Yahoo's Social Networking Strategy?

TechCrunch points to a Bear Stearns analyst presentation discussed in Barron's about Yahoo's need to develop a social networking strategy. Point blank, TechCrunch asks why hasn't Yahoo acquired a big social networking player yet? What are they waiting for?

Given Peck's valuations, it's time to stop and realize that soon it may be Facebook that would acquire Yahoo at some point. As I told AOL Money & Finance recently, "If Facebook does its branding right by losing its 'college' image, it could be the next Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) of social networking. Facebook has grown in popularity due to the company recently opening up participation from anyone (not just college students), so a lot of business owners and self-promoters are beginning to see success with it. Facebook's platform strategy also entailed opening their API, called F8 Platform, to outside developers. This makes Application development a very hot topic right now -- since companies are now given the ability to build their own programs and branded widgets that run within the Facebook community."

Point is, the future of Web 3.0 is increasingly about widgets, and Facebook's open integration and open API will make it a growing sticky and engaged site, as well as a gaming powerhouse and a web start page along the lines of Netvibes or Pageflakes.

In a reversal of roles, social networking sites may soon be asking themselves if they need to buy Yahoo to increase their online reach.

Source : http://prmachine.blogspot.com/2007/08/yahoos-social-networking-strategy.html

Face book - Good or Bad?

INTRODUCTION

Facebook, like much of the Internet, is a great innovation! It offers you an opportunity to interact with an extraordinarily expansive universe of new people. You can sculpt your on-line identity and learn more about how the Internet and its various programs work to create new relationships and communities. For the entrepreneurially minded, it might be an introduction into business as you think of how to "market" yourself. Individuals with particular social identities or hobbies, say as a Christian gay person or someone who likes a narrow range of military on-line games, can use it to find friends with common interests. Facebook is a cool tool.

People make the technology, not only in the fundamental sense of discovery and invention, but also in the sense that they make it happen and that they contour it in ways that reflect our basic humanity. Our basic humanity is for better or for worse, however. It is vulnerable to context, circumstance and interpretation. And so it is important to remember that Facebook is malleable and creates as many obligations as it does opportunities for expression. Below are five concepts to keep in mind when you use Facebook, if not other programs of personal creativity such as chat rooms or MySpace, on the Internet.

Note: Access to Facebook has changed since this article was published in April 2006; consult Facebook policy for the most current status. More information can also be found in the article A Wider World: Youth, Privacy, and Social Networking Technologies and the panel discussion Facing Facebook and Other Social Networking Technologies.

FIVE THINGS TO THINK ABOUT WHEN USING FACEBOOKI.

1) Invincibility

A long time ago, well before the advent of Facebook, there was a student at an it-shall-go-unnamed university who used a chat room to post some facts about the size of his penis. What a surprise when he went for his first job interview, all nicely tailored in a new suit and armed with a good G.P.A. He was rejected. Fortunate for him, there was a friendly alumnus on the search committee who told him the reason. The HR person on the hiring committee had looked him up on the Internet and found the boasting posting! Frantically, the student called the university officials asking them to remove it. Alas, they could not help him, because a commercial ISP was the domain of the posted information. In time, the student learned about the labyrinthine procedure in which he had to engage in order to have the posting removed. It never occurred to him that a relatively harmless boast could cause him so much trouble.

This example is just one of many. Other examples from around the country include students whose posted pictures of themselves partying bolstered the administration's case when the underage students were charged with alcohol abuse; a student who applied to be a resident advisor but was rejected because staff reviewing applications found material the student had posted on Facebook sites inappropriate; or the students reprimanded for extreme and possibly libelous statements that they made about a professor on their Facebook postings.

2) Caching
In the days before Google became the dominant search engine for the Internet, ISPs that sported chat rooms had policies regarding caching information. Nowadays, Google is the main corporate entity with which one deals when it comes to cached information. To date, Google has tended to be good about removing material within a certain number of days pursuant to a proper request. But let's take a step back and see what caching means.

Caching, in effect, means that if you post something on Facebook, let's say for a day or two, just to be funny or to make a point, even if you take it down or change it, it remains accessible to the rest of the world on the Internet anyway.

Take a moment to think about how you want to "brand" yourself on the Internet. Almost everyone is more complex of a person than a single label can explain, but for most people it takes time and effort, if not real friendship, to get to know people's complexities. Don't give people an excuse to think of you in a single dimensional way. Instead of trying just to fit into a single group, think about yourself as an interesting person with depth of personality and character. What you put out on Facebook about yourself should be an invitation to the rest of the world to get to know you better.

Then consider what it takes to get something removed from Google. You must go through their policy process1 for removing information from their caching technology. Not only is that a lot of bureaucracy, but also you should know that while Google is the dominant search engine on the Internet today, it might not be tomorrow. Moreover, other search engines operate currently on the Internet and so it is not just Google whom you might have to contact in order to remove a page.

3) CU IT Policy: Freedom: No monitoring the network for content
Cornell University is very proud of its policy against monitoring the network for content as a practice. That policy has put the university in good light not merely as a response to content industries that have requested that we monitor in order to enforce their intellectual property rights, but more important as a statement about its role in higher education as research university. Because Cornell is a private not for profit entity, it is not required to observe the First Amendment on free speech. No bother, because as research institution it prizes free inquiry, and free speech is a prerequisite to that exercise. Thus, for Cornell University, free speech is a part of our values as an important center for research, teaching and outreach internationally.

I am sure you have all heard that with freedom comes responsibility. Facebook is an excellent example of that adage. No official at Cornell is going to monitor your posting and make suggestions to you about it, good or bad, either way. Most entering freshmen are young adults and we treat you that way. It is time for you to be away from your families and make your own decisions about who you want to be. This is not because Cornell University does not care, its officials care deeply about you and your development. It is just that we all believe you are of an age and maturity that it is time you learned about freedom and responsibility for yourself. It also means, however, that it is up to you to set your own limits and create your own identity and to be responsible for the consequences, given that you live in the real world of rules, judicial discipline, employers with their own interests as well as other people who, like it or not, will make judgments about what they see.

