This document summarizes key trends in web technology presented by Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb. It discusses the transition to Web 3.0 with a focus on structured data and services. Other trends covered include the semantic web, open data, social graphs, mobile web applications, and recommendation engines. Emerging technologies like microblogging and strans are also mentioned.

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

2. 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)

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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?

15. 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