more internet users equals more cruft on the internet

Interestingly, Finland, the United States, and Germany seem to have capped at a little over 600 internet users per 1000 people. 2004 brought a doubling in the number of internet users per thousand for the UK, France, and India. India’s population of internet users increased approximately six-fold from 2000. Sweden and the United States were roughly comparable in 2000, but in 2004 Sweden far outstripped the United States.

One conclusion — as more of the world’s population continues to come online, we’ll be inundated with data and metadata. We’ll need good (and appropriate) tools to help us filter, sort, classify, and consume this data and metadata.

I posit that the web browser, as we know it today, will die because it is ill suited to help us sift through vast quantities of information to find relevant bits. In order to manage this kind of information, we need a tool that gives us more than just an unfiltered view of everything out there, which is what the web browser does.

What will these new kinds of tools be? How will they work? I don’t know, yet. But there are several ways in which I can see them growing today. APIs, special browser add-ons, rss readers, and mashups are all helping accomplish this vision of creating new (better) ways to consume information.

I should write more about this, especially since Chris disagrees and has already thrown down the gauntlet (link to his post forthcoming). But first I need to write more code for Swivel.

Data is from the World Bank, and uploaded into Swivel by redRob.