4) CU IT Policy: Responsibility: No limiting authorized viewers from your site on Facebook or other Internet expressions of your identity.
Here is the responsibility part: no one is going to limit those people who are authorized to use the Internet or view Facebook postings from seeing what you post on-line. The Internet is an open, unlimited international community (that is why it is such an exciting innovation!). Facebook is open generally to .edu addresses and specifically to anyone with a Cornell NetID address. That authorization includes faculty and staff — as well as alumni. Such people might be members of your family, your parent's neighbors, the local bank manager where you want to get a loan for a new car, your insurance agent, an advertising industry in NYC with whom you might want a summer internship, or a law firm where you want to work your second summer of law school — anyone, world wide! Thus, if you are applying for a job as a resident advisor there is nothing keeping the residence hall staff from looking you up. Got JAed for alcohol abuse? The JA can look you up as well. Trying to get a deal on car insurance? Who knows, maybe that little Geico went to Cornell! Do you really want him seeing a photograph of you bombed out of your mind? In other words, there is nothing to keep just about anyone from looking you up. On Facebook, you have absolutely no expectation of privacy.

You also might want to take a moment and reflect on the physical safety of this tool when posting information about yourself. No expectation of privacy combined with the full range of humanity represented in these forums means that you may be exposing yourself to someone who may not have the same values, assumptions about appropriate behavior or may even have a mental defect or disease which could put you at risk as a victim of criminal behavior. Very likely you would not place a placard in the front of your house or dorm describing intimate details of your personal life, private sexual matters, detailed comings and goings or anything else that someone less careful and competent than you might construe as an invitation for communication or even harassment and stalking that could prove dangerous. Use physical space as your guide. What you wouldn't put on a poster on your dorm room door you might want to think two or three times about posting on-line.

5) The Law
Most of the time when we talk about Facebook it is a very individual matter. There is yet another angle to consider: the privacy of others. "Privacy" is a complicated matter in American law. It evokes everything from the right to family planning through Fourth Amendment search and seizure to torts, or civil rights, "to be let alone" in our person.


Watch what you say! If you post an alleged fact about someone that proves incorrect, you may be liable for damages under either defamation or libel. Moreover, if you post photographs or information about someone that can be construed to be an "invasion of their privacy" (say while they were sleeping in their own bed), or "false light" (say suggesting that they are of one sexual persuasion when they are of another), or "misappropriation of likeness" (a claim usually reserved for celebrities, but then again we have them here at Cornell too!) then you may be liable for a tort under the broad rubric of "privacy."

CONCLUSION

Facebook, along with much of the Internet, is a great innovation that allows users to express their humanity and an opportunity to create new communities. As such it represents a forum in which one can make choices about their identity, at least insofar as one chooses to represent themselves publicly. That freedom does not suggest that one can do so with impunity, however. Because we live in a society in which expression is judged in legal, policy and even personal ways, it is important to remember the consequences of that expression no matter how ephemeral or fun in the moment it might seem to be.

This essay offers some things to contemplate when using Facebook, all of which can be summed up easily in a "Golden Rule." Don't say anything about someone else that you would not want said about yourself. And be gentle with yourself too! What might seem fun or spontaneous at 18, given caching technologies, might prove to be a liability to an on-going sense of your identity over the longer course of history. Have fun and make productive use of these new, exciting technologies, but remember that technology does not absolve one of responsibility. Behind every device, behind every new program, behind every technology is a law, a social norm, a business practice that warrants thoughtful consideration.

By Tracy Mitrano, Director of IT Policy and Computer Policy & Law Program, Cornell University
Source: http://www.cit.cornell.edu/policy/memos/facebook.html

Face Book Critics

Facebook is being described as many things today, as pundits, marketers, social scientists and educators try to get a handle of what’s going on in this space. Is it the ‘”connective tissue,” or a “social graph,” a resume, or a utility?

New York Times Op-Ed writer Alice Mathias has a different take on all of this, dismissing it as an place that encourages performances and escapism –a time-sucking hangout of the “Fakebook Generation.” Here is how she describes it:

I’ve always thought of Facebook as online community theater. In costumes we customize in a backstage makeup room — the Edit Profile page, where we can add a few Favorite Books or touch up our About Me section — we deliver our lines on the very public stage of friends’ walls or photo albums. And because every time we join a network, post a link or make another friend it’s immediately made visible to others via the News Feed, every Facebook act is a soliloquy to our anonymous audience.

I know we instinctively want to challenge this notion. But wait. Mathias is not some angry pundit –she’s a grad student who’s grown up on the thing. She makes a solid point that’s worth addressing: Networks like FB, she says, make us miss other valuable parts of human interaction. “Dwelling online is a cowardly and utterly enjoyable alternative to real interaction.”

Source: http://hoipolloi.wordpress.com/2007/10/09/facebook-critic-calls-it-theater/

Intel® Web 2.0 Technology Development Kit (TDK)

On Jan 18 2007, at Mashup Camp 3 in Boston, CV Vick and Clayne Robison launched Intel Web 2.0 TDK, which provides royalty-free Javascript API, binary and source codes to allow you to create web applications by taking advantage of the mobile features on notebooks and UMPCs.

Create Web 2.0 application with the platform and the environment in mind. Leverage information about the platform's configuration and context to provide more expressive interactions and better user experience for your Web 2.0 applications, especially on mobile platforms where intermittent connectivity and limited power are common issues.

Imagine if your Web 2.0 application could be aware of the platform it is running on and its environment. It could, for example, leverage multi-core power to provide more immersive user interfaces, postpone certain tasks during low power situations, avoid network traffic over low bandwidth/high latency connections, etc.

The Intel® Web 2.0 Technology Development Kit (TDK) allows developers to learn about the platform's configuration, e.g. display, storage, processor, and the platform's context, e.g. bandwidth, connectivity, power and location, etc. within a browser using JavaScript.

The Intel® Web 2.0 TDK contains documentation and full source code (C++ and JavaScript) for IE 6/7. The code can be incorporated directly in your extensions or JavaScript libraries, and be redistributed royalty free.

Intel provides support through the online mobile software forums staffed by Intel software engineers to provide information on using the TDK for within Web 2.0 applications.

Highlights


Build Web 2.0 applications that respond gracefully to platform state changes such as power source changes, battery power levels and WiFi signal strength variations.
Detect changes in network connectivity and connection quality and gracefully handle intermittent connectivity
Support offline operation and handle low bandwidth power situations

What's in the Intel Web 2.0 TDK

Intel Web 2.0 TDK Developer Guide (PDF 68KB)
Source code and build scripts for a IE 6/7 browser extensions and a FireFox extensions
JavaScript-based API library
Sample applications
Known issues, bug fixes and work-arounds
Installation instructions
End user license

Key Features

Support for Windows XP* operating system.
Support IE6/7 and Firefox
Allows creation of user-defined callbacks in an object-oriented way to handle specific platform events.
Provides a high-level JavaScript API to get information about battery power states, network connectivity, and processor information, including number of cores.
Power information API
Connectivity information API
Storage information API
Bandwidth information API
Processor information API
Location information API
Download the free Intel Web 2.0 TDK today to enhance your Web 2.0 applications and deliver a better more expressive user experience.
And before you download and use Intel Web 2.0 TDK, please read and accept the license agreement for this web 2.0 TDK.

