Future of web predicted to be small

Researchers at Hewlett Packard have announced what they see for the future of the internet – a village.

This is backed up by recent research that discovered that 40% of the time people spend on line is used to keep up with 20 domains.

It’ll come as no surprise that Facebook, Digg, MySpace and YouTube are a few of the most highly visited sites but the men who were being the research were shocked by how little of the internet was explored by the average user. Comparisons were made to village life – although we may have hundreds of ‘friends’ on social networking sites, we actually only keep in touch regularly with a few of those.

One of the senior fellows, Bernardo Huberman, said: “Things are starting to become intimate again. We went through this explosion, this illusion that the world is at my fingertips and I can reach anyone and everybody. But at the end of the day we notice that we actually interact with very few.”

Attention is scarce online – when once you could charge for certain information (for example, when someone was trying to organise a holiday) now that is easily accessible on the internet.

The main findings were that novelty was a key factor in the popularity of a site and another was popularity – meaning that everyone joined Facebook simply because everyone was joining Facebook.

Huberman hailed the work of Paris Hilton for being able to keep in the headlines, saying: “If I were to do something idiotic like stand on my head now on this table perhaps some of you might write about it. If I keep doing that every hour of every day of the week, most likely you won’t do it. So I have to invent new things to be on the news the way Paris Hilton is. That’s a huge talent in a sense.”

Things Paris has been in the headlines for: defending the Jonas brothers, announcing that she wants to duet with Britney Spears, getting a film about her cut down to one showing at the Toronto International Film Festival, the latest in her prison saga and for wearing a tree hugger T-shirt. Not bad for one day!