GoInstant makes it possible to share the web. That means two or more people can browse the web together, in real-time. I like to think of it like a “3rd web browser” that sits between the people who are sharing it.

Jevon MacDonald (co-founder & CEO) published a guest post on Joyent’s blog about the vision behind GoInstant. (I was happy to contribute to this as well.) The basic premise is this: the future of the web is shared.

We’re seeing it already with things like Turntable.fm, Chill, Google+ / Hangouts, etc. You can now watch videos online together, listen to music and more. Facebook’s getting into the game too; when a friend is listening to a song on Facebook (through Spotify), you’ll see that and can listen too.

The part that really makes sense to me is how we can visualize the web in evolutionary layers. First came the Information Web. Then the Commerce Web. Next we had the Broadcast Web, and then the Social Web. Each one came with massive innovation and massive change. Each one built on top of the other, and couldn’t have existed without its predecessors. And each one at the time seemed unlikely and crazy (Buying cars on eBay? Everyone as a publisher?), but now seems obvious and completely natural.

The Shared Web will be the same way. We’re seeing implementations of it, controlled use cases for collaboration (Google docs), entertainment, etc. Eventually, the entire web could be shareable, and sharing web experiences will be as natural as searching multiple times per day on Google, buying shoes, publishing Tumblr posts by the millions, tweeting and chatting. That’s the vision and future of GoInstant.

I hope you’ll take a look at Jevon’s post: The Dawn of the Completely Shared Web.