Pls follow this link for downoading the trial kit!http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/articles/eng/1026.htm

The return of the Web 2.0 Blog and the latest: A Web 2.0 book, Enterprise 2.0, The New New Internet, and much more

It's been an incredible year in 2007 as we've continued to make our way on the "2.0" journey that we embarked upon last year. I thought I'd re-inaugurate this blog with my return to regular posting and to catch up our colleagues, friends, and contacts in the industry with what's been going on with us lately. The good news, much of our current hard work is over and I'm going to be returning more to writing and speaking in the near future, though I'm always going to work closely with clients.

Building a dedicated business around helping organizations transform themselves to the business models of the 21st century has proven to be no minor task. Founding Hinchcliffe & Company as well as creating our enormously popular Web 2.0 University, growing a close-knit passionate team, crafting a set of quality consulting and education products that we believe in, all the while keeping customers happy has been an enormous effort, consuming virtually all of our time. However, we've begun to see the fruits of our labor by seeing our clients and partners succeed in applying Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 to invigorate themselves, grow, and innovate. Along the way we have been rewarded with an absolutely top-notch set of clients and valued industry contacts.

As to our future, the good news is that the key catchphrases of our business, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, seem to be as popular as ever. In fact, surprising as it seems for those of us who have been involved in them for the last few years, I believe that 2008 will be the first truly mainstream year for both of these of strategic new approaches to business and technology.

We have a lot of very exciting projects in the works that we'll announce over the next few months. I'm also pleased to go on record predicting that 2008 will be one of the most interesting years in the business as organizations begin to globally grapple in earnest with the disruptive business models of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 which we see advancing on virtually all industries and institutions today.

As I have in the past, I'm going to use this blog to cover mainstream Web 2.0 topics while using my ZDNet blog to focus specifically on enterprise applications of Web 2.0. Stay tuned.

What else have we been doing lately? Plenty as it turns out...


New Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 publications, education, events, and partnerships

1) A new Web 2.0 book. We've just help complete a major new book on the topic of Web 2.0 with Adobe's Duane Nickull and Redmonk's James Governor, due for publication from O'Reilly shortly. You can read James' take on it on his blog as well as Duane's recent blog overview of it.
2) A new Enterprise 2.0 course. Our Enterprise 2.0 Bootcamp has recently finished development after successful trials at major conferences such as Interop and the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. It will be offered shortly as part of Web 2.0 University. You can attend in locations around the world or it can be brought to your organization.

3) Refining the revolution. We recently posted our latest assessment of how to use Web 2.0 social platforms in the workplace in The State of Enterprise 2.0 on ZDNet.

4) A conference on Enterprise 2.0. I'm speaking at Avenue A Razorfish's Reinventing the Enterprise summit this Friday in Boston, MA. I'll be covering the latest topics on Enterprise 2.0 along with Jimmy.

5) A major event on Web 2.0 in Business. We are speaking at and sponsoring the East Coast's largest Web 2.0 conference, The New New Internet in Tyson's Corner, VA on November 1st, 2007. I'm hosting an armchair discussion with Salesforce.com's Peter Coffee and Amazon's Jeff Barr. There are still a few tickets left for this event, and you can use my special registration discount code at this link to save off the retail price of admission.


6) We help take Web 2.0 to Europe. Web 2.0 Expo Berlin is kicking off next month on November 5th. Mark the date, we'll be there to provide a half-day version of Web 2.0 University as a workshop on the first day. It was enormously popular at Web 2.0 Expo SF in April with over 600 people attending in a standing room only crowd. I'm also giving an extensively updated talk on the rise of Web widgets and new online distribution models which was also very popular at the last Expo.

7) Web 2.0 University(tm) is coming to DC. On November 16th, the world's leading learning event on Web 2.0 is coming to Washington, DC. Thousands of business leaders around the world have attended this strategic business event to rave reviews. Seating is limited to sign up now to make sure you're there. Web 2.0 University will also be given in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and San Francisco in the next few months.

8) We expand globally. We have recently licensed Web 2.0 University to one of the top consulting firms in Europe. Reply will exclusively deliver our leading courses courses to their clients and the general public in Italy and Germany. We've also established a partnership with LG CNS of Korea on bringing Web 2.0 consulting and education to Korea ( press release in Korean).

9) New faces. We've had some key new additions to our executive line-up. Denise Kalos and John Fandel have come over to us from O'Reilly Media and have deep experience with Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 solutions around consulting, education, and online communities that support Web 2.0 initiatives.
Source: Please do keep in touch in comments below, via Facebook, or contact directly at dion@hinchcliffeandco.com.

The 6 essential things you need to know about Google's OpenSocial

I've spent the last few days keeping track of the seemingly endless stream of news and blog coverage about Google's new OpenSocial model for social networking applications. OpenSocial has been described by some as Google's industry "chess move" to outmaneuver and corner Facebook.

This is fascinating set of developments to watch since Google's own growing social networking platform, Orkut, was eclipsed by Facebook in terms of overall traffic back in September.

Unless you've been hiding under a rock lately, you know that Facebook is presently the industry darling in social networking, having largely pushed MySpace off the industry's stage, as it seems to offer a more compelling model for social interaction to users overall. Just as importantly, Facebook also lets any other company that wants to join in party do so by building 3rd party Facebook applications, of which over 7,100 now exist, making Facebook increasingly rich in functionality and content by leveraging the creative capacity at the edge of the Web.

In the Web 2.0 era (and in all computing eras before), the central truism is that a platform beats an application every time. This applies here with a vengeance and MySpace and other social networking sites have suddenly rushed to embrace openness and 3rd party widgets and gadgets to such an extent that MySpace has thrown in with Google on OpenSocial.

So the damage is done and in the fickle world of online social networking, Facebook currently has the upper hand. This demonstrates yet again a powerful but counterintuitive aspect of networked software: the more control you give away, the more value you can get back.

