than China, but we arent perfect ourselves, so why should we act likee the Police Nation?

Wired Infrastructure

[Perdo]

Take note that untill recently, having the internet meant having a piece of copper strung to your house. Because most countries have not had the massive copper build out that is seen in the united states, getting internet was not possible. that is what makes some of the wireless technologies so interesting. For example, Kuwait has phone lines to only 15% of residences. Every one has a mobile phone though. To a person in kuwait, placing a call means calling a person, not a location. Internet cafes are extremely popular, satisfying demand for an internet that has no infrastructure. Which is what makes 802.11b/a and other wireless methods so interesting. I am guessing that there are as many people in the world, with dollars to spend, that the providers of wireless internet access will call customers, as currently use copper to access the internet. However, untill it is cheaper to set up a wireless internet connection than buy a similar length of copper, acceptance will obviously be poor.

Re:End of the WWW

[denzo]

I don't think the argument is that the Web will disappear or not be used anymore, but that its content-to-noise ratio will worsen. In its beginnings, the WWW had mostly academic documents, which could be considered high-quality and accurate information. As the number of Internet users has grown, there is a greater percentage of garbage compared to useful information. We now have annoying pop-ups, DoS'ed IRC servers, messageboard full of flamefests, etc. Internet advertising companies are now spreading themselves thin over millions of Web pages, causing advertising revenue for each of the Web sites to fall drastically. Various big Web sites are disappearing because they cannot afford their bandwidth, and free file downloads are becoming more scarce (the exceptions are large networks like ZDNet, or servers that cater to limited groups like Linux... but when Linux REALLY picks up, will we still have the same access to free FTP mirrors?).

If you look at it that way, the future of the Web looks kinda bleak.

Re:Usability still an issue

[jhines0042]

I agree with you that the user interface could be made more user friendly... but at the expense of power. This is the trade off.

Remember the good old pocket calculator? Remember how it used to just add and subtract, multiply and divide. Then it could do square roots, raise to the power... Now they can graph things etc. Problem is that as the number of functions that you want to accomplish increase and the number of variables that you want to change increase, you get ever increasing complexity.

Imagine if you will a washing machine that also was able to dry clothes, knit sweaters, pop popcorn, and wax the floors of your house. How on earth would you make something with such a diverse set of functions operate with a simple user interface that was intuitive for all users? What if grandma (or little johnny) just needed to have it knit sweaters? Could she learn how? Sure. But it would take some effort.

It is sad to see that we have become so ingrained with the fast food instant gratification lifestyle in America that we want someone to sell us an appliance (PC) that does exactly what we want without any thinking.

When I was growing up... I played with Legos, Lincoln Logs, Sticks Rocks -n- String and all sorts of great things. My first computer was a Commodore 64 and I didn't have a disk or tape drive. I turned it on and I programmed on it. Of course that was fairly simple becaues that was the only thing that I COULD do on it so that is what I learned to do on it.

Perhaps what we need is a way to not think of the PC as the Appliance. Think of the PC as an Appliance Storage Mechanism and each of the Applications as the Appliances. Each program is pretty easy to learn by itself. Once you have one down you can learn the next one... and some of the knowledge transfers.

Re:Usability still an issue

[stubear]

This ia all fine and well but there are tywo problems with your argument. First of all, Microwaves and the other list of small appliances do not perform the myriad of tasks the PC is expected to perform.

The other problem is getting programmers to actually listen to and implement proper user interfaces. Human Interface Guidelines aren't written for the health of the authors. They are written so developers can build applications which fllow a certain set of rules of consistancy. The HIGs exist, get the pig-headed developers to follow them.

Re:Usability still an issue

[NathanBFH]

You bring up some very interesting rebuttels to my post, and I thank you for your feedback. I'll let you know that I agree with almost all of your points (that computers should not be dumbed down for the layman). However, that is not exactly what I meant to imply. Computers will always have their place. You can turn my PC into an appliance over my dead body! What I'm suggesting is that if there was a way to provide simple services such as email (in text/voice/video form) that everyone would benefit. A breed of device seperate from a typical PC that anyone can use.

