Clay Shirky mulls whether the Web is dead

The transition from browsers and search engines to applications is hastened by the growing use of cell phones to access the Internet. Analysts say the majority of people will use mobile phones to access the Web within five years.  

Shirky said that on a cell phone, it is easier to open a restaurant-finding app than to open a browser and search for restaurants. 

Smart phones “don’t have the memory, don’t have the bandwidth, and frankly we don’t have the patience and the little thumbs necessary for using them that way,” he said. 

Users find applications helpful because they already know what people are looking for, Shirky said. 

“To sit down at a Web browser, open Google and search for something … it’s a lot of extra steps,” he said.

Apps are the new way of “marshaling the resources of the Internet,” he said. “It’s a more tightly designed experience.”

The question of whether “the Web is dead” was probed in a Wired cover piece this month.