Flow Architectures

The 10-Year Impact of the World Wide Flow

Note

This article assumes that fictional flow standards, the Event Metadata Protocol and the Event Subscription Interface—collectively known as the Internet Event Flow Suite—was introduced in 2021 and adopted by a number of tech companies. This created the platform by which Event Flow Protocol became standard tooling that sent and received data streams (including events).

The article purposely avoids talking about the specifics of how the Internet Event Flow Suite works. It notes that the Event Metadata Protocol (which is modeled on the CNCF Cloud Events Protocol) is an event data protocol, and that the Event Subscription Interface enables consumers to subscribe to streams (which is loosely based on today’s MQTT and NATS.io subscription application program interfaces [APIs]). Again, the article avoids discussing specifics, as they are not critical to the outcomes described here.

San Francisco (2034)—Ten years ago this month, the Internet Event Flow Suite, or IEFS, standard was introduced by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The world economy has undergone significant changes in the decade since. From powerful new online services to fundamental changes in the way business has been automated, the World Wide Flow (WWF) has had great impact—both good and bad—on the way our world works. We thought it would be fun to look at some of the incredible technologies and services enabled by the WWF, and pay tribute to the incredible rise of event-driven integration and shared data flows.

The WWF in Finance

Our financial system is based on the exchange of data (money) between parties engaged in various value-building activities. It is no surprise, then, that financial service companies were among the first to embrace IEFS, including the Event Metadata Protocol (EMP) and Event Subscription Interface (ESI). The credit card industry was quick to leverage IEFS to offer their customers real-time budget management, parental controls, and other time-sensitive services.

However, integrating real-time credit and debit card transaction data with new central banking reporting services was the beginning of what was to become the US government’s “Real-Time Economy” (RTE) initiative. The RTE program reports key economic data, including inflation, GDP, and purchasing trends every business day, and offers IEFS interfaces to enable subscribers to receive that data as soon as it is published. For example, the IEFS interfaces are used by banks to rapidly adjust their risk analysis for loans and investments across their portfolios. Interestingly, the Federal Reserve has reported that it intends to boost this reporting to hourly (for data four hours in arrears) as early as next year, and banks are eagerly anticipating the change.

The equities markets were also eager to take advantage of real-time flow standards. Though the stock and commodity markets were already using data flows to enable high-frequency trading and other automated trading programs, the introduction of standards for event data flows greatly reduced the cost of accessing and processing those streams. The rapidly decreasing cost of trading through software APIs combined with these flows resulted in the incredible rise of hobbyist trading, as well as the birth of a cadre of new financial services firms aimed at using artificial intelligence algorithms and other computational approaches to attempt to out-think the markets.

Most of these algorithms failed to maintain any kind of advantage over the markets, and a few were outright disastrous. For example, Komputrade, a two-employee startup based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was blamed for the Komputrade Crash of March 8, 2023, in which every US equity market was halted for an hour and a half due to the unusual activity the startup’s algorithms generated.

Most other hobbyist algorithms failed to exceed market averages, but a few made their inventors extremely wealthy. Neuroquity founder Imani Abioye famously became Africa’s richest woman when her commodity trading company was acquired by JPMorgan Chase in 2028 for $34 billion.

The WWF in Retail

The retail industry benefited from the WWF through a combination of reduced costs and increased visibility into the real-time state of the business. Initially, IEFS and EMP were used to standardize the exchange of real-time inventory data across retail supply chains. Within a few short years, any retailer could count on being able to receive inventory event flows from any supplier using the inventory processing system of their choice.

Such systems were soon consolidated into standard offerings, including those from SAP, Amazon, and Microsoft. New retail inventory startups also looked to fill niche needs in the industry, such as equipment rental and digital media licensing. One darling of Wall Street, RentAll, has become the go-to destination for renting nearly anything that is not real estate. Flow enabled RentAll to create a successful business model in which they didn’t own a single asset that they leased.

The influence of the WWF on retail didn’t stop with inventory management, however. The rise of mobile assistants (such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google Assistant) with in-store location tracking has created that now-ubiquitous personal shopping assistant (PSA) experience across the brick-and-mortar shopping world. Shoppers are now able to ask their phones where to find the item they are looking for, and their phones respond by guiding them to the exact spot where that item resides in the store. If the item is not available at the store, an online buying option is immediately presented. This is something most readers will have experienced by now.

Of course, the move toward home delivery has accelerated as online grocery stores have added the capability to generate detailed shopping lists based on events from your smart appliances and smart product packaging, plan optimal routes for delivery drivers based on traffic events, and collect product quality feedback through a number of unobtrusive channels. Many grocers also retrieve items related to your purchases, such as batteries for electronic goods or cocktail mixers for alcoholic drinks, which the delivery driver will make available for purchase when they deliver your order.

All of this is enabled by the real-time exchange of events from the customer’s mobile device and smart home combined with a memory of similar event streams in the past made available through the WWF.

The WWF in Transportation

Of course, the transportation industry has undergone a widespread revolution in the last 10 years thanks to a wide variety of innovative advances beyond the WWF. However, the standard mechanisms of the WWF enabled some critical infrastructure components to evolve faster than they may have otherwise, thanks to the ability for entrepreneurs to integrate their solutions cheaply and easily with the overall transportation technology ecosystem.