On the point of mouse clicks/keyboard presses:
If you wanted to bring simple webservices like email to a person that's never used a computer before you would probably sign them up for a free service such as hotmail or yahoo. I want to diagram how many button presses are involved (this all may sound ridiculous and extremely mellodramatic, but the truth is non-geeky people often get confused by all the steps involved):

- Double Click Internet Explorer from the standard 5-15 icons that are on the desktop. Keep in mind that the Internet Explorer icon is about 1/100th the size of the entire desktop, and a non-tech user can often get lost in the many icons present.
[ 2 clicks ]

- Click in the address bar (which is among 20 other buttons) and type in the (archaic) web address http://www.hotmail.com.
[1 click, 22 key presses]

- In the sign in box type your user name (again, sometimes lost in all the buttons on the screen. Sounds ridiculous, but I've seen users have trouble finding it)
[1 click, ~8 key presses ]

- Same for the password
[1 click, ~8 key presses ]

- Sign In Button
[1 click]

Now you are provided with a user interface (the website) inside of a user interface (the browser) inside of _another_ user interface (the OS). When I sign in to my Yahoo! account, there are no less than 50 links on the page. The browser has another 20 buttons, and the OS has a task bar with who knows what in the tray, a min/max/close button, ect. It's a kalidescopic nightmare for the untrained user.

And that's just email.

Granted it gets easier with time, granted we all had to learn it, but it seems like nothing has changed in the last 20 years. It feels like we have made very little ground. And it seems like an incomprehensible mess to a first time user. Now how many key presses does it take to read each message? Which button out of the 50 available does what I want? You mean that small (16x16 pixel) button? The one next to the other 12 buttons that's below the big bar of other buttons and next to the message that says my computer "Isn't optimized for the Internet"? Couldn't this confusion be halved/quarted/_almost_ totally eliminated?

Past solutions have involved dumbing down the PC. I think that's a terrible idea. Millions of people use PC's with out (many) problems and love the flexibality they provide, including myself. But most don't care about flexability. They don't care that their comptuer can run all the latest applications/OSes. They just want email!

I'm just throwing some food out. I would love to hear rebuttles/other ideas.

*Home* access, not total access

[jpatokal]

Many people seem to be missing the important little point that the 498 million figure refers to people who can access the Net at home. There are quite a few people who have Internet access at work or at school but not at home, and even more people who can (and do?) access the Internet at cafes, libraries, etc. Getting exact figures for these is probably impossible, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if the total of all of these was well over a billion.

Cheers,
-j.

Re:Wait

[HanzoSan]

Alot more freedoms?

Ok, what happens if you write some source code which decodes the RIAAs copy protected CD, well, guess what you go to jail, all your freedom? Where is it?

Oh and lets not forget, you dont have freedom to even control the information produced by your computer hardware.

Soon you may not even have the freedom of writing open source software at all.

Its not just software, but the whole capitalist system takes away your freedom and gives it to businesses.

What happened to the individuality and your freedom? Guess its all about business now.

USA doesnt force its culture on people? What was Vietnam about again? What about the cold war?

USA doesnt hold a gun to peoples head? Tell that to Fidel.

the USA has enemies because the USA spreads everywhere, Bin laden attacked us because we got involved with him, we destroyed afganastan using bin laden to fight our little enemies the Russians, the whole battle with the Russians was because they had a diffrent culture, we wanted them to be like us and had an entire cold war over it.

Now we want to go bother Sadam for the same reason, We should get out of the middle east right now, Stop helping Isreal, Stop attacking Iraq, stop bothering North Korea

None of these countries attacked us, yet we go there and attack them, then we act surprised when they all gang up on us and do a 911 style attack on us.

There shouldnt be a world government, and if there was, it we shouldnt be the police of the world and expect to not be the biggest target. 911 only happened because we caused it, cause and effect.

Sure Bin laden may not have liked our culture, but he would have never attacked us if we didnt go bother him first and we DID bother him first, we arent innocent.

I'm tired of biased Americans acting like the USA can do no wrong, and its always the innocent angels in the USA vs "EVIL" or the AXIS of EVIL

The UN doesnt support what we are doing, because its wrong, Sure we have the right to attack Al Qaeda, but Iraq? North Korea? Cuba, Somolia, Russia, all this stuff didnt have to happen.In fact if none of it did happen, we wouldnt be hated.