I’ve seen this term getting tossed around a lot lately, the splinternet, more so in the last few weeks than ever before. After all, Apple claims to have sold over 1 million iPad devices in 28 days (about half as long as it took them to sell 1 million first generation iPhones). Facebook has begun colonizing web content on other site experiences by rolling out their “Like” feature. The rumors out there estimated that over 50,000 external sites had already implemented the simple line of code from Facebook in just the first week it was released, so visitors to these external sites could share content within Facebook. Then there is Google. Google has benefited and profited mightily from bringing the web together, and serving ads within alongside the order inherent in the chaos of the web. But this chaos of information, neatly indexed and ranked for relevancy and recency is not the endgame any longer. Facebook is colonizing content on the web that is locking Google out behind their user’s IDs, and Apple is pushing and perpetuating their own proprietary platforms. And they are controlling every aspect of that experience: from apps to ads to analytics.
To the casual web user, this concept is maybe too high-level to be aware of over the course of everyday web browsing, status updates, and app usage. This is all pretty new stuff. What do you think? Bernoff’s article seems to set up this epic battle of Apple vs. Facebook. I’m not so sure if it’s one vs. the other. I think it’s more like this: Apple+Facebook+Google= a totally new web experience.
Thoughts?