The WEB we live in

Remember those days when connecting to the Internet was usually something involving plain old telephone lines, things called dial-up modems, and was accompanied by ear-splitting noises while the modem apparently got into sync with the universe at large? Back when buying a book involved going into a real-life store? Back when chatting was something you did face-to-face and mail was something that involved sheets of paper, envelopes and little sticky things called stamps? Back when going online meant dialing in to AOL or CompuServe or BTX? All of that seems like ancient history nowadays, like tales from the beginnings of the industrial revolution, back then when everything was still powered by steam and Charles Dickens was prowling the gas-lit and fog-filled streets of London. Actually, only about 20 years have passed since the days of the acoustic coupler. We have moved from the Web as something of interest to technophiles only to something that most of us use every moment of our lives – to check on our loved ones, to buy and download books, music, videos, tickets, arrange our vacation, to watch that show we missed last night, to share pictures, videos, and the latest and greatest insights we just were struck by. Even more exciting: With the Web we have started to turn our societies, our lives, and our ways of conducting business inside out! Web-applications such as Wikipedia, Flickr, Wordpress, Tumblr, Twitter, while also being entertaining, enable us to graduate from being consumers to becoming producers. Technologies such as the emerging 3D printing technology – interestingly enough not driven by any of the established printer manufacturers but instead by academics and interested amateurs! – and the grassroots-powered Arduino efforts now help us to break through that virtual, real-life barrier that confined us to the cyberspace so far: the virtual becomes real! As the Web turns 20 this year we thought we would take a closer look at the Web we live in, at how it has developed over the last decades, and what we can expect to see in the near and further future. We have been fortunate in getting several experts to share their knowledge and insight with us. We decided to base this special issue on two papers from Google in which Sergey Brin, Lawrence Page and colleagues describe their ideas for the first ver-