With its new converged messaging service announced today, Facebook took several more steps toward David Gelernter’s Lifestreams concept, first outlined in the mid- to late-1990s. See an old Yale web page on the topic, the newer Lifestream blog, and a 2009 interview with Gelernter. A lifestream is bascially a digital representation of your life — all the communications, documents, photos, blips, bleeps, and bits that come and go . . . arranged in chronological order as a never-ending river of searchable information. Google’s Gmail was the first popular application/service that hinted at the Lifestream ideal. Facebook — with its “seamless messaging,” “conversation history,” and “social inbox” — now moves further with the integration of email, text, IM, and attachments in never ending streams, accessible on any device.

Cisco’s latest Visual Networking Index, this one focusing mobile data traffic, projects 108% compound growth through 2014.

See this fun and quite insightful discussion of the digital 2000’s (and beyond) with Esther Dyson, Jaron Lanier, and Paul Saffo (hat tip: Adam Thierer).

YouTube is moving toward a 1080p Hi Def video capability, just as we long-predicted.

This video may be “1080p,” but the frame-rate is slow, and the video motion is thus not very smooth. George Ou estimates the bit-rate at 3.7 Mbps, which is not enough for real full-motion HD. But we’re moving quickly in that direction.

See our brief review of Arbor Networks’ new two-year study where they captured and analyzed 264 exabytes of Internet traffic. Highlights:

• Internet traffic growing at least 45% annually.
• Web video jumped to 52% of all Internet traffic from 42%.
• P2P, although still substantial, dropped more than any other application.
• Google, between 2007 and 2009, jumped from outside the top-ten global ISPs by traffic volume to the number 3 spot.
• Comcast jumped from outside the top-ten to number 6.
• Content delivery networks (CDNs) are now responsible for around 10% of global Internet traffic.
• This fast-changing ecosystem is not amenable to rigid rules imposed from a central authority, as would be the case under “net neutrality” regulation.

YouTube says it now serves up well over a billion videos a day — far more than previously thought.

Om Malik surveys the Net traffic spike after Michael Jackson’s death:

Around 6:30 p.m. EST, Akamai’s Net Usage Index for News spiked all the way to 4,247,971 global visitors per minute vs. normal traffic of 2,000,000, a 112 percent gain.

We’ve been talking about Netflix’s sure move to the Web for a long time now. In our presentations, we show how Netflix DVDs that today mostly arrive in the U.S. mail, if sent in high-def (HD) over the Net, would total almost eight exabytes per year. That’s almost half of all U.S. Internet traffic in 2008.

Well, here’s CEO Reed Hastings in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal:

Netflix Inc. is a standout in the recession. The DVD-rental company added more subscribers than ever during the first three months of the year. Its stock has more than doubled since October.

But Netflix’s chief executive officer, Reed Hastings, thinks his core business is doomed. As soon as four years from now, he predicts, the business that generates most of Netflix’s revenue today will begin to decline, as DVDs delivered by mail steadily lose ground to movies sent straight over the Internet. So Mr. Hastings, who co-founded the company, is quickly trying to shift Netflix’s business — seeking to make more videos available online and cutting deals with electronics makers so consumers can play those movies on television sets.

His position offers a rare look at how a CEO manages a still-hot business as its time runs out. “Almost no companies succeed at what we’re doing,” he says.

Check out Cato Unbound’s symposium on Lawrence Lessig’s 1999 book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Declan McCullagh leads off, with Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain and my former colleague Adam Thierer next, and then a response from Lessig himself.

Here’s Thierer’s bottom line:

Luckily for us, Lessig’s lugubrious predictions proved largely unwarranted. Code has not become the great regulator of markets or enslaver of man; it has been a liberator of both. Indeed, the story of the past digital decade has been the exact opposite of the one Lessig envisioned in Code. Cyberspace has proven far more difficult to “control” or regulate than any of us ever imagined. More importantly, the volume and pace of technological innovation we have witnessed over the past decade has been nothing short of stunning.

