What comprises the infrastructure of the web? A very narrow-minded answer would probably refer just to the networks and the server hardware, but obviously they are not enough to provide the experience that we know as the web. We need at least web server software, with which browsers communicate using standardized protocols. But is there still more to the infrastructure of the web?

According to Wikipedia article, infrastructure is “generally structural elements that provide the framework supporting an entire structure”. Browsers, servers, protocols and hardware comprise big part of the infrastructure, but I don’t think that they are yet enough. Internet would be completely different if it would lack search engines – and for most of us this means Google.

Google has practically become part of the web infrastructure. For a long time we used to consider search engines as search services, serving the function of finding something we wish to find in the web– very useful, but replaceable in their function by portals, directories, home pages and link lists.

Not any more. Google has become essential part of the way web is used, even replacing using domain names (and thus DNS, essential part of the infrastructure). It is an infrastructural service into which each and every service operating on the Internet has to connect – without working with Google you practically don’t exist.

I sketched the layers of the web infrastructure to the picture below. Google started as a service among others, but it has become something between service and the infrastructure.

I don’t think there are many other infrastructural services currently in the web, but there is one very strong candidate. If you use Google to find information, you use social networking service to connect to your friends and acquaintances. Previously this was done using several different services, such as email and instant messaging – but Facebook and other social networking services have made their services into a platforms containing and enabling everything needed to communicate with people we know. Partly they have already replaced email as a connection and communication tool.

Facebook is obviously the strongest candidate to take the role of infrastructural service in this field. There are not yet many really useful applications utilizing the platform provided by Facebook, but most probably there will be. If Facebook is able to keep its service open and free to outside developers and keep the people networked through it not too irritated, it may well be able to take a role as part of web infrastructure – a service to which each and every service which has anything to do with something social, will have to connect to.