Search Results for: Internet

The Internet Tidal Wave

Longreads Pick

May 26th, 1995: Bill Gates sends a memo, entitled “The Internet Tidal Wave,” to all executive staff within Microsoft. In it, he makes clear his intention to focus the company’s efforts online with immediate effect and “assign the Internet the highest level of importance,” going on to call it, “the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981.”

Author: Bill Gates
Source: Letters of Note
Published: May 26, 1995
Length: 23 minutes (5,773 words)

Looking for Someone: Sex, Love and Loneliness on the Internet

Longreads Pick

The cutting edge is in mobile and location-based technology, such as Grindr, a smartphone app for gay men that tells subscribers when there are other willing subscribers in their vicinity. Many Internet dating companies, including Grindr, are trying to devise ways to make this kind of thing work for straight people, which means making it work for straight women, who may not need an app to know that they are surrounded by willing straight men.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jul 4, 2011
Length: 41 minutes (10,251 words)

Passing Through: Why the Open Internet Is Worth Saving

Longreads Pick

One could also read ‘The Master Switch’ as a much bolder attempt to influence the future of the information economy, not just net neutrality. In the book and in recent public appearances, Wu has focused on the growing power of Apple, Facebook, and Twitter—not the usual contestants in net neutrality debates. He believes that some of these companies exhibit features of earlier information empires and may be hurting innovation. The separations principle is clearly meant to apply to them, and to the information industry as a whole, not just to network operators such as Comcast and Verizon. The merits and implications of Wu’s position, therefore, need to be assessed in a much broader context than net neutrality alone.

Source: Boston Review
Published: Mar 2, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,799 words)

How Egypt's Leaders Found 'Off' Switch for the Internet

How Egypt’s Leaders Found ‘Off’ Switch for the Internet

How Egypt’s Leaders Found the ‘Off’ Switch for the Internet

Longreads Pick

Epitaphs for the Mubarak government all note that the mobilizing power of the Internet was one of the Egyptian opposition’s most potent weapons. But quickly lost in the swirl of revolution was the government’s ferocious counterattack, a dark achievement that many had thought impossible in the age of global connectedness. In a span of minutes just after midnight on Jan. 28, a technologically advanced, densely wired country with more than 20 million people online was essentially severed from the global Internet.

Published: Feb 16, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,372 words)

How the Internet Gets Inside Us

How the Internet Gets Inside Us

The Information: How the Internet Gets Inside Us

Longreads Pick

Call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened … The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Feb 7, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,734 words)

Ginsberg Internets the Internet: The longest reads in the world

Ginsberg Internets the Internet: The longest reads in the world

Blank Slate: Jacob Weisberg Doesn’t Much Care for What Works on the Internet. Can Slate recover?

Longreads Pick

The site’s internal numbers show that page views for October were up just 6 percent, to 83.6 million, and unique visitors were down 21 percent — growing pains as the site weans itself from longtime traffic teat MSN.com and develops its own, more clicky readers. Over the same time period, Gawker has more than doubled its audience, and the Huffington Post has a global readership roughly three times as large. Through October, the Daily Beast racked up publicity with long, will-they-or-won’t-they talks of a merger with Newsweek. When media people talk about the future of publishing online, in other words, they don’t talk about the site with the 12-year-old CMS.

Published: Nov 10, 2010
Length: 9 minutes (2,304 words)

The State of the Internet Operating System

Longreads Pick
Published: Mar 29, 2010
Length: 62 minutes (15,540 words)