Had there been anything to the Lessig’s “code-is-law” theory, AOL’s walled-garden model would still be the dominant web paradigm instead of search, social networking, blogs, and wikis. Instead, AOL — a company Lessig spent a great deal of time fretting over in Code — was forced to tear down those walls years ago in an effort to retain customers, and now Time Warner isspinning it off entirely. Not only are walled gardens dead, but just about every proprietary digital system is quickly cracked open and modified or challenged by open source and free-to-the-world Web 2.0 alternatives. How can this be the case if, as Lessig predicted, unregulated code creates a world of “perfect control”?

Lots of commentators continue to misinterpret the research I and others have done on Internet traffic and its interplay with network infrastructure investment and communications policy.

I think that new video applications require lots more bandwidth — and, equally or even more important, that more bandwidth drives creative new applications. Two sides of the innovation coin. And I think investment friendly policies are necessary both to encourage deployment of new wireline and wireless broadband and also boost innovative new applications and services for consumers and businesses.

But this article, as one of many examples, mis-summarizes my view. It uses scary words like “apocalypse,” “catastrophe,” and, well, “scare mongering,” to describe my optimistic anticipation of an exaflood of Internet innovations coming our way. I don’t think that

the world will simply run out of bandwidth and we’ll all be weeping over our clogged tubes.

Not unless we block the expansion of new network capacity and capability. (more…)

Check out Stephen Wolfram’s new project called Alpha, which moves beyond searching for information on the Web and toward the integration of knowledge into more useful, higher level patterns. I find the prospect of offloading onto Stephen Wolfram lots of data mining and other drudgery immediately appealing for my own research and analysis work. Quicker research would yield more — and one might hope, better — analysis. One can imagine lots of hiccups in getting to a real product, but this video demo offers a fun and enticing beginning.

When Cablevision of New York announced this week it would begin offering broadband Internet service of 101 megabits per second for $99 per month, lots of people took notice. Which was the point.

Maybe the 101-megabit product is a good experiment. Maybe it will be successful. Maybe not. One hundred megabits per second is a lot, given today’s applications (and especially given cable’s broadcast tree-and-branch shared network topology). A hundred megabits, for example, could accommodate more than five fully uncompressed high-definition TV channels, or 10+ compressed HD streams. It’s difficult to imagine too many households finding a way today to consume that much bandwidth. Tomorrow is another question. The bottom line is that in addition to making a statement, Cablevision is probably mostly targeting the small business market with this product.

Far more perplexing than Cablevision’s strategy, however, was the reaction from groups like the reflexively critical Free Press:

We are encouraged by Cablevision’s plan to set a new high-speed bar of service for the cable industry. . . . this is a long overdue step in the right direction.

Free Press usually blasts any decision whatever by any network or media company. But by praising the 101-megabit experiment, Free Press is acknowledging the perfect legitimacy of charging variable prices for variable products. Pay more, get more. Pay less, get more affordably the type of service that will meet your needs the vast majority of the time. (more…)

See two recent articles (here and here) addressing a topic I’ve done lots of research on: Internet traffic growth, mostly due to Web video, and the technology investment needed to both drive and accommodate it.

Here’s one of my papers:
Estimating the Exaflood – 01.28.08 – by Bret Swanson & George Gilder

My Tech Liberation Front colleague Adam Thierer notes a fun article by Harry McCracken that follows the top 15 Web entities from 1999, asking where they are today. Only six of the top 15 from 1999 remain so in 2009, with nine dropping off, and nine new names you may have heard of.

The supposed top finding of a new report commissioned by the British telecom regulator Ofcom is that we won’t need any QoS (quality of service) or traffic management to accommodate next generation video services, which are driving Internet traffic at consistently high annual growth rates of between 50% and 60%. TelecomTV One headlined, “Much ado about nothing: Internet CAN take video strain says UK study.” 

But the content of the Analysys Mason (AM) study, entitled “Delivering High Quality Video Services Online,” does not support either (1) the media headline — “Much ado about nothing,” which implies next generation services and brisk traffic growth don’t require much in the way of new technology or new investment to accommodate them — or (2) its own “finding” that QoS and traffic management aren’t needed to deliver these next generation content and services.

For example, AM acknowledges in one of its five key findings in the Executive Summary: 

innovative business models might be limited by regulation: if the ability to develop and deploy novel approaches was limited by new regulation, this might limit the potential for growth in online video services.

