Rosedale: Yup. I think there are a couple reasons for that. I know that's a bold claim. It's one of the things when I get up at conferences and I'd say, "Look, I'm telling you, in 10 years time..." If you look today at Web router traffic, if you look at a tier 1 router today and you say, "What's going through it?" It's about 70 percent Web traffic and then the rest is email. So, you basically have the Web as the dominant use of information technology on the global network. That's what we do, we use the Web.
The second thing we do is send email back and forth. And those are basically in round numbers and everything else, is smaller - obviously, still in many cases, big businesses -- but that's the whole thing. That's the frequency (muddled).
I believe that in a decade's time, the number one spot will be virtual world traffic. It will basically be the act of moving around in and consuming content in a virtual world, in the same manner that we see the 70 percent traffic on the Web today.
I think the Web will be -- this is the mystery of super-linear growth conditions -- the Web will be a lot bigger than it is today. I'm not saying that the Web will be smaller; I'm just saying that in the same way that we've seen all of these exponential curves on new products, I believe that virtual worlds will ultimately get on an exponential [curve] where they attract users at a rate greater than the Web. So, I think there's going to be this inversion where virtual worlds are going to be number one, the Web will be number two, and email will be number three, in 10 years time.
The reason for that is that - think about it - it's a couple of things. The main one is that human beings generally try... I look at all life experiences as being: information consumption, creation, or sharing. It's like "The Matrix," right? You can say that it's all digital. All we're talking about, back at that camera, our conversation is basically just digital stuff being exchanged. So, what we're doing is sharing information back and forth. When you surf the Web, that's what you're doing. You're generally consuming information.
If you look at human beings and you look at their day to day activities, they generally enjoy and optimize for the creation, sharing and consumption of information in the presence of others. It is just generally the case that we're not alone. We spend less of our time alone -- not none of our time alone, we certainly spend a lot of time alone -- but if you just look at the average human, they spend a majority of their time in the presence of others.
The Web and the Internet, to date, do not afford us the feature where we do things in the presence of others. And, "in the presence of others" has a very, very, very, specific meaning that relates to how the brain works, which is within the one-second delay range, where something I do is visible to you and you can respond to it in real time, which for the brain is in hundreds of milliseconds. So, Facebook does not fall into that category, is what I'm saying. Facebook is incredibly powerful and important, but it is not the same thing. You don't have presence. When you go on Facebook, it's not like walking into a bar. You don't log onto Facebook and go, "Ooh, all of these people around me!"
Industry Standard: Well, you can see at the bottom of the screen how many other people are online at the time.
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