Why the internet needs a new social platform for the consumer and business relationship?

This section will briefly explain the technology of the internet and the pros and cons of some of the technologies that help consumers have an online relationship with businesses. For the purpose of this paper Vocit has defined an “online relationship” of a consumer and business as being able to connect, stay connected, and grow through loyalty.
Over the years, businesses have used the internet to find direct and more convenient ways of communicating, exchanging assets, and interacting with their consumers. Today’s Internet allows for businesses and consumers to have this online relationship in many ways like: websites, search engines, chat rooms, email, social media, blogs, credit cards, ecommerce sites, reward programs, applications, client relation managers, and online data/asset storage and exchanges. These technologies and platforms are all purposeful, but from Vocit’s perspective struggle to really allow for a thriving online relationship between a consumer and business. Vocit believes this is mainly due to these platforms being built not for the sole purpose of allowing a consumer and business to connect, stay connected and grow through loyalty. They are built for a different purpose which may allow for one or two of the online relationship requirements, but not all three.
This paper will explain more about the history of these technologies and why Vocit is needed.
2.1.1 Internet
First, it is important to slightly understand how the internet works as it has opened up ways for computers to be able to communicate to other computers. Each computer connected to the internet has an IP address similar to a home address. The IP address is how other computers find that computer to allow for an exchange of messages or assets.
The messages or assets on one computer are converted from graphics, videos, or text to an electronic signal and then back to a graphic, video or text to the other computer. This exchange takes place through a computers protocol stack, phone lines, cable wires or wireless connections.
There are several phases that the electronic signal passes through before it reaches its end destination, but for this purpose the internet is best explained as that process of going from one computer to another computer. It is important to mention that most computers are connected to the internet through an Internet Service Provider or ISP, who are connected to the Network Service Providers (NSP), who are connected to Network Access Points (NAP’s) and Metropolitan Area Exchanges (MAE’s) or commonly known as Internet exchange points.
The other interesting factor of computers talking to other computers through the internet is people tell the computers what to do. It would be very difficult for a consumer or business to remember every IP Address in order for the computers to exchange information. The internet has a system called the Domain Name Service or DNS that keeps track of all computer names and their corresponding IP address. This allows for businesses and consumers to easily remember who they want to communicate with by remembering the domain name instead of the IP address.
As stated above a computer uses a system called a protocol stack to convert the data to an electronic signal. There are several protocols that are in play when computers communicate, but one of the major protocols is called the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP. This is the protocol that allows internet browsers or clients to communicate with web servers. As the web browser sends a request to the server to load a web page the server responds and the page is loaded on the browser.
Another popular protocol is called Simple Mail Transfer Protocol or SMTP. This is the basis of Email. There are several other web protocols like SSH, HTTPS, and POP3 that allow computers to communicate to other computers through the internet.
The internet was built for individual computers to be able to communicate to other computers in a decentralized manner. In 1979 two founders by the name of Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis created a system called Usenet which was one of the first online sharing communities. The concept was anyone would be able to run their own server and connect to other computers and start sending and receiving messages. Usenet was very slow due to the technology at that time, but a user would post a message on their server and then slowly it would get copied from one server to another until the entire network had the message.
For this paper the most notable aspect of Usenet was that it lacked a central server and dedicated administrator. Anyone could access Usenet if they had a server and no one person controlled it. It was the first internet and it was decentralized.
By 1989; 10 years later, the internet was connecting millions of computers together, but in a very slow and inefficient way. Sir Tim Berners-Lee a British computer scientist had a vision to be able to connect computers together more efficiently through an up-and-coming technology called hypertext. Hypertext connects web pages together with textual links to allow web pages that are written in HyperText Markup Language or HTML to be linked and cross referenced throughout the entire web. This was the emergence of The World Wide Web.
The invention of the World Wide Web offers some very important breakthroughs that Vocit sees necessary to continue the development of the internet. These 5 points that the world wide web offered to the public for free were taken from the World Wide Web Foundation
“https://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/”
“Decentralisation: No permission is needed from a central authority to post anything on the web, there is no central controlling node, and so no single point of failure … and no “kill switch”! This also implies freedom from indiscriminate censorship and surveillance”
“Non-discrimination: If I pay to connect to the internet with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or a greater quality of service, then we can both communicate at the same level. This principle of equity is also known as Net Neutrality.”
