The immediacy of the Internet

I'm continually being reminded that the Internet is now. If something happens anywhere in the world you will see it or hear about it first on the Internet. Not exactly.

Recently, while listing to the radio, a news story reported the collapse of a giant crane killing three. I went on the net and tried two news sites. Nothing. Nada. Zip. I heard it first on the radio and later received more detailed information from the radio.

I'm a big fan of CART racing. Last year I would go to their web site to get the latest status of a race. I did this because ABC Corp. was delaying the races. Most races were delayed up to three hours. That means the race is over before it gets broadcast on TV.

This year the CART web site is produced by quokka, a new sports site. Now everything is flipped. The TV broadcast have mostly been live and trying to get immediate race status from the CART web site is a big pain in the ass. Last year the status of a race was presented using a Java application. quokka uses Shockwave. I have never seen Shockwave work as advertised. I still don't know what so special about Shockwave anyway. Now when a race is delayed for TV broadcast I can't get immediate status from the web site.

During one of the recent space mission launches I went to the NASA web site to view the launch. Everything went ok until just before the launch when several thousand users wanted to view the launch from the web site. Not. The pipe is only so big and in effect the screen froze. Back to TV to watch the launch live.

You're familiar with what happened at the Frederick's of Hollywood's web site when they had a live video show. Didn't happen. The Internet is not big enough to support live events. Sites, like Frederick's of Hollywood, do a disservice by putting on these live events when they know their servers can't handle the traffic. Especially video.

Investors who came to the Internet to trade because they believed it would provide the immediate access to their broker were misinformed. Like any system, Internet sites are designed to handle x amount of traffic and usually they try to over build the systems. But no site with hundred of thousands of customers can build a system economically to accept all those customers at the same time, anymore than they can build a phone system that will handle all their customers at the same time.

Web sites are not powerful enough to handle large amounts of instantaneous traffic. Even if they were, the infrastructure that delivers all that traffic isn't big enough.

So if you desire to watch a live event or you need immediate information then try TV. Radio is still great for getting immediate information of current events from around the world. The Internet will get there in the future. The problem is no one can accurately predict when that will be.

copyright 1999 john s krill