Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond, May 2008 Update

What’s Next on the Web? Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond Presented by: Richard MacManus, Editor, ReadWriteWeb

http://www.readwriteweb.com

Daily coverage of Web Technology news, trends & products

Lead blog in RWW Network; others are Last100 (digital lifestyle), AltSearchEngines (search), ReadWriteTalk (podcast show)

ReadWriteWeb 10th most popular blog in the world (ref: Technorati)

Founder & Editor: Richard MacManus

RWW team: Alex Iskold, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Josh Catone, Sarah Perez, Bernard Lunn, Corvida Raven, Steve O’Hear & Dan Langendorf (last100), Charles Knight (ASE), Sean Ammirati (RWT)

Web 2.0

Read/Write, two-way, anyone can be a publisher

Social Web

The term “Web 2.0” defines an era; like “Dot Com”

Search (Google, Alternative Search Engines)

Social Networks (MySpace, Facebook, OpenSocial)

Online Media (YouTube, Last.fm)

Content Aggregation / Syndication (Bloglines, Google Reader, Techmeme, Topix)

Mashups (Google Maps, Flickr, YouTube)

Image credit: catspyjamasnz

What’s Next? (Web 3.0)

Web Sites Become Web Services

“ Unstructured information will give way to structured information - paving the road to more intelligent computing.” ( Alex Iskold, ReadWriteWeb, Mar 07 )

Examples: Amazon E-Commerce API, del.icio.us API, Twitter API, Dapper, Yahoo! Pipes (scraping technologies)

Pages not center of Web now, Data & Services are

90% of Twitter activity happens through its API

Intelligent Web = data is getting smarter ( ref: Nova Spivack, Twine, Oct 07 )

Semantic Web

Filters / recommendations

Personalization

Beyond PC - mobile, IPTV, physical world integration

Semantic Web

Machines talking to machines

Making the Web more 'intelligent’

Tim Berners-Lee: computers "analyzing all the data on the Web‚ the content, links, and transactions between people and computers.”

Bottom Up = annotate, metadata, RDF!

Top Down = Simple

Image credit: dullhunk

Top-down:

Leverage existing web information

Apply specific, vertical semantic knowledge

Deliver the results as a consumer-centric web app

Semantic Apps

What is a Semantic App?

- Not necessarily W3C Semantic Web

An app that determines the meaning of text and other data, and then creates connections for users

Data portability and connectibility are keys (ref: Nova Spivack)

Example: Calais Reuters, the international business and financial news giant, launched an API called Open Calais in Feb 08. The API does a semantic markup on unstructured HTML documents - recognizing people, places, companies, and events. Ref: Reuters Wants The World To Be Tagged ; Alex Iskold, ReadWriteWeb, Feb 08

More Semantic Apps

Other Products to watch:

Twine

Freeset

Powerset

Talis

TrueKnowledge

AdaptiveBlue

TripIt

Spock

Quintura

Hakia

Ref: 10 Semantic Apps to Watch ; Richard MacManus,

ReadWriteWeb, Nov 07

Open Data

Data-driven Web

APIs, Portable data

Making data available on the Web via APIs, web services, open data standards

“ Data silos and walled gardens are a huge loss of opportunity and more people are figuring that out every day.” Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb, January 2008

Social Graph

Social networks slowly opening up: OpenSocial / Facebook Platform --> Social Graph --> Custom Social Networks?

Brad Fitzpatrick: "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related”; Ref: Brad Fitzpatrick, Aug 07

Alex Iskold: “…it will take a lot of work to get a working solution. The challenges are conceptual, technical, political, business and educational.”; Ref: Social Graph: Concepts and Issues; Alex Iskold, ReadWriteWeb, Sep 07

Tim Berners-Lee: Third main "level" of computer networks (Giant Global Graph): Internet --> Web --> Graph. Ref: RWW, Nov 07

Social Networking Arms Race

Google vs Facebook

Competing APIs: Google FriendConnect vs Facebook Connect

Google: MySpace, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Ning, Orkut

Facebook open sourcing its platform: any social network can implement Facebook applications

Ref: The Social Networking Arms Race, ReadWriteWeb, May 2008

Open Data: Products & Standards

Open Data Products

Google's Android mobile OS ; will be available for any phone manufacturer to install and build on top of

Data remix products ; e.g. Dapper, Yahoo Pipes

Mashups; e.g. Last.fm mashups use Audioscrobbler - "a massive database that tracks listening habits and calculates relationships and recommendations based on the music people listen to."

Lifestreaming apps (personal data aggregation and publishing); e.g. Tumblr, Jaiku, Onaswarm, MyBlogLog, FriendFeed Ref: Lifestreaming: a ReadWriteWeb Primer, Jan 08

Open Data Standards

Data portability - taking your data and friends from one site to another. Check out DataPortability.org

OpenID - portable identity; single sign-on

OpenSocial - Google initiative for social networks, enabling developers to create widgets with one set of code; MySpace a member, Facebook isn’t

APML - growing ‘Attention’ standard; Your Attention Data is all the information online about what you read, write, share and consume

Mobile Web

Portable

Location-aware

Integrated with physical world

Always on, always carried, built-in payment model, mobile phone is a creative tool at point of creative impulse, gets the most accurate audience info. (ref: Tomi Ahonen, Oct 07 )

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft all ramping up their Mobile Web efforts (e.g. Yahoo Go platform )

iPhone

Revolutionary Mobile Web UI (multi-touch)

Runs OS X, Safari = can view full websites in the browser on a mobile phone (not WAP!)

Desktop class applications

Rich HTML emails (competitor to Blackberry)

3G version rumored for June 08

Ref: Boom! iPhone Rocks Tech World, ReadWriteWeb, Jan 07

Mobile Web Apps

5 Essential Mobile Web Apps

As chosen by RWW readers, Nov 07:

Gmail Java app for mobile phone

Google Maps for Mobile

Opera Mini

Fring (VoIP, IM)

Shozu (send media to Web)

Twitter

Best Mobile Start-up , Crunchies Awards 2007

ReadWriteWeb’s Best Web LittleCo of 2007

Micro-blogging; mix between blogging and chatting; short updates, “140 characters or less”

Niche now, but potential for mainstream: “It is the coverage of news events and the continued emergence of citizen journalism that will push Twitter toward the mainstream this year.” Josh Catone, ReadWriteWeb, Jan 08

Recommendation Engines

Given a set of ratings for a particular user, along with those of the whole user base, come up with new items that this user will like

Personalization is driving it

4 Approaches:

Personalized recommendation - recommend things based on the individual's past behavior

Social recommendation - recommend things based on the past behavior of similar users

Item recommendation - recommend things based on the item itself

A combination of the three approaches above

Ref: Rethinking Recommendation Engines,Alex Iskold, ReadWriteWeb, Feb 08

Recommendation Engines - Examples

Amazon, Netflix, last.fm, Pandora, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us are some of the most popular

Last.fm music recommendation community sold to CBS for $280M & StumbleUpon sold to eBay for $75M; both in May ‘07

Ref: 10 Recommended Recommendation Engines, ReadWriteWeb, Feb 08

Strands

Invested $55 million so far

Aims to “to lead the social recommendation industry”

Currently music discovery and social networking site that covers the PC, mobile and physical worlds

Mission: “help people discover new things”

Working on open data formats for describing user taste data; may also use APML?

ReadWriteWeb Resources

What's Next on the Web: a ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008

2008 Web Predictions

10 Future Web Trends

10 More Future Web Trends

Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond, May 2008 Update

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