Breakpoint Book

Are Apps Killing the World Wide Web? Jeff Stibel Gives His Take to The Wall Street Journal

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The internet is evolving, but it’s also shrinking. Confused? Jeff Stibel explains how apps have killed the world wide web in this video with the Wall Street Journal. He also explains why this phenomena isn’t a bad thing and why our brains are actually identical to the internet (they’re shrinking, too!).

There’s more to learn about than just killer apps and our brains, though. Stibel covers everything from ant colonies to cat videos, and yes, it all makes perfect sense.

Photo Credit: Jason Howie, Flickr

How to Cope with What the Internet Does to Your Brain – by Jeff Stibel

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Would it surprise you to learn that our brains have been shrinking for the last 20,000 years? It’s true. In a major reversal from the two million years before that, our brains have actually been growing smaller. We’ve lost about a baseball sized amount of matter in a brain that’s not any bigger than a football. One reason for that is our bodies are smaller as well (except for maybe Shaq), but that only accounts for a small amount of the loss.

Read the full article on LinkedIn where it originally appeared.

The Logic Behind Facebook’s Recent Moves – By Jeff Stibel

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Recently, two Princeton graduate students released a study predicting the demise of Facebook by 2017, using concepts from epidemiology. No quicker had the media reported the results of the study than numerous rebuttals were posted. A few Facebook data scientists had great fun by posting their analyses showing that Princeton University would run out of students by 2021 and that the Earth would run out of air by 2060.

Read the whole article where is originally appeared.

Google Is Already in Our Nests – By Jeff Stibel

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Last month, Google bought Nest Labs, a company that makes smart home thermostats and smoke detectors. While a few applauded the acquisition (mostly geeks and tech investors), much of the reporting centered on privacy fears and predictions of doomsday advertising scenarios. It’s just the latest story exploiting our collective fear of the growing “internet of things” and distrust of the companies who leverage it.

Read the whole article where it originally appeared.

Photo Credit:plantronicsgermany, Flickr

The Future of Facebook and the Internet | Interview with Jeff Stibel

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Breakpoint author Jeff Stibel speaks with Rick Van Cise of KOMO radio about the how the world’s largest social network, Facebook, can take proactive measures to reach equilibrium after its breakpoint instead of following the likes of Friendster and Myspace into obscurity.

Furthermore, he notes that though the internet is not going anywhere, how we access and use it will. Our relationship with the internet has already begun to change, thanks largely to the popularity of apps, and will only continue to as technology progresses.

For reference, How Facebook Can Avoid a Slow, Painful Death is the Wired article mentioned during the interview.

150-WORD BOOK REVIEW – Breakpoint by Jeff Stibel

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The blurb that comes on the front cover of this book doesn’t augur well – ‘Why the web will implode, search will be obsolete, and everything else you need to know about technology is in your brain’.

It reminded me of a similar threat on the cover of Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance that this ‘book will change your life forever’. For once, or for twice in this case, both proclamations are very probably true.

Stibel’s book is powerful and full of facts for the layman and the passive expert about how the workings of the brain and the internet are alike. He loves ants a little too much when he speaks of colony power, but this book made my brain break.

Everything I need to know about technology may be in my brain, but it took me a couple of days to get over that. An excellent read and recommended

REVIEW: 8.5/10 (A VERY STRONG 8.5)

This review was written by Monty and originally appeared on Mob 76 Outlook

Breakpoint, book review: Is the internet really a brain? – Excerpt from ZDNet

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Our brains are shrinking, and this is a good thing. Having read, long ago, Stephen Jay Gould’s book The Mismeasure of Man, I’d argue it’s probably an irrelevant thing: the quality of brains is not effectively measured by their size. Otherwise, elephants would be running Congress and the shutdown wouldn’t have occurred.

But this is sort of Jeff Stibel’s point in Breakpoint (subtitled ‘Why the Web will Implode, Search will be Obsolete, and Everything Else you Need to Know about Technology is in Your Brain’): highly interconnected systems grow like crazy until they reach some inherently unsustainable size limit and then they break.

The original article appeared on ZDNet.

Breakpoint View: Entrepreneur Jeff Stibel on Why the Web Will Implode – Excerpt from Silicon Valley 411

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Screen Shot 2013-09-24 at 3.04.03 PMWhen Mark Zuckerberg announced an initiative to bring Internet access to the 2.5 billion people not yet connected, Jeff Stibel’s first thought was that Zuckerberg just put the Internet on a fast-track to implode.

But, he adds, that shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s been around for a while, because it’s happened before. Lots of times.

Stibel, a brain scientist and entrepreneur, is author of the evocatively titled bestseller Breakpoint: Why the Web Will Implode, Search Will Be Obsolete, and Everything Else You Need to Know About Technology Is in Your Brain. Stibel will discuss his book on Sept. 27 at the C2SV Technology Conference, an event sponsored by Metro.

The full article originally appeared on Silicon Valley 411.

Author interview – Jeff Stibel, ‘Breakpoint’ – An Excerpt from Engineering and Technology Magazine

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Screen Shot 2013-09-18 at 10.07.15 AMThere will come a point when the Internet will reach its physical limit and hit what author Jeff Stibel calls ‘breakpoint’. But that is not necessarily as catastrophic as it sounds.

We could be forgiven for thinking that the Internet is infinite. In scale it is certainly the biggest thing humans have ever invented, and there is no doubt, at least not in Jeff Stibel’s mind, that it has grown to “epic proportions”.

We’re used to reading that if an alien arrived on Earth it would probably assume that the Internet was the largest living organism on the planet, and yet the author of ‘Breakpoint’ says that it has a long way to go before it becomes as sophisticated as a human brain. This is because, while computers are very good at storing information and making calculations, they have nothing like the brain’s power to communicate. In fact, when we hook up two computers together the result is only a “rudimentary brain”.

Original article appeared on Engineering and Technology Magazine. Read the full article.

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