Facebook is paying $US1bn to acquire the smartphone app company Instagram. Source: Supplied
AFTER Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, announced last week that his company was buying Instagram, a sweet little smartphone app that allows you to change the colours of your photographs before sharing them with friends, he sent the inventors a carrot cake cut into 13 slices - one for each of Instagram's employees.
It was a Silicon Valley version of the traditional "trophy" that celebrates a big deal like this and a sensible alternative to Instagram's first jokey demand: that Zuckerberg hand-deliver his price to their San Francisco office in dollar bills. As the final purchase price is $US1 billion ($963 million), that amount of cash would have weighed about 1000 tonnes and filled a fleet of lorries.
Last year, Zuckerberg could have bought Instagram for $US25m. At the beginning of this month, as its number of users snowballed with hipsters saturating snaps (typically of food, for some reason) in sepia, Instagram's market valuation topped $US500m. Its "value" doubled in a week of Silicon Valley bubble time.
The purchase of Instagram is significant, which is why Zuckerberg, who is many things, but never dumb, paid such an outrageous sum for a company employing a baker's dozen of savants and which has never turned a profit. It heralds nothing less than the impending demise of the world wide web. Or at least its increasing irrelevance.
For many the web has proven just too wild. Hunting for a gift for Mother's Day all too easily drops you into the dungeons of porn, which drives 25 per cent of all online searches. More icky still, there are the uncharted depths known as the "dark web".
The other big change is that people are using the internet on the move. Last year, 15 per cent of Google searches were carried out on mobile devices such as phones and tablets; this year it will be 30 per cent. In the mid-1990s, says Cisco, the computer firm, nearly half the traffic across the internet was on the web; now that is below 25 per cent and falling.
The surge has not been driven only by iPhones and iPads, but also by the apps - the dedicated little worker bee programs that do only one thing, whether it is to allow you to talk to friends through Skype, steal music, play with irritable avians or carry articles such as this. And all without HTTP.
Apps are light and nimble and cut their own dedicated path across the net. They are much faster than web searches, which like emails have slowed as firewalls multiply and demand exceeds capacity. This is not, as Wired magazine recently pointed out, a trivial distinction. When you have apps, who needs the web?
It means that consumers are trading up from the open-access web where anything goes to the safety of "walled gardens". It's like the closing of the American western frontier in the 1890s, when Mormons traded polygamy for statehood and the automobile started to frighten the horses. And fewer people got shot.
If a big user can gather all the most popular apps into one place, turn itself into a one-stop social media shopping centre on your iPhone or Android device, it is approaching monopolistic strength. And every business dreams of monopoly, or at least an oligarchy of the few big names, such as record companies or car builders.
The protean net has convulsed every few years since it was born in the 1960s, from Tim Berners-Lee's web work of the 80s to "browser wars" of the 90s to the more recent broadband hoggers such as iPlayer. This time around the trick is not, like Microsoft, to start sternly with business, but to follow the consumers to where they find their fun.
That is why the web-based Facebook was so eager to buy a rather silly app such as Instagram, with its 30 million fans; because it, like Google and Yahoo!, seeks to become your digital front room with all the social media you can swallow and with only one door - theirs.
After that, when we have all been corralled into the walled gardens tended by maybe half a dozen familiar names, they can "monetise" us with subscriptions and bump up the advertising revenues. There will come a point, maybe within five years, when new digital devices - on telephones, watches and in Google eyeglasses rather than clunky desktop PCs - will not include access to the web at all. Why bother? All traffic will be directed through sanitised apps - already Apple has banned anything mildly risque; others will compete to be even more scrupulous.
No more "accidental" searches - porn, already being exiled to a red light domain known as .xxx, may have to go back to shabby cinemas - and no more discoveries of unexpected wonders such as Fenton the dog chasing deer in Richmond Park, either.
Is it a price worth paying for what Americans routinely call "freedom"? For families and businesses: oh, yes. It gives parents and bosses more control over content. But for the curious, the creative, the unwashed, the wild at heart? The digital frontier is closing fast and it's time for the gunslingers to leave town. You will be missed.
The Sunday Times
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