However, much of the blogging around OpenSocial would have you believe that has Google now trounced the competition with a strategic move that counters Facebook's open SNS platform move with an open SNS application model that can work everywhere else too. At least, that is, the other social networking sites that support OpenSocial's API.

But as Don Dodge noted in his OpenSocial coverage this isn't going to stop developers from building apps natively for Facebook any time soon and will have little practical effect on existing Facebook users for quite a while. Not to mention the rest of the Web, since not even a single real OpenSocial application yet exists.

That's not to say however that OpenSocial doesn't have its advantages. Joe Kraus, a Director of Product Management at Google, wrote today on the Official Google blog that OpenSocial will make life easier for developers "because it makes it easier for them to focus on making their web apps better; they get lots of distribution with a lot less work. It's good for websites, because they can tap into the creativity of the largest possible developer community (and no longer have to compete with one another for developer attention). And finally, it's good for users, because they get more applications in more places."

So, despite the early beginnings, does OpenSocial make sense from the production side of social networking applications? It still remains to be seen, despite the enormous amount of early partner support for it, if the consumption side in terms of these kinds of applications really generates value. Most of the applications on Facebook provide so little actual utility that they are barely worth installing. While making these mini-apps portable between social networking sites is convenient -- and it probably will appreciably increase the total number of available social applications -- it's really people and the network effect they represent for a given social networking site that makes the site truly valuable. In other words, if my friends and colleagues aren't on the social networking site I use, then that site is of little or no use to me, even if I can take my apps with me.

It'll be interesting to see what ultimately happens to OpenSocial. I suspect it will actually see fairly good uptake since it's based on the highly successful Google Gadgets model, for which over 23,000 different Gadgets presently exist. But will it change the playing field in the social networking wars? Probably not as much as a federated social identity would. Federated social identity could potentially let you exist and participate simultaneously in all the social networks you wanted to at once using one set of social metadata you control. That's probably a lot closer to the Facebook killer that so many are looking for and things like openid are bring that world closer to reality all the time.

In the meantime, here's the six things you absolutely have to know about OpenSocial to have an opinion about it:

6 Essential Things You Need To Know About Google's OpenSocial

1. OpenSocial only offers the lowest common denominator, not the full richness of each social networking platform. While application developers can create apps using the OpenSocial model and they will be able to run on dozens of different social networking sites, OpenSocial can't help you leverage the full capabilities of the site it runs on. Social networking site APIs aren't anywhere as complex as say, the Windows APIs, but we've seen this before with platforms such as Java, where the development model can't support the full capabilities of the underlying operating systems. Like Java, write once, test everywhere is the name of the game for OpenSocial and while economies in this model certainly exist, a single universal widget model tends to discourage product differentiation in favor of broad distribution. This means to get at the full richness of the underlying platform and create a competitive product, you have do custom coding for that site and you've just broken the reason to use a common application model.

2. OpenSocial is largely based on open standards and there's only minor developer lock-in. Overall, it actually seems pretty safe to do a lot of your social application development using OpenSocial. It uses the essential browser open standards of XML, HTML, Javascript, and the data formats are all ATOM and RESTful/WOA. You can even host Flash content and functionality inside the OpenSocial application as long as you don't break the rules. Finally, most of the really popular development platforms, including Ruby on Rails, can support the server-side API. All in all, Google seems to have stuck to a fairly open and non-proprietary model including avoiding crufty proprietary markup. OpenSocial documentation and sample code all uses the Creative Commons licensing and Apache 2.0, and the OpenSocial FAQ says everything will be open sourced at some point. Kudos for this open stance, Google.

3. OpenSocial is a real doorway to social networking data portability as well as potential security holes. A site that supports OpenSocial applications provides that application with all the people data in that user's account. Their own info as well as their friends. This can be used to export user's social data from sites that don't support themselves directly and it could even be used to knit together a person's social data across other social sites that support OpenSocial, with properly designed 3rd party apps. But it also opens the door to security problems and expect to see that security, cross-site scripting, and exploits become an issue over time, as it always does when platforms open up to the rest of the world. Update: Michael Arrington has reported that the first OpenSocial app has now been hacked.

4. OpenSocial is simple and straightforward but also capable of developing full-blown, rich Internet applications. And without server-side infrastructure. Developers can simply innovate with a few bits of markup and procedural code and drop it into the OpenSocial ecosystem and leverage the massive audiences and scalable infrastructure of OpenSocial compliant sites. OpenSocial even supports powerful interactive Web user interface models like Ajax explicitly. Like we saw last year, with the new productivity-oriented Web development platforms, this will change what's possible while also creating mountains and mountains of relatively useless, uninteresting apps amongst a few real gems. But a lot more wildflowers will bloom on the OpenSocial landscape and some will likely rise up and show us how useful these applications can be.

5. OpenSocial is from Google and excessive philanthropy should not be expected. Google almost certainly thinks OpenSocial will ultimately be very good for Google, if not outright bad for a few others (probably Facebook). While the openness is encouraging, if OpenSocial is successful, Google has a plan to make that success work for it. Those plans may not always be to the benefit of everyone playing under the OpenSocial umbrella. User beware.

6. A new era in competency in social software is being ushered in by models like OpenSocial. A lot more social applications are being created because of open social platforms have become so popular. But building successful social applications is a lot different prospect from building traditional business and consumer applications. Expect that many developers and software designers will fail to build applications successfully until we learn that a different focus and way of thinking is required. I've written before about the basic rules for building good social applications, but these are just the beginning. Understanding people is the key to building effective social networking applications, and that is often the hardest thing for us in an industry obsessed with connecting with each other via 1s and 0s.

Source: http://web2.socialcomputingmagazine.com/
Put your ideas in comments below or drop a line at dion@hinchcliffeandco.com.

Web 2.0 = prostituting social interaction for fun and profit?

Nick Carr has a biting post on Facebook's search for monetization. According to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, the future of Facebook may well be to monetize social interactions. I can't wait. What could be better than to have my interactions with "friends" I can't be bothered to hang out with in real life bought and sold?

Nick writes:

I like the way that Zuckerberg considers "media" and "advertising" to be synonymous. It cuts through the bull[potty]. It simplifies. Get over your MSM hangups, granddads. Editorial is advertorial. The medium is the message from our sponsor.

Marketing is conversational, says Zuckerberg, and advertising is social. There is no intimacy that is not a branding opportunity, no friendship that can't be monetized, no kiss that doesn't carry an exchange of value....The social graph, it turns out, is a platform for social graft....