Automobile manufacturer Tesla delivered early innovations in the use of IEFS as the interface for battery management systems, both on the car and in the cloud. It wasn’t all that long ago that Tesla owners had to remember to connect their car to a charging port—either at home or at a Supercharger station—to recharge the car’s batteries. Tesla’s introduction of Tesla SelfCharging technology combined their self-driving mode with on-car battery monitoring software, charger connection robots at the charging stations, and a cloud service that provided details on nearby charger availability. All of this enables a Tesla car to find, travel to, and connect to a charger when it is most convenient for the owner, without the owner being present.

While the system was a little buggy at first, and allegedly caused some minor accidents, the technology is so trusted today that every other major car manufacturer has incorporated Tesla’s system or a similar system in their offerings. The huge influx of new cars using IEFS to communicate with charging stations has led to a massive growth in charging stations (and vendors) in the last five years.

The logistics industry has also made the most of the WWF, creating a network of shippers, customers, and load-brokering marketplaces that ensure efficient matching of shipped goods to available truck, train, ship, and airplane cargo space. LoadLeader, which was recently acquired by FedEx, established an entirely new class of partial-load shipping options by quickly matching available cargo to trucks with room to spare. The result was so efficient that moving companies began to accept commercial shipping loads, and commercial shippers found new business shipping storage modules from city to city.

The efficiency of this system has turned load scheduling into a utility service, and has led to new products from shippers such as FedEx and UPS. These services include such advancements as “ASAP” shipping, low-cost services for specialized handling (such as refrigeration), and the introduction of services for security sensitive payloads.

The WWF in Health Care

Initially, consumers saw the application of the WWF for health care through the lens of personal fitness tracking. Early adoption of IEFS was generally centered on connecting fitness devices, such as a Fitbit, to health-care tracking systems provided by the device vendors. However, in 2025, Kaiser Permanente (in partnership with electronic health records vendor Epic) utilized these IEFS streams to enable both customers and doctors to monitor and visualize the patient’s current health. Most other health-care systems soon followed their lead.

Changes in the health-care system led to rethinking patient record management. In the mid ’20s, the healthcare industry started moving to an independent personal recordkeeping model. Today, you, the patient, have more control over your data than ever before. IEFS made this change affordable by minimizing the cost of moving real-time data streams from hospital systems to modern independent personal health record providers (PHRP). Most PHRPs allow you to add additional streams (such as local pollution sensor data or food quality information) to your data streams in exchange for a detailed analysis of factors that may further affect your health from day to day.

Hospital and physician systems have found several additional innovative uses for the WWF. Emergency rooms quickly took advantage of streams offered by first responders and 911 call centers to automate parts of triage, resource planning, and space management. Most hospital and private practice medical supplies today are automatically ordered as required through “smart cabinet” technologies, and are even stocked by supply robots at some hospitals. CVS and Walgreens have contracted with several physician front office systems to determine local pharmacy demand based on real-time monitoring of prescriptions and medical orders.

Pharmaceutical companies are using these health-care streams to monitor the efficacy of drugs and to quickly detect individual patients that may have adverse reactions to their products. The investment in early warning systems for prescription drugs has reduced the number of accidental fatalities by 72% since 2022.

The pharmaceutical industry also heavily utilizes IEFS and the WWF to identify opportunities to apply their products in various diagnosis situations. While some doctors have reported that the constant marketing in their day-to-day jobs is distracting (or even dangerous), most diagnosis systems have reduced the “noise” in treatment recommendations, and include pharmaceutical recommendations as a part of an overall treatment plan template. These templates include personalized efficacy evaluations based on the personal health record data and up-to-date drug efficacy data. This greatly simplifies the challenges doctors face in determining a treatment plan once a diagnosis is made.

The WWF in Data Services

While the preceding industries have benefited from the WWF, most people will recognize that the examples shared were only a tiny fraction of the streams available to consumers, businesses, and institutions. Do you want to keep track of videos viewed by your teenager? There’s a stream for that. Care to track polling sentiment in real time during an election? There’s a stream for that. Want to understand the rate at which recycled steel is being reforged into new products? There’s a stream for that too.

In fact, sharing real-time data has become so cheap, there is a growing world of event streams that are considered critical to our national infrastructure. One great example of that is the National Weather Service’s free WeatherFlow streams, which are billed as the “up-to-the-minute weather service.” WeatherFlow coordinates data from over a million weather stations and other sensors located across the globe—including autonomous sailboats on all of the world’s oceans—to update global governments, businesses, and individuals around the world on conditions almost anywhere on the planet. The infrastructure the agency has assembled to achieve this involves combining those data sources with regional analysis centers that run on specialized IEFS networks. The WeatherFlow team claims they can add dozens of new analysis centers every day, if needed, using this architecture.