“Bottom-up design: Instead of code being written and controlled by a small group of experts, it was developed in full view of everyone, encouraging maximum participation and experimentation.”
“Universality: For anyone to be able to publish anything on the web, all the computers involved have to speak the same languages to each other, no matter what different hardware people are using; where they live; or what cultural and political beliefs they have. In this way, the web breaks down silos while still allowing diversity to flourish.”
“Consensus: For universal standards to work, everyone had to agree to use them. Tim and others achieved this consensus by giving everyone a say in creating the standards, through a transparent, participatory process at W3C.”
It is critical to note that the internet as we know it today has gone far away from this decentralized system. During the dot-com bubble businesses were inspired to bring the power of the internet to the world. Over time the internet became easier to use and moved from a decentralized small entity ownership to large centralized corporations controlling the internet in exchange for users’ data. This happened as it was easier to manage and make profits for the large corporations like Facebook, google, dropbox, whatsup, and twitter to name just a few.
As this history of the internet was very basic, it portrays a couple different technologies that this paper will explain more in depth as they relate to the consumer and business online relationship.
2.1.2 Web Sites
From the time the world wide web was developed until today, websites have allowed individual businesses to showcase their professionalism and legitimacy. The Website allows businesses to present their purpose and products to consumers on the internet with digital and multimedia pages that have text, graphics, animations, hyperlinks, audios and/or videos.
As computers communicated to each other via the internet they needed a standard operating langue. During the early days, websites were written strictly in HTML. The websites were very basic and HTML was designed for a text focused specification. HTML is very limited in the way that it tells the browser the design and format of how things should load onto the page. As websites moved from strictly academic based to consumer and business based the need for increased design, formatting, and ultimately a better user experience become more important.
As websites needed a language that could tell a browser how to format a page Hakon Wium Lie proposed a style language while working with Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. In 1994 Hakon Wiem Lie proposed Cascading Style Sheets or CSS that would separate the presentation from the content. This allowed for more flexibility and control of the presentation of the website.
Soon after HTML and CSS were created, the technology industry continued to push forward by creating languages that were server sided or back-end instead of client sided or front end. The front-end or client sided language is what runs on the user’s computer after the browser downloads the website. The backend or server side runs its language before the browser loads the website.
The most popular backend language is PHP which was developed in 1996 and continues to dominate the web while be utilized by about 80% of all websites. Other popular backend languages that allowed website to continue to develop are Python, Ruby, Node JS.
Another popular front-end language is called JavaScript which is an object-oriented language that allows interactive effects within the web browser. As the need for interactive and beautiful looking websites continued to grow the consumer and business online relationship continued to grow. A a website is like an online shop window with consumers walking by and looking through the window, everything they see tells them something about the shop, from the graphics to the ease of navigation. A good website is clear and up-to-date, tells the consumer what they need to know, guides them quickly and easily through the product range, makes it safe and secure for them to submit any payment, and provides contact details for questions and queries.
Doing business via the internet is very much about confidence and trust and a website should inspire both if it is to succeed. If done well, a website can provide a significant boost to sales. It can enlarge the potential market while keeping overheads down. To succeed, websites need to be kept alive and updated, backed by human contact and products and services that live up to their online claims. If used to its full potential, a website is a perfect way to build networks and relationships with consumers and other businesses.
The website technology has continued to grow over the last 30 years, but the functionality of websites has remained basically unchanged since they first appeared. Today’s websites, while somewhat attractive are certainly not the ideal marketing tool as a website is reliant on consumers being able to find and remember the website. Websites are also not social by design as a consumer must visit the website to receive its content.
It is also critical to make mention that the ability to create beautiful looking websites that work on all computer sizes has substantially gotten better. Website development is taught in almost every public school now, and in fact people do not even need an education in web development as companies like Wix, Square, and WordPress offer template-based websites that users can easily edit on their browser without even knowing web development languages.
This technology of easy website creation is critical for the success of Vocit as business owners need to spend their time and money on growing their business not developing a website. Businesses need to be able to customize their websites with ease and exactness. Vocit will allow the customizable websites to be social for the first time, hence the word social websites.
One of the key factors in the growth of website usage rests in the search technology improvements that have occurred over the last decade. To a large extent, Google is responsible for this improvement as their algorithms allow people to search for practically anything they desire online.
Next article is about Search Engines and Email and Article 3 is about Social Media and other applications.

Regards,
Vocit team.