Facebook, which distinguished itself by being the anti-MySpace, is now determined to out-MySpace MySpace. It's a nifty system: First you get your users to entrust their personal data to you, and then you not only sell that data to advertisers but you get the users to be the vector for the ads. And what do the users get in return? An animated Sprite Sips character to interact with.

Surely there's more to Web 2.0 than whoring social data for profit. Right?

Right???

A small plea to Web 2.0 wannabes: please find some other way to make money than to shove ads down my throat. I've got Adblock Plus. I don't see them, anyway, and I don't want invasive forms of advertising to take over standard advertising.

By Matt Assay
Source: http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9812701-16.html

Beyond Web 2.0: The social web or the semantic web ?

Synopsis:

Beyond Web 2.0 is still more Web 2.0(for now). The full impact of Web 2.0 will be felt only in 2008 and beyond. The Semantic web is not the future of Web20. The full impact of Web 20 itself has yet to be felt because Web 20 technologies like cloud computing and 'umbrella social networks' (i.e. social networks encompassing the personal web, enterprise and the mobile web and incorporating presence) are still emerging and will gather momentum in 2008 and beyond.

Introduction

It seems ironic to talk about ‘beyond Web 2.0’ almost a week away from the Berlin Web 2.0 expo (where I am speaking).

Extending the ‘2.0’ numbering notation, we could naturally think of Web 3.0.

Much has been already said about Web 3.0 – most of it self serving.

Nova Spivack and Jason Calacanis have each attempted to define Web 3.0 corresponding to their respective companies (Radar networks and Mahalo)

In a world of hyper connectivity and information sharing – such definitions don’t go very far because of their inherent limitations based on their proponent’s businesses. So, I won’t go into those in detail. You can read more about these definitions HERE

Even Tim Berners shrugs at the term Web 2.0 but ironically does not hesitate in attempting to speak of Web 3.0 as a form of Semantic web. Of course, the semantic web is defined in an article from Tim Berners Lee himself as early as 2001 in the Scientific American magazine (The Semantic Web A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities By Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila)

But to understand ‘beyond Web 2.0’ – we have to appreciate a bit about why Web 2.0 took off as much as it did .. and why so many people did(do!) not get it.

Social software and social computing

In defining the Web 2.0 paradigm, Tim O Reilly’s genius lies in taking computing along the social domain and in laying the intellectual foundations of a new class of software i.e. social software.

Even before the seven principles of Web 2.0 were postulated by Tim O Reilly, we intuitively accepted the social aspects of the Web(for example Wikis existed before that time and were created by Ward Cunningham). However, Web 2.0 brought all these ideas together and provided us a common lexicon / framework to discuss these terms

Critically, Web 2.0 comes under the umbrella of social computing/social software. The term Social software is normally applied to a range of web-enabled software programs that allow users to interact, share, and meet other users. (Adapted from wikipedia definition of social software)

One might view ‘social software’ as a contradiction in terms. Traditionally software is almost ‘antisocial’ (i.e. logical – with little or no human interaction)

Consequently, many people from a programming background find the idea of social software as ‘marketing driven hype’. And some from marketing – do indeed hype it as the next big thing.

However, that should not take us away from the basic merits of the Web 2.0 definition as defined by the seven principles of Web 2.0 and a new class of software that is underpinned by Web 2.0 principles like harnessing collective intelligence, the web as a platform and so on.

Beyond Web 2.0

If we recap the title of Tim Berners Lee’s article on the semantic web, it says : A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers

So, to me; it is all about meaningful to computers(semantic web)? OR meaningful to people(social software/social web)

Of course, they are not mutually exclusive .. hence they will coexist – but the emphasis on each is important. The semantic web is oriented to a new form for content that makes sense to machines. The social web(which includes Web 2.0 ) relates to web enabled software that facilitates communication between people.

The paths of machines and men .. are both divergent and coexisting.

So, let’s start with the machines(the semantic web)

The semantic Web

The end goal of the semantic web is to extract meaning from data. Hence, content should be machine readable, machine interpretable(the computer must make sense of it) and machine actionable. In its ultimate incarnation, it leads to the rarified world of science fiction bots negotiating deals on behalf of their creators.

How practical is all this?

Not very – in my view.

Avatars and bots aside, the more basic question is: Who will add the semantics(structure) to the semantic web?

The semantic web needs someone to do the semantics before it becomes truly useful. This is a chicken and egg situation – to make the semantic web useful, you need content to be tagged – but who would tag the content in the first place(and why)?

Semantics for a specific vertical are relatively easy. Semantics for 'Joe public'(consumers) are another matter entirely.

And to be really useful; the semantics must be for all .. And this is where almost all efforts led by specific companies may fail because the web cannot be expected to cede control to a company - it must be an open standard. And even if islands of semantics evolve(one for pharmaceuticals, one for automotive and so on), they may be just that - islands ... Islands of semantic content are useful – but do not translate into a semantic web.

Ironically, the best solution to the semantic web ‘chicken and egg’ problem(aka who will create the semantics for the semantic web) comes from Web 2.0(social web). Web 2.0 ‘works’ because it solves this very fundamental chicken and egg problem by getting the users to do the semantics in return for some benefits(storing and sharing pictures for example as in flickr). Thus, it provides a ‘lite’ solution to the semantic web problem.

This illustrates the limitations of taking a software only approach of the semantic web. If you ignore the social aspects of the Web, then software can take you only so far ..

Web 2.0

Before we proceed with this section, A quick note: I do not consider either Mobile Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 as ‘beyond’ Web 2.0 because they are sub memes of Web 2.0 i.e. extend the basic idea of Web 2.0 along specific dimensions.

Unlike the semantic Web, Web 2.0 addresses a completely different problem domain – that of social computing.

Thus, if we consider web 20 as primarily a manifestation of the social web, then it follows that the idea of 'beyond web 20' has to address the evolution of the social web (and not the semantic web)

In my view, the two Web 2.0 concepts that pertain to the evolution of the social web are
a) Social network as a 'meta/umbrella' layer above the personal, enterprise and the mobile web
And
b) Cloud computing

The full impact of both is yet to be felt.

The first is a relatively simple idea – but very disruptive ..

It can be summarised as ‘facebook(or similar) as your primary interface to the Web’.

The idea is - we "log in' to a single profile on our social network. The resultant social network then becomes an ‘umbrella’ network encompassing your Web, Mobile Web and even the Enterprise Web. The concept of umbrella social networks becomes even more powerful when presence is added to the mix.

