Internet Beat
Gloria R. Rivera
Internet Trends
After a prolonged pause, this column resumes. As always, everyone is welcome to contribute. The articles published in this column are posted at www.seguin.net, so anyone can use them.
It is interesting that although Internet usage has increased exponentially, the individual time spent browsing online has not increased at the same pace. It also seems interesting to know that users remain loyal to hosts and do not change their viewing habits.
Of interest is a study that finds that most users visit only 5 or 6 sites per session, and they return to them. This is contrary to expectations, as there has been explosive growth in web sites and the online information they provide.
Even though there has certainly been a great increase in the number of domains and increase in the number of sessions per person, the ratio of viewings per session has remained rather constant, between 5 and 6. Users revisit the same web sites frequently, 75% of the time they visit the same domain, but they do not visit the same pages.
Yet another study suggests that when redesigning a website, a factor to consider is that visitors do not like to go through the learning curve necessary to know where the needed information is located in the domains they visit and revisit, they like the information in the familiar place.
The usability experts’ advice is always to make websites simpler and simpler, to remember that users should not have to re-learn how to use a site. Another advice is to change content if necessary, but to keep the same urls, because the search engines have the url information in their database. Both pieces of advice are congruent with the findings of the previously mentioned study, which concludes that users revisit sites.
Web trends between 1999 and 2001 show that there have been significant changes taking place. The total minutes spent online in the United States has risen from 50 billion in March 1999 to 107 billion in March 2001. The number of companies controlling 60 percent of all minutes has been reduced from 110 in March 1999 to 14 in March 2001. This represents an 87 percent decrease.
The top three companies capturing 46.7 % of the total US home and work combined online minutes are: AOL/Time Warner network (http://www.aol.com ), the Microsoft sites and Yahoo!(www.yahoo.com). The popularity of AOL Instant Messenger accounts for the dominance of AOL. All companies are marketing heavily (I am sure your e-mail gets spam mail, unsolicited marketing mail, which is part of the aggressive marketing efforts by companies)
Another interesting trend taking place are the efforts to have the capability of tracking e-mail messages, specially for the secure delivery of electronic statements and bills, and for the use by businesses that are using e-mail for important communications. The goal is to ensure that the messages do not get stuck or to be able to determine where a message gets stuck. There is a group working towards this goal. It is called Internet Engineering Task Force IETF, and they will be requesting comments for their proposal, they would like to adopt a message tracking query protocol (MTQP) by the end of this year. http://www.ietf.org/ids.by.wg/msgtrk.html
This is a very interesting site about e-mail tracking and other Internet draft topics. An e-mail tracking abstract reads: “Customers buying enterprise [e-mail] message systems often ask: Can I track the messages? Message tracking is the ability to find out the path that a particular message has taken through a messaging system and the current routing status of that message. “
Someone else proposes marking a message for future tracking. “Message Tracking is expected to be used to determine the status of undelivered e-mail upon request. Tracking is used in conjunction with Delivery Status Notifications DSN and Message Disposition Notifications MDN; generally, a message tracking request will be issued only when a DSN or MDN has not been received within a reasonable timeout period.”
In time, we will be able to track the lost e-mail messages that we know were sent to us.
If you are interested in following the Current Internet-Drafts by very knowledgeable people, access http://www.ietf.org/1id-abstracts.html
This is a sample of the abstracts:
“It has become common for Internet mail users to have more than one account where mail is received, to access multiple accounts from the same machine, to access the same accounts from different machines, and to use multiple programs which require email account configuration information ……..”
“Storing URLs for later access has become common in Internet applications (for example, web browsers, FTP clients); these saved URLs have become known as bookmarks. It would be desirable to access one's bookmarks from multiple clients and multiple machines….”
Stay tuned!
For the October column, Chris Lykins will write about the www.seguingazette.com website.
To contribute to this column, contact Internet Beat column coordinator Gloria R. Rivera at webmaster@seguin.net . Internet Beat articles can be accessed from