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David Weinberger's Intranet Buzz:

"DOES THE WEB SCALE?"

By David Weinberger
Editor, Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization

Alright class, repeat after me: The Web is about people connecting with other people. I know you all learned that in the second grade when we did our unit on "People Are the Bestest!" but it's a lesson we're in danger of forgetting, especially when media giants like Time Warner prove they don't know their ass-kissers from an AOL in the ground. You can say the Web is about "broadband" and broadcast $170 billion times, but we'll just route around you so we can talk with one another.

So, the Web is about conversations. And, as we say in The Cluetrain Manifesto (new subtitle: "Let's All Pitch in and Make It a Best Seller"), these conversations occur among the people of the market but also need to occur -- will occur -- among companies and their customers. It's easy to find easy examples -- companies that put up discussion boards, who allow their employees to answer email from customers, who don't require their employees to recite the corporate mission statement by heart when they tell someone what they do for a living.

But how do you scale conversations when you have 30 million people buying your dishwashing soap? We can hear the minions of Procter & Gamble saying:

Can't be done! You'd have to hire 100,000 employees just to keep the conversations going. Oh, sure, this "The Web is a conversation" trope sounds real good, like "Suppose they held a war and no one came" and Hands Across America (don't ask, young'uns, it's just too damn embarrassing), but what works at Woodstock won't work at P&G. Just how long has it been since you changed the water in your bong?

Now isn't the time to lose heart, comrades. The Web -- the World Wide Conversation -- will scale. We just don't know how yet. But that gap of unknowing is where all the fun is. Every last drop of it.

A person at a talk three of us Cluetrain authors gave in Boulder put it well. (Unfortunately, he didn't identify himself. If you're him, let me know!) He asked us to imagine explaining, before the free market existed, how it will work. How will the right number of eggs get to markets all over the world? How will this decentralized pricing mechanism ever succeed, with prices set "magically" by supply and demand? You're telling me to believe in some "invisible hand"? C'mon, get real! It might work in a village, but it'll never scale!

One might say the same thing about democracy: nice system for a village where everyone knows everyone else, but it'll never work nationally with, what, 260 million participants? Are you out of your mind? Get real!

Now, there's important truth in remembering that the free market and representative democracy haven't scaled in some important ways. The distribution of wealth and of access to resources is wildly imperfect, and to paraphrase Churchill, while representative democracy may be terrible, it's still the best system that large corporations can buy. Nevertheless, both systems have scaled beyond any reasonable expectation.

The Web, too, will scale. We just don't know how, yet. But it will scale for precisely the same reasons the other two systems scale: it is a large, decentralized system that is inventing itself. Centralized systems can't scale because the amount of effort required to keep them together increases at the rate of the growth of complexity, not the rate of growth of quantity. The Web is so decentralized that it can hardly fail to scale.

Some of the answer will undoubtedly come from technology. The ability of search engines to handle hundreds of millions of pages while remaining simple enough to be used by untutored info-rubes was unpredictable before the Web. But the Web is unleashing an unprecedented wave of group intelligence. So, we're likely to see advances in filtering, personalization, and information clustering.

At least as important, we will grow accustomed to using automated services. We don't want to have conversations about our dishwashing soap because, generally, we don't care about it. So, if we have a question, we will demand some form of automated system -- which may be as simple as a FAQ -- to get us what we need.

We'll also invent new types of conversations. Newsgroups were one such. Chat rooms are another. These are new to our culture, even if the technology is old in Internet terms. We can't predict what the conversations of the Web will look like as the Web scales. We can't predict it. We can only invent it.

We will.

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The Author

David Weinberger writes JOHO and is one of the Ringleaders of cluetrain.com, a manifesto of web ethics. He also provides strategic marketing consulting to high-tech companies, writes for several magazines (including Wired) and is a commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered." He was, as VP of Strategic Marketing, one of the shapers of Open Text's intranet strategy. David sits on several conference boards and is a member of AIIM's Emerging Technology Advisory Group. Reach him at self@evident.com.