This is a concern to many including Google. Many people no longer use email because email is replaced by facebook messages. If your entire web experience is replaced by facebook and the advertising for facebook is exclusively from Microsoft .. this is clearly a threat for Google(and a master move on behalf of Microsoft). So, already we are seeing some moves in this direction – and one can expect some response from Google to this.

(Note: I can't find the reference but JP Rangaswami had spoken of a similar idea – which I call ‘umbrella social networks’ - in one of his blogs. If I find the blog, I shall link it.)

To really work, this idea needs a fine grained privacy control and an open social network. But it is not so strange to think that our entire web experience may be driven from a facebook(or similar) profile. Facebook is already courting the enterprise

Also, in the article 15 reasons Facebook may be worth $15bn, here are some insights ..

>>>
7. Facebook is the new web: The decision to open up the network to outside developers turned Facebook into a destination for many uses, like messaging, photos and video. Of course, as Facebook is on the web it could never really be the new web.
11. Facebook messaging is the new e-mail. Everyone feels stressed from a deluge of e-mail from unwanted people and companies. But Facebook messages are always from friends.
12. Facebook's "status updates" have become the easiest way to let friends know what you are doing and how you are feeling at any given moment.
<<<

Related to the idea of umbrella social networks is the idea of ‘Cloud computing’ – I have spoken of cloud computing many times on the OpenGardens blog for instance : Mobile Ajax- more than a pretty face and Cloud computing in the context of enterprise 2.0 . The idea has many adherents – especially Nokia and Google.

It is related to the idea of umbrella social networks since to have a seamless experience between the Web, the Mobile Web and the Enterprise; the data has to ideally reside in the ‘Cloud’.

So, the core idea is of this blog(and the evolution of Web 2.0) can be summarised as:
Cloud + a social network user interface to the cloud(where the cloud spans the Web, the Mobile Web and the Enterprise).

Eric Schmidt also refers to cloud computing as the future of applications with applications having characteristics like : being pieced together, small, data is in the cloud, run on any device PC or mobile phone, fast, customizable, distributed virally(social networks, email etc).

Conclusion

Let me recap the synopsis as the conclusion ..

Beyond Web 2.0 is still more Web 2.0(for now). The full impact of Web 2.0 will be felt only in 2008 and beyond. The Semantic web is not the future of web20. Instead, the full impact of web 20 itself has yet to be felt because web 20 technologies like cloud computing and 'umbrella social networks' (i.e. social networks encompassing the personal web, enterprise and the mobile web and incorporating presence) are still emerging and will gather momentum in 2008 and beyond.

Source: http://opengardensblog.futuretext.com/archives/2007/10/beyond_web_20_t.html

Is Web 3.0 is Coming?

Is Web 3.0 yet another buzz word, or is it a real turnaround in our industry?

Web 1.0 was the good old web of the 1990s. In those times, all client-side changes were the result of a server round-trip. The Internet was ramping up in popularity.

Web 2.0 has been a little more than just a technological evolution. The staple of Web 2.0 has been the emergence of social media (Internet users creating most of the content), powered by mature technologies (DHTML, Ajax) on somewhat stable web browsers.

Web 3.0 is not a revolution either. It is yet another technological evolution destined to provide users with an even better experience, both online and offline. Web 3.0 will lead to the blurring of that artificial wall between the web browser and the desktop, providing a full — but secure — integration with devices and services exposed by the operating system.

Web 3.0 is just starting. Look around you and you’ll see that Web 3.0 technologies are slowly cropping up everywhere on the web. Google Gears, one of the first Web 3.0 technologies, allows you to build web applications that can work offline. Thanks to Google Gears, applications such as Remember The Milk, an online to-do list and task management system, can now work offline. The Adobe Flash player already allows application developers limited access to the webcam and the microphone. Soon, we’ll also be able to drag and drop files from the desktop to a web browser (see this Java Upload Applet for an example using the Java technology)

Another aspect of Web 3.0 is the use of stunning graphics, smooth animations, high definition audio and video, 3D, etc. and all of this inside a web browser!

At first, Web 3.0 features will be available using plugins (Google Gears, Java, Flash, Silverlight, ActiveX and Firefox extensions, etc.) But slowly, we may start seeing browser vendors integrating them into their browsers, followed by some level of standardization. The HTML 5 Working Draft seems to be going in the right direction.

These are exciting times for web front-end engineers! The risk of fragmentation, inevitable with such ground-breaking technologies, will hopefully be mitigated in the short term by the use of JavaScript toolkits. The Dojo Toolkit, for example, has already started making Web 3.0 features available (see dojo.gfx and the Dojo Offline Toolkit) Hopefully, all the other major frameworks will follow suite so we can all start building cool new applications that wow our users!


Source: http://www.julienlecomte.net/blog/

Web 2.0 Crack Start to Show

SAN FRANCISCO -- No one may be able to agree on what Web 2.0 means, but the idea of a new, more collaborative internet is creating buzz reminiscent of the go-go days of the late 1990s.

Excitment over emerging new publishing theories -- and the whiff of a resurgence of startup financings -- this week drew throngs of geeks paying $2,800 a head to the sold-out Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. Eight hundred people jostled in the doorways of early workshops devoted to tagging, innovations in search and raising venture capital.

Web 2.0, according to conference sponsor Tim O'Reilly, is an "architecture of participation" -- a constellation made up of links between web applications that rival desktop applications, the blog publishing revolution and self-service advertising. This architecture is based on social software where users generate content, rather than simply consume it, and on open programming interfaces that let developers add to a web service or get at data. It is an arena where the web rather than the desktop is the dominant platform, and organization appears spontaneously through the actions of the group, for example, in the creation of folksonomies created through tagging.

The theory has been percolating for some time. But it intensified last week when O'Reilly published an essay on the topic, as well as a graphic outlining the key categories of this new medium.

Ross Mayfield, the CEO of SocialText, a company that sells collaborative wiki software to enterprises and that is hosting the Web 2.0 wiki, had a simpler definition for conference goers.

"Web 1.0 was commerce. Web 2.0 is people," Mayfield said.

The day was not without skeptics.

In a freewheeling conversation with Web 2.0 conference organizer John Battelle, InterActiveCorp CEO Barry Diller, who recently purchased Ask.com, dismissed the idea that citizens with blogs and video editing software were major threats to the entertainment industry.

"There is not that much talent in the world," Diller said. "There are very few people in very few closets in very few rooms that are really talented and can't get out."

