By PRINCE OSUAGWU

Last Saturday marked the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web, www, becoming a publicly available service on the internet.

Although many people frequently use the terms web and internet interchangeably, the fact is that they are actually different services.

The twenty years journey of the world wide web today, started on August 6 1991, when a man known today as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, saying “the WWW project aims to allow all links to be made to any information anywhere.”

Before this time, the web was mainly used to allow physicists at the CERN physics laboratory to share data, news and documentation, but Berners-Lee’s post released the technology to the general public.

However, Lee’s initiative of making the web openly available and royalty free, quickly turned out to be a globally used service, closing its chapter of being the secret of the technologically minded.

Incidentally, the web has now become a daily part of modern life. Between the 90s and 2000s many businesses related to the dot-com has sprouted making the web a common market for all the countries of the world.

The contributions of sites such as Amazon, eBay and the likes, are making life easier and shopping quite simple. Yet the web keeps spreading tentacles, growing to be now included on most new phones and televisions.

Today, the ability to access email and other web services through mobile phones has proved unbelievably successful, with many now addicted to their smart phones. In 2008 statistics proved that mobile access to the web exceeded desktop-computer-based access for the first time.

Meanwhile a Professor at the Open University, Prof. John Domingue, according to Sky news, predicted the future of the web as that which will see a number of trends and influences.

It is also reported that over five billion people now on the web, are through mobile devices, particularly the smart devices like the smart phone, iPad, eReader among others, rather than the laptop.

Now, with Booming sales of tablets in 2011 which has been predicted to help drive a 57.8 percent increase in shipments of mobile broadband devices this decade, no body can stop the surge of the web.

A study by IHS, says that shipments of mobile broadband devices in 2011 are projected to climb to 157.9 million units, up from 100.1 million units in 2010.

The study also noted that aside from tablets, the mobile broadband segment includes devices such as notebook and netbook computers, as well as e-book readers.

This year’s growth rate for mobile broadband devices parallels the 57.4 percent expansion of 2010, and if the 2008 statistics on web growth through mobile devices is anything to rely on, it is only left to be imagined what surge businesses on the web would experience with the latest figures.

Even before tasking imaginations, the IHS study confirmed that tablets will represent the fastest-growing mobile broadband device this year with shipments projected to reach 58.9 million units, up 239.3 percent from 17.4 million in 2010.

It added that of the various ways to enable broadband access for consumer electronics devices, mobile hotspots and embedded chipsets are the fastest-growing methods, growing 25 to 50 percent faster than the overall market, making it draw the conclusion that by 2015, the majority of mobile broadband devices will use LTE, in line with consumer demand for faster speeds.

However, one problem that is envisaged with all these predictions in the future of the web is privacy. While this is already the case now with a number of sites getting worse as technology advances, it may not after all deny the upward movement the web is heading towards.