Manisha Verma ponders the "Splinternet":

The golden age of the Web - a unified aggregation of sites people accessed using standard or similarly formatted PCs and browsers, is being replaced slowly by new-age iPhones, Androids, Kindles, Tablets, and TVs connecting to the Web.

Derek Thompson follows up:

The splintering of the Internet provides challenges and opportunities (those fraternal twins of corporate ambiguity) for ad-based companies. The evolution is important because the "golden age of the Web" was golden for free content, but not for paid content. In the Splinternet, users are more willing to pay for content. Consider: one estimate put the Apple app economy at $2.4 billion per year in 2009. If Web advertising is failing to cover overhead on site accessed via laptop, then perhaps paid apps with revenue shared between the proprietary platform and the content-maker could offer a way out of the morass. On the other hand, the splintering incurs additional development costs. Rather than run the same portfolio of banner ads across your Web pages, developers have to build custom applications for each platform.

(Image via Thompson)