"People with talent and expertise at making entertainment products are not going to be displaced by 1,800 people coming up with their videos that they think are going to have an appeal."

That clear-headed observation didn't set well with some, including media critic Jeff Jarvis, who promptly blogged the talk and labeled Diller with the deadly moniker, "Web 1.0."

By whatever the theory, Web 2.0 is shaking up the status quo in web publishing, and feeding a surge of dealmaking.

Small Web 2.0 companies are already being snapped up by internet giants.

Google acquired Dodgeball, a mobile phone social networking application, and recruited one of the princes of mash-ups, Paul Rademacher of Housingmaps.com, from his job at DreamWorks Animation SKG.

Yahoo snapped up Flickr, a community photo sharing application that relies heavily on tagging, and on Tuesday, bought Upcoming.org, an user-driven events tracking service.

Wednesday afternoon's LaunchPad presentation, featuring 13 companies giving six minute pitches, drew throngs, including venture capitalists smelling money to be made from the cleverness of young programmers, and representatives from internet giants trying to determine whether their business models were as doomed as bloggers have prophesied.

The crowd was so large that hotel staff had to break down the partitions separating three conference rooms to accommodate everyone.

The presentations included a demo of the well publicized, but as yet unreleased, Flock browser, that aims to make Firefox into a two-way communication tool.

Ian McCarthy of Orb showed the crowd how his software would let them stream media from their desktop using any web-enabled device, without having to worry about the format or bit rate of their movies or music.

Zvents.com unveiled its event finder (which currently covers only the San Francisco Bay Area) and claimed it was far better than the service Yahoo had purchased the day before.

Rollyo, short for roll your own search engine, officially launched at the demo, unveiling a service that lets users build their own specific search engines for travel or politics using Yahoo's search API.

Longtime RSS player Pub Sub unveiled its initiative, Structured Blogging, to help bring the fabled Semantic Web into being.

Structured Blogging allows bloggers to easily add structured meta-data to blog posts, such as movie reviews or event listings, so they can be easily found, read and syndicated by other sites.

The ad-hoc XML (no standards body has yet decided on what elements should be in such data) would make possible a search for book or product reviews that only returned real reviews, instead of the current jumbled listing of commerce sites and spammers that search engines currently provide.

But the crowd reserved its largest applause and its gasps of envy for Zimbra, a company which debuted its open-source enterprise software in early September.

The software, called a collaboration suite, performs the same server based calendaring and e-mail of Microsoft's Exchange Server.

Zimbra CEO Satish Dharmaraj wowed the crowd with his demo of his Ajax-powered web client, which would display the calendar when mousing over a date mentioned in an e-mail and call a number through Skype when clicking on a phone number in a message.

Zimbra already has devotees working on the code and translating the interface into Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch.

Dharmaraj knows he's facing a tough battle taking on a flagship Microsoft product, but thinks that Web 2.0-style collaboration and the efforts of the open source community might be his savior.

"I would not like to take on the big boy by myself," Dharmaraj told Wired News. "I would love to take Microsoft on with IBM and Google and Apple on my side."

Source: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/10/69366?currentPage=all

Friendly Web 2.0

Social networks are great: you can stay in touch with friends all across the world and find new ones based on your interests. But often, social networks serve a single purpose or interest. For instance photos, videos or classmates from school and university.This is not a problem by itself, but when you want to keep track of all your contacts in all these social networks, this is a lot of work for you to update your contacts list in all the social networks you are in. And you also might need to get a member of a social network, although you’re not interesed in the subject, but only want to track your friends activities.NoseRub only defines the social network and some basic content types like media, links, micropublishing and text. You can now add all your contacts to a NoseRub network and aggregate several social networks into just one.And you always have full control of your data, as you can install NoseRub on your own server and have it connect to other servers out there.


Source: http://web2.0news.be/

Web 2.0 Keeps Ecommerce Strong

BuddeComm, an independent Australian telecommunications research firm has released a study that indicates strong new businesses models and booming growth in online advertising are rapidly building the foundations of the new Internet economy.

The research found that about $2 billion is projected to be spent on social network advertising in the U.S. by 2010. Social networking and user- generated content will play a major role among a variety of new applications in the Web 2.0 arena.

Paul Budde managing director at BuddeComm said, "It is the burgeoning number of households and businesses with broadband connections, which has been the main driver behind the current boom," Budde said. "In several European countries, 75 percent, or higher, of households have the Internet, which gives e-commerce a strong platform from which to do business."

This year Internet advertising spending is estimated to reach $31 billion globally, up from $24.4 billion last year. The $31 billion is 7 percent of overall ad spending across all media, up from 5.8 percent of the total in 2006. In 2008 Internet ad spending will account for around 8 percent of all spending and over 8.5 percent, or $43 billion out of a total of $495 billion, in 2009.

Online payment services such as PayPal have made a crucial contribution to the growth of ecommerce, creating easier ways for people to pay for products and services online.

The report finds that there are early indications, despite the strong growth of Web 2.0 that online spending growth may slow faster than first thought, to around 10 percent instead of 20 percent by the decades end. It could also indicate that ecommerce is maturing.
Submitted by Mike Sachoff on Fri, 11/09/2007
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/11/09/web-2-0-keeps-ecommerce-strong

Web 2.0 won't switch to mobile, says Blyk founder

Antti Ohrling, the founder of ad-funded mobile company Blyk, has warned that web 2.0 evangelists are wrong to assume the same phenomenon will transfer to mobile.
Mr Ohrling, who has just launched the company in the UK, signing the Daily Telegraph's Shaun Gregory this week, was speaking at the MediaGuardian Changing Advertising Summit.

"Internet web 2.0 people think that it [mobile usage] will become mobile 2.0," he said. "If you think that the mobile phone will be internet on the mobile then you are not right".

He pointed out that studies show people are not using many mobile applications such as the internet.

The "killer apps" - or must-have features - of mobile are text, voice and alarm clock functions, he said.

"Communications are everything," he said. "Mobile is a push medium, you call someone they call you, you text someone they text you".

Tying this into the model for Blyk - which offers free calls and texts to young people who agree to receive targeted ads - he argued that mobile advertising should involve ads based around "earning" attention.

"You don't see a print ad made for TV, so why make ads in mobile not based in communication?" he said.

He claimed that Blyk aimed to deliver relevant ads that engaged with and made offers to its target youth market, saying: "It is not advertising, it becomes a service to the end user."

He said Blyk was not a "free service for young kids in exchange for annoying advertising".

