AN OVERVIEW OF INTERNET APPLICATIONS

AN OVERVIEW OF INTERNET APPLICATIONS
To understand why the internet is being commercialized, we need to understand what internet applications people are interested in and are actively seeking. This section will provide an overview of the popular applications found on the internet. These applications serve as the inspiration and harbinger to the vision of electronic commerce on the I-way.
If the wires and cables of the telecommunications and cable industry are the e-commerce network foundation, the Internet applications may very well provide the language, culture, and etiquette for e-commerce. The internet, with origins completely outside the business world, is nonetheless important to commercial users because it represents in many the vision of the emerging global marketplace.
Two major types of information are likely to be founded on the internet; (1) public (or free) information (stock quotes, company annual reports, product and customer service information, government documents, works with expired copyrights, works in the public domain, and works that authors make available to the internet community on an experimental basis); and (2)fee-based information, access to which is billed (financial information, and electronic newspapers such as the San-Jose Mercury Times). For understandable reason, some types of information not likely to be founded on the internet, most notably, commercial works that are protected by copyright law. However this is too may change as better security and information protection methods become available (See Chapter 15).
To navigate through the wealth of information resources, internet users traditionally had to know cryptic operating system commands for UNIX, which is the dominant operating system on the internet. Today, sophisticated user interfaces are being developed that shield the end user from much of the complexity that was associated with the internet in general and with the UNIX operating system, in particular.
The internet provides a broad range of services to address a variety of user needs:
• Individual-to-group communications. Group conferencing. Tele-meeting services, with interactive multimedia and conferencing, negotiation, decision support systems; mailing list server, bulletin board/news group, directories / resources discovery services-for research collaboration and distance education (interactive tutorials) across institutional, state, and national boundaries
• Information transfer and delivery services. Text-based e-mail, multimedia e-mail. E-mail/fax interface e-mail/EDI interface; news groups/bulletin boards / directories; digital (packet) audio and video communications
• Information database. Access to citation, full-text database and “virtual” libraries containing both text and multimedia information. These data-bases are accessible using internet tools like Gopher, world wide web (WWW), file transfer, remote log-in, resource discovery services, and news-gathering agents
• Information processing services. Remote access to a variety of software programs including operations research (OR) tools, statistics, simulation and visualization tools.
• Resource-sharing services. Access to printer, fax machines, and other processing services that enable the utilization of spare capacity on underutilized machines.
Within these categories the most commonly used services and e-mail, bulletin boards, search and retrieval tools (Archie), and information publishing tools (Gopher and World Wide Web). These tools are described next.













Figure 3.12 screen shot of an e-mail program, PINE, developed at the university of Washington
Electronic-mail. The bulk of the traffic that crosses the internet and by far its most widely used service is interpersonal communication in the form of electronic mail. The ability to send messages in a few seconds to a computer anywhere in the world is a big reason for getting on and staying on the internet. E-mail is handled by a variety of programs with names like elm, pine, and eudoro that allow user to send and receive messages (see Fig. 3.12). as it becomes easy and inexpensive to access the internet, rather than setting up private systems, e-mail is being increasingly used for both internal and external corporate communication between enterprises and their customers, suppliers, and collaborators.
e-mail to fax. Other services (e-mail to fax and fax to e-mail) offer a variation of the e-mail theme, allowing users to send and receive a fax via e-mail. Some services are free. In general, it works in the following manner: the user sends an e-mail to a special address including the phone number of the recipient’s fax machine. A computer looks at the phone number and decides














Figure 3.13 Screenshot of a small subset of news groups accessible via command “rn”
Whether any of the participating fax machines cover the destination. If so, the message is routed to the appropriate location. Also, faxes can be sent to, multiple fax machines – a fax mail-out – or faxes and traditional e-mail can be combined. After the deed is done, the sender receives an e-mail containing the outcome, namely, success or failure to deliver. Certain limitations still apply. You cannot send a fax just anywhere with this service, only to those companies, institutions, and individuals that have linked a computer and fax modem to the network. This innovative use of the internet is an example of the digital convergence trend – in this case the two technologies being fac-simile and electronic mail.
Collaboration via bulletin boards. Another major source of the internet’s allure is that anyone can post and retrieve information in news groups, which are essentially global bulletin boards. One important source of information is the USENET service, a massive collection of topic-specific forums in which participants can send and receive news, debate issues, ask questions, and provide answers. Thousands of news groups are filled with experts discussing various aspects of their fields. Several discussion groups focus on software, hardware, medicine, politics, manufacturing, education, pets, movies sex, cooking, humor, and a host of other topics (See Fig. 3.13). In the figure, the comp. groups are computer groups, rec. groups are recreation – oriented groups, and alt. is usually reserved for groups that do not fit the traditional hierarchy.













Figure 3.14 A screen shot of a Gopher session
Information publishing and databases. Most on-line database information on the internet is free for the taking and the quantity is mind boggling. Highly Prized information that is freely accessible includes security and exchange commission (SEC) database containing valuable information on the health of companies, the NASDAQ stock exchange, the Federal Reserve and many other government agencies, esoteric information such as national weather service satellite photos, on-line searches of the largest library in the world – the library of congress catalog – and a host of other sources too numerous to list comprehensively. In addition to information, user can download soft – ware called freeware and shareware (for which a small amount is requested by the author). Although shareware applications are not very polished, they match the functionality of applications bought shrink-wrapped from the store at prices in the hundreds of dollars.
Several tool-Gopher / veronica, FTP/Archie, WWW-exist for accessing information. The Gopher, developed at the University of Minnesota, is an information organization method for facilitating easy search and access of files through menu like interfaces (See fig. 3.14). The Gopher program lists different host computers and the subject areas of information they contain. The user can select any one of these menu choices and will be transported to the submenus in that category. Gopher servers are available on many host machines around the world. Each version provides information about files on the machine it is on, as well as on other interconnected computers.
Another very popular tool for accessing information database is anonymous FTP (file transfer protocol), which allows the user to connect and download files from one computer to another computer. Figure 3.15 shows a typical log-in session for doing anonymous FTP. The user name is always “anonymous