In fact, the very first key finding says:

A delay in the migration to 21CN-based bitstream products may have a negative impact on service providers that use current bitstream products, as growth in consumption of video services could be held back due to the prohibitive costs of backhaul capacity to support them on the legacy core network. We believe that the timely migration to 21CN will be important in enabling significant take-up of online video services at prices that are reasonable for consumers.

So very large investments in new technologies and platforms are needed, and new regulations that discourage this investment could delay crucial innovations on the edge. Sounds like much ado about something, something very big.  (more…)

Three media veterans – Gordon Crovitz, Steve Brill, and Leo Hindery — give paid content, via micro-payments and related subscriptions, yet another shot. With iTunes and Amazon also doing their part to advance the model, will we finally get a break-through?

Could the iPhone 3.0 release this summer help create the mechanism — and culture — of micro-payments that many have long been seeking to solve the Web’s intellectual property problem?

UPDATE: These guys were thinking the exact same thing.

See this fun interview with the energetic early Web innovator Marc Andreesen. Andreesen is on the Facebook board, has his own social networking company called Ning, and is just launching a new venture fund. He talks about Kindles, iPhones, social nets, the theory of cascading innovation, and says we should create new “virtual banks” to get past the financial crisis.

Take a look at this 40 minute interview with Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of graphics chip maker Nvidia. It’s a non-technical discussion of a very important topic in the large world of computing and the Internet. Namely, the rise of the GPU — the graphics processing unit.

Almost 40 years ago the CPU — or central processing unit — burst onto the scene and enabled the PC revolution, which was mostly about word processing (text) and simple spreadsheets (number crunching). But today, as Nvidia and AMD’s ATI division add programmability to their graphics chips, the GPU becomes the next generation general purpose processor. (Huang briefly describes the CUDA programmability architecture, which he compares to the x86 architecture of the CPU age.) With its massive parallelism and ability to render the visual applications most important to today’s consumers — games, photos, movies, art, photoshop, YouTube, GoogleEarth, virtual worlds — the GPU rises to match the CPU’s “centrality” in the computing scheme.

Less obvious, the GPU’s attributes also make it useful for all sorts of non-consumer applications like seismic geographic imaging for energy exploration, high-end military systems, and even quantitative finance.

Perhaps the most exciting shift unleashed by the GPU, however, is in cloud computing. At the January 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, AMD and a small but revolutionary start-up called LightStage/Otoy announced they are building the world’s fastest petaflops supercomputer at LightStage/Otoy’s Burbank, CA, offices. But this isn’t just any supercomputer. It’s based on GPUs, not CPUs. And it’s not just really, really fast. Designed for the Internet age, this “render cloud” will enable real-time photorealistic 3D gaming and virtual worlds across the Web. It will compress the power of the most advanced motion picture CGI (computer generated imaging) techniques, which can consume hours to render one movie frame and months to produce movie sequences, into real-time . . . and link this power to the wider world over the Net. 

Watch this space. The GPU story is big.

Sergey Brin didn’t think Wikipedia would work. But as Chris Anderson (and, in a linked video, Brin himself) explain, the power of scale offered by the Net often surprises even the savviest Google-founding multi-billionaires.

A few days after the election, I wrote about President-elect Obama’s decentralized entrepreneurial campaign, which fully exploited the Web and trusted people at the edge. Here’s a post-election debrief from the technology team — the so-called Triple-O — that made it happen. They offer a final tally of metrics:

– two million “MyBO” Web-volunteer profiles

– 13 million e-mail addresses

– more than half a billion dollars raised online

– three million online donors gave 6.5 million donations

– average online contribution of $80

– more than 200,000 volunteer-organized offline events

As I pointed out, this innovative “capitalist” campaign clashed with many of Obama’s tax-regulate-and-centralize policy proposals. We’ll see if the new President learns anything from his successful campaign and puts it to use reigniting the economy.

Sorry, Mr. President. Please surrender your BlackBerry.

Those are seven words President-elect Barack Obama is dreading but expecting to hear, friends and advisers say, when he takes office in 65 days.

This would be excruciatingly difficult.