There are so many things to catch up on, so I will be brief on each topic but some are too important (in my opinion) not to address.....
Wolfram Alfa – “The World’s Most Computable Knowledge”. While still in its early stages (thus the “Alpha”), it is an entirely new type of search engine. It is built on knowledge based computing and focuses on systemic results. The search is done with natural language input, but the results are real time and incredibly comprehensive. This is about computing, and will be a one stop accessible and reliable source for anyone with a computational question. It is worth a try, as this is too big to miss. Completely free form input with a knowledge engine that presents results in an entirely new, comprehensive way. Lots of fun Easter Eggs in there too.
Great new Hulu interface. I hope this doesn’t hurt Boxee too much; they have always been one of my favorite companies. Hulu focuses on movies and television, while Boxee includes all types of entertainment (music, YouTube,sharing favorites) and is geared toward the social crowd.
Lots of new smartphones to get excited about. The new iPhone debuts in June (along with other Apple and Mac secrets, a trademark of the WWDC – the Apple World Wide Developers Conference). Will one surprise be the return of Steve Jobs? I love the speculation beforehand.
Also the Palm Pre, coming next week, promises to be an amazing phone. Finally something new for the Treo lovers of the world. A full color high resolution touch screen, slide out QWERTY keyboard, backward compatible with older Palm programs, an app store, and most importantly the ability to multi-task (run multiple apps/tasks at one time.) For some reason, this is something iPhones haven’t been able to do (unless the new version, supposedly with 1.5x the processing power, makes it possible). Oh, and the Pre will sync with iTunes seamlessly and show up in the program as a device just like an iPod (syncing everything except for DRM music). If this phone were coming to ATT or T-Mobile I would worry for iPhone. There are still so many people who love a real keyboard (I am one of them so I still use my Blackberry) or who are married to Palm's OS. The fact that Sprint has a pre-existing deal to exclusively carry all Palm products for 6 months is a shame. I doubt even Bono uses Sprint (his Private Equity firm, Elevation Partners, owns a large percentage of Palm shares).
Lots of debate about what Web 3.0 is and the term itself (Robert Scoble and others are calling it Web 2010 but doesn’t that outdate the phrase quickly? Sorry @scobleizer just my opinion).
What IS important to note is that there IS a difference in the products we’re seeing in 2009 compared to the ones we saw at the height of Web 2.0 (up till 2008). Web 2.0 was about user generated content and social applications. The Newer web is about more open and structured data. Our destination is data instead of pages – which essentially makes the web more intelligent.
The smarter the data, the more things we can do with it. Filtering content, real-time data (yes, we have now evolved to a “real time web” with personalization), evidence that the next generation of the web is here.
According to Greg Boutin, the new kid on the structured block is “Linked Data” and the Semantic web. There is so much data out there right now, but it still needs to be structured. This web is potentially much smarter than what we have grown accustomed to. He also argues that although this real-time information is now available and potentially makes us much smarter; we need new applications to link the structured data to be more machine-readable. There is actually an LOD (Linking Open Data) project underway which will hopefully help accomplish this task. There are still very few apps that address linking this RDF (Resource Descriptive Framework) in a way that incorporates the Semantic web. These apps need to be bottoms up (embedding the meta-data into the information), but the few apps that exist so far are top down (which analyzes existing information and allows people to use natural language processing to get us to the same place).
There is an ongoing “discussion” about whether the top down Semantic web already won, or if more RDF applications will be developed because there are so many applications in consumer, health, and other enterprise markets.
The Semantic web is not just about putting information on the web. It’s about making links, so people can explore the web of data. With linked data, you can find other, related data.
One of the simplest ways to explain where we are going was a very big (yet relatively unpublicized) decision to allow users to log on to Facebook with OpenID. Facebook is the most closed of all networks (as I have discussed before in this blog) and traditional logic would imply that they are so far ahead of everyone else; they didn’t need to do it. Now Facebook users will be able to open accounts using Gmail credentials. Mark Zuckerberg continues to impress me. He recognizes the new direction of the web, he feels its heartbeat, and he knows the history lesson that led to the demise of AOL. He can avoid the same fate by dynamically changing with the eco-system his users live and play in. People left AOL and never came back. This new development may keep users attached to the walled garden of Facebook for a very long time.
Back to Linked Data. We have gone from a web of documents to a web of data (Link from Paul Miller). There are all kinds of efforts encouraging government departments, businesses, and individuals to open their data and put it on the web, so that others can link to it and use it.
Om Malik (GigaOm.com) had a number of good points in his "How Internet Content Is Changing" post. My favorite points?
1 - The total disaggregation of the web in parallel with the slow decline of the destination web.
2 – The web is transforming from mere interactivity to a dynamic, real-time web where read-write functions are heading toward synchronicity. He explains Dave Winer’s “River of News” (which he predicted) where people dip in and drink exactly they want, when they want it. We are part of this flow both as users and participants.
Most importantly, that old phrase “Information Overload” is gone. We have no choice but to acknowledge that we can’t sift through all of that information. We just have to dip in and out, and that’s enough for us to be satisfied.
Other interesting trends to watch? Virtual events (they draw live in-person crowds), the new Twitter applications (is this Twitter-as-a Platform?). And games games and more games (E3 Expo is coming up this week).