Mr Ohlring explained why Blyk chose the UK as its first market outside its native Scandinavia.

"We picked it [the UK] deliberately because it is the biggest single ad market in Europe," he explained.

"Digital spend is high and is more advanced than the rest of Europe. It is a mature market and so there is room for us."

He said if consumers were to take up internet-related applications they had to become free and much easier to use.

"Access is one barrier and cost is another," he said. The result is that users, especially younger demographics, see "minimal" perceived value in using the internet on mobile.

Earlier this week Blyk hired the Daily Telegraph's director of new media, Shaun Gregory, to become chief executive of the UK operation.

Gregory, a former senior executive at Emap Radio, joined the Telegraph in October last year with a brief to expand its online, TV and mobile operations.

· To contact the MediaGuardian newsdesk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 7239 9857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 7278 2332.

Source: http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/story/0,,2183639,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=4

Best Web Site for Web 2.0

Back in October of 2006 we posted the Best of the Best Web 2.0 Web Site List. This was intended more than anything to keep track of the most useful and most impressive Web 2.0 Web Sites on the Internet. Since the original list, a whole slew of new Web 2.0 Sites have cropped up. Every month now we will feature a "Best Web 2.0 Web Sites" for the month. Below is our listing of the Best Web 2.0 Web Sites for the month of June 2007!

This web 2.0 application is sheer genius, and the poster child for social networking done right! The interface is so easy to use, it's addictive. This is what every true web 2.0 application strives to be. Allowing its users to easily customize their facebook page, while at the same time keeping all pages consistent and clean. And now with its recent launch of the Facebook Platform, Facebook seems poised to become the backend to all things social network.

The brainchild of Kevin Rose, Digg stormed onto the Internet in 2005 after the Paris Hilton cell phone fiasco helped Digg double its users within a day.

Stumble Upon

Sometimes you just want to "stumble" around the Internet, and don't really know the exact site you want to see, but know the category of site's you would like to view. Stumbleupon is a fantastic tool for doing just that. And on your tour, rank sites up or down based on your likes and dislikes.

This is a beautifully designed concept and portal site. Although some would argue netvibes should be the winner here, in terms of interface and ease to set up, I give Pageflakes the honors hands down. Type in your location, select your likes and dislikes, and within seconds you have a completely AJAX driven dashboard to keep your slew of websites a simple pageflakes.com away!

Dominating the video space, others have tried to compete with YouTube, including Google with Google Video, however, they have not been successful. This lead to Google's purchase of YouTube. While many other Web 2.0 companies fail to impress, Google continues to add to brand, with a new version in beta and ready to launch any day. Recently with the addition of YouTube Remixer, YouTube will stay at the forefront of the video webspace for months!

Tracking over 85 million blogs and over 350 million pieces of tagged social media, Technorati is the authority on the Internet when it comes to what is happening on the Internet this very second! Although it started with Blogs, Technorati has recently expanded to all things Live Web! The best part of Technorati is there ranking system, and their recently launched "WTF".

This is a beautifully designed concept and portal site. Although some would argue netvibes should be the winner here, in terms of interface and ease to set up, I give Pageflakes the honors hands down. Type in your location, select your likes and dislikes, and within seconds you have a completely AJAX driven dashboard to keep your slew of websites a simple pageflakes.com away!

(Source :http://www.realsoftwaredevelopment.com/2007/06/best_web_20_web.html)

Read this to know about Web 2.0

This picture above shows a simple abstraction of web evolution.

The traditional World Wide Web, also known as Web 1.0, is a Read-or-Write Web. In particular, authors of web pages write down what they want to share and then publish it online. Web readers can watch these web pages and subjectively comprehend the meanings. Unless writers willingly release their contact information in their authored web pages, the link between writers and readers is generally disconnected on Web 1.0. By leaving public contact information, however, writers have to disclose their private identities (such as emails, phone numbers, or mailing addresses). In short, Web 1.0 connects people to a public, shared environment — World Wide Web. But Web 1.0 essential does not facilitate direct communication between web readers and writers.

The second stage of web evolution is Web 2.0. Though its definition is still vague, Web 2.0 is a Read/Write Web. At Web 2.0, not only writers but also readers can both read and write to a same web space. This advance allows establishing friendly social communication among web users without obligated disclosure of private identities. Hence it significantly increases the participating interest of web users. Normal web readers (not necessarily being a standard web author simultaneously) then have a handy way of telling their viewpoints without the need of disclosing who they are. The link between web readers and writers becomes generally connected, though many of the specific connections are still anonymous. Whether there is default direction communication between web readers and writers is a fundamental distinction between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. In short, Web 2.0 not only connects individual users to the Web, but also connects these individual uses together. It fixes the previous disconnection between web readers and writers.

We don’t know precisely what the very next stage of web evolution is at this moment. However, many of us believe that semantic web must be one of the future stages. Following the last two paradigms, an ideal semantic web is a Read/Write/Request Web. The fundamental change is still at web space. A web space will be no longer a simple web page as on Web 1.0. Neither will a web space still be a Web-2.0-style blog/wiki that facilitates only human communications. Every ideal semantic web space will become a little thinking space. It contains owner-approved machine-processable semantics. Based on these semantics, an ideal semantic web space can actively and proactively execute owner-specified requests by themselves and communicate with other semantic web spaces. By this augmentation, a semantic web space simultaneously is also a living machine agent. We had a name for this type of semantic web spaces as Active Semantic Space (ASpaces). (An introductory scientific article about ASpaces can be found at here for advanced readers.) In short, Semantic Web, when it is realized, will connect virtual representatives of real people who use the World Wide Web. It thus will significantly facilitate the exploration of web resources.

A practical semantic web requires every web user to have a web space by himself. Though it looks abnormal at first glimpse, this requirement is indeed fundamental. It is impossible to imagine that humans still need to perform every request by themselves on a semantic web. If there are no machine agents help humans process the machine-processable data on a semantic web, why should we build this type of semantic web from the beginning? Every semantic web space is a little agent. So every semantic web user must have a web space. The emergence of Semantic Web will eventually eliminates the distinction between readers and writers on the Web. Every human web user must simultaneously be a reader, a writer, and a requester; or maybe we should rename them to be web participators.

In summary, Web 1.0 connects real people to the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 connects real people who use the World Wide Web. The future semantic web, however, will connect virtual representatives of real people who use the World Wide Web. This is a simple story of web evolution.

(This article is originally posted at Thinking Space)