One thing that is really cool about living in the real world is serendipity: the ability to discover something that you were not looking for in the first place. How many times have you been looking for a book in a bookstore and finally leave the place with a book you never heard of before? (you buy books, right?)

A blind man

In the world wide web, this doesn’t exist. Apart from a few attempts to bring unexpected content in e-shops - aimed at having you spend more by cross-selling similar products - the web is just like the world as seen by a blind man. You go to where you want to, you sometimes get lost, but you rarely discover things you were not looking for.

Helpful neighbor

That’s why sites like digg, stumble upon, del.icio.us and brothers were born lately. To help you find something you are not looking for. But isn’t it ironic? You have to visit regularly a place to find things that you are not interested in in the first place. It’s just as if the blind man paid a neighbor to talk about the latest events in the neighborhood: Mr Smith just moved, a certain Miss Doe took his place, she seems well educated and nice.

That’s a very partial vision of things, and the blind man may never hear about this porn shop that just opened a few blocks away, and where he would love to go every once in a while, all that because his neighbor wouldn’t want to be seen there (by a blind man?).

Web vicinity

Back to the web. What if, every time you go to a site, you had to pass in front of some others? Not random sites, but a constant sequence of sites, depending on the place you’re at and the place your target is? When I say place, I think IP address. I’d love to see a widget which detects existing websites around the routers and proxies leading you to your target, and show each one of them briefly (one or two seconds) during the course of your request.

Of course, you would have to see quite often websites that you may not want to see, but it’s just like a mean neighbor that you have to greet when you cross his path, even if you know he beats his wife and watches TV all day long. And you know what? Life isn’t better when you only see nice things (that’s the big mistake of the Disney corp.). On the contrary, the more you see, the more you get to compare things with, and you vision of things becomes better established. In a word: the path to enlightenment.

It’s not that fun, but it’s good

Once again, it’s not about related sites, webrings or some other site deciding for you (according to user ratings or redactors review). It’s not about ad-paid fake randomness, and it’s not about giving you surprises. It is about recreating an environment, having time to discover something through repetition, and finding where you are in the giant map of the world wide web.

In the long run, if you really can’t stand your neighborhood, you can always move.

The web is overburdened with old sites, visited by nobody and victims of the pride of their creators, who don’t want to let them go. “It costs nothing”, they say, “and someone may want to read my opinion on carrot soup someday”.

What with the old ones in real life

In real life, the old ones are visited regularly by the members of their family, so that they don’t get forgotten. It’s like a child’s duty to pay a visit every once in a while to grandparents, old uncles and sick elderly aunt Tatiana. Until they die, and then you go to the funeral, gather with the nearest and dearest, cry a little, drink a lot, and start something else.

The same applies to the web

To avoid overpopulation, the web should follow the example given by the family traditions. Any forgotten website for more than, say, a year, should be declared sick, and its creators/members/users/trackbacks should be told about the situation. They could all meet in the website’s backyard on Sundays, to talk about the good old times when the website was still active, and about the Superbowl. That way, the website’s visits figures, although low, would keep at an acceptable level.

Then the web doctor would visit the old website and check its health. He would advise against useless attempts to rejuvenation, give a few coins to the host so that the website doesn’t get kicked out, check that it still looks acceptable on modern browsers… Web doctor could be a nice profession, and if it’s like in real life, it would pay well.

Web funerals

Anyway. After numerous years of brave resistance of the patient, the web doctor could declare it dead. He would call the relatives and ask them to organize the ceremony. A chat would be organized in a #funeral IRC channel, people would overdress and exchange memories of the website, only to say that it was better in the old times, nowadays everything gets corrupted. The creator would choose a picture of the website, and put it on a virtual grave at graveyard.com. Then the host would be informed to wipe out all data, the search indexes would be told to do the same, and the website would only live in our memories, for the best.

How would that change the web?

I see numerous advantages to the old websites dying.

• First of all, it leaves room for the youth. Yeah, altavista.com was a kick-ass site, but it’s time to start using a real search engine.

• Also, it forces us to keep the knowledge of the past, and is a good way to avoid repeating the same mistakes. The numerous web 2.0 sites coming out everyday have a strange aftertaste of the 00s Internet bubble (unreasonnable cash burn rate, ridiculous business potential).

• New sites respect the older ones, and don’t try to show off too much, even if they do better.

• The growth rate of the web… well, this will probably not get better.

• Your name can’t be found related to some old story anymore. You know, when you wrote in a webmaster forum that JavaScript is crap.

• Has-been website creators pass to something else (at last).

• Information gathered from websites isn’t outdated in fifty percent of the cases.

• Hard disk manufacturers don’t get rich so fast.

And most of all, my searches in Google would return relevant results.