The Sebastian

As described by the Urban Dictionary:

"Wilfing" - or surfing the web without any real purpose

"The tendency to wilf is more prevalent among men than women, the poll found. Gazing at a succession of pointless web pages also appeared to be the preserve of the young, with people aged 55 or over being three times less likely to browse absent-mindedly than those under 25.

"The time-consuming practice appears to have destructive effects too: a third of males admitted that wilfing has a damaging effect on their relationship with a partner." Guardian.co.uk

I still remember those old days when, after downloading for a while, the (now) ugly looking old site would come up with a silly tiling background an a flashing red and green button.

The web has evolved quite a bit since then. The browser, then the search engines, then the small dynamic pages, online newspapers and CMSs, forums, ads, wikis, blogs, google maps, digg, youtube, myspace, ... and the list goes on and on.

It seems like the web has matured and the collaboration tools and techniques available nowadays are enabling the developers to go faster and faster. It is not any more just a few guys here an there interchanging a few e-mails, it is armies of the most clever developers around the world developing together massive quantities of quality code and open source projects by leveraging on incredibly powerful and readily available, advanced tools (and processes). Ideas are also being shared and discussed by big and disperse groups faster and easier than ever before.

This would explain a better-than-linear evolution. In other words, is technology itself starting to enable quicker technology development and therefore accelerating its own advancement speed? Or... wait a second... that has always happened... I just think this time, on this narrow subject, it is a big acceleration rate that we are seing.