The biggest consumers of WeatherFlow are the transportation and logistics companies that are most affected when adverse weather conditions disrupt their business. Most of the major international air traffic control systems utilize WeatherFlow or an international competitor to assure safe but efficient routing. Consumer businesses have also discovered the value of this data, such as LiveTime Games, whose wildly successful Global Sleuth virtual reality game re-creates nearly exact current climatic conditions in each of the cities a player visits when solving a mystery.

Just about every Global 2000 company and government today is offering at least one data service on the WWF. And these organizations are also consuming these services to both make existing businesses and programs more efficient, and to create innovative new solutions to reach new markets.

It Hasn’t All Been Good…

Any evaluation of the positive impacts of the WWF on our society and economy has to acknowledge that there have been both good outcomes and severe challenges to public safety and social accord. While the democratization of real-time activity cannot be denied, as with all new technologies there have been some unanticipated negative effects, as well.

Early after the introduction of IEFS, dozens of startups were launched to disrupt existing, relatively inefficient businesses using the WWF. As we’ve seen, some of these businesses changed their industries for the better, but this often happened at the expense of employment at their larger competitors.

The WWF has had the greatest effect on clerical work—jobs in which the employee is provided a queue of tasks, performs some prescriptive activity on the items in that queue, and submits the finished work to the next queue in the process. The combination of machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence and the ready availability of activity streams has led to a sea change in the ways these business activities are automated.

Those lost jobs are part of what contributed to the recession of late 2026 (though they certainly weren’t the entire story). In the aftermath, the US federal government was among the many national governments that looked for ways to incentivize citizens to build the skills necessary to launch their own businesses, or to bring their skills to the gig economy. The mixed success of these programs has led to the rise of the new “flowtrepreneur” class, but recent government data shows they have done little to reduce the gap between the wealthy and the rest of the population.

Security has been another ongoing concern with the WWF. While protocols and services were quickly developed to encrypt WWF traffic by default—including the WWF dialtones offered by network providers such as AT&T and Verizon—hackers were quick to find a number of unique attack surfaces in IEFS applications.

“Man-in-the-middle” attacks were common in early IEFS implementations, and they delayed or disrupted the release of many early financial system applications. Hackers were able to redirect flow traffic to their own systems and capture or even modify data before forwarding it to its intended destination. Two things generally mitigated “man-in-the-middle” attacks: the revolutionary data provenance technology of technology giant ProviCorp (and its recently announced open source project, Inception), and the introduction of stronger authentication protocols in IEFS.

These days, trust in both the parties involved in an IEFS stream connection, and in the data being passed over that stream, is just assumed. That’s not to say the technology is infallible, as evidenced in the recent “nation-in-the-middle” scandals in which China, Russia, and the United States have accused each other of spying on both public and private secure streams.

The use of the WWF to transmit social media and community content events has also had a mixed history. Twitter’s move to adopt IEFS as its standard streaming interface six years ago was a seminal moment in the democratization of social media content, but it only made sense for the company to do so when IEFS advertising technologies were perfected. Today, it remains difficult to find a source of social media data that doesn’t require viewing ads or some form of subscription payment to avoid them.

The pornography industry’s use of IEFS was initially as a mechanism to notify subscribers of new content. However, in 2024 the FBI exposed a network of illegal pornography streams that transmitted images of children and other highly disturbing activity to individuals across the globe. While the FBI shut down that network, it is largely believed that new streams of these types are regularly created on the WWF. Unfortunately, the same technologies that secure streams for business and government can make these illicit streams difficult to detect. Law enforcement now has specialized technology teams to discover such offenders and prosecute them.

Finally, a retrospective such as this would be incomplete without acknowledging the impact of the WWF in government policy. As we noted earlier, the “nation-in-the-middle” scandal has exposed the extent that national governments may monitor flows they find valuable for national security. However, most nations have increased law enforcement on the internet through the WWF, including monitoring activities on websites, WWF sources, and even the network itself through secure data streams and data analytics technologies.

The WWF has also allowed politicians to rethink some of the core institutions of government. In the United States, for instance, the current debate is on whether we should replace income tax with a sales tax, as it is now easier to track each and every digital purchase through the WWF. The IRS has asked Congress for permission to run a federal sales tax prototype with a number of large retailers, though there is some controversy among retailers about this idea. Whether or not the idea is politically feasible, it is a sign of the power and breadth of the WWF that no one is really arguing the technical feasibility of the idea.

The Future of the WWF

So much has happened in the last 10 years, and yet it doesn’t take much to see that we are only in the early stages of WWF evolution. The rapid integration of industry has led to new opportunities that will change our world in dramatic ways.

Self-driving cars, smart infrastructure, integrated cities, and numerous other popular technology initiatives are forcing network providers to look closely at how their infrastructure can better support massive volumes of data streams. Most major network providers have promised to keep up with demand, though some continue to talk about tiered traffic pricing and specialized private networks for certain streams. Over the next decade, nations will have to decide how the WWF fits into network neutrality policies already in place.

However, innovation continues to drive the future of the WWF. New devices and technologies, new services based on new combinations of real-time data streams, even the increased use of space-based data sources, all show signs of influencing how internet-governing bodies such as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) evolve the core technologies of the WWF. The next decade promises to be at least as revolutionary as the last.