We are in the early stages of a major phase transition. Whatever you call it, something new is brewing, and that nasty R word has a lot do with it. It is not the semantic web. That is a part of it, a big piece of the new technology pie, but it feels too much like a solution looking for a problem.
Nobody knows what name will eventually resonate with people. Web 3.0 sounds too derivative of Web 2.0. By the time this new phase gets a name, people won’t want to be associated with the past.
This week was a hectic one, with a number of RWW writers present at the annual Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The big Internet news of the week was the launch of Microsoft's Live Mesh. Yahoo also announced key support for Social Graph and data portability. In social networking news, MySpace officially opened its Application Gallery to all users. In our web trends coverage, Sarah analyzed a Forrester report that claimed Enterprise 2.0 will become a $4.6 Billion industry by 2013, Marshall looked at what will build on the emerging foundation of ubiquitous APIs, Josh investigated the current fad for 'Web 3.0', and Alex looked at the increasing stress in our online lives.
Lots more Internet TV-related coverage on our network blog last100 this week, including news of a new joint venture from Viacom, Paramount, MGM and Lionsgate; Netflix has secured three new set-top box partners who'll add support for the company’s ‘Watch Now’ video streaming service; more speculation surrounding Sony's forthcoming movie download service for the PlayStation 3; and Motorola is rumored to be planning a movie download service for its mobile devices.
How useful can communication limited to 140 characters be for serious journalism? It turns out that the short messages you find on Twitter have proven wildly useful for some writers penning larger pieces.
Here at ReadWriteWeb we've been leveraging Twitter heavily for some of our most important news writing. While cynics dismiss twitter as frivolous, we've got stories to share that should make anyone reconsider their doubts about the microblogging medium.
We can't all eat, breathe, and live social media 24x7, as much as we might like to. Some of have day jobs that require a bit of our attention, too. And unlike the web-app embracing startups we read about, the policies at more traditional companies actually discourage mindless web surfing, tweeting, facebooking, and the like. However, there are still plenty of ways to fit in your social media addictions at work, without getting noticed by your nosy co-workers or getting blocked by I.T.
New research from the University of Buffalo and University of Hawaii concludes that young people who watch reality TV are more likely to accept a large number of unknown friends and to post photos of themselves on social networking sites than their peers who do not watch shows like American Idol and Survivor. The researchers deemed such behavior "promiscuous."
File this under unsurprising, but interesting none the less.
From Brussels-based company Attentio comes a new blog search engine and trend-tracking tool called Trendpedia. The service, now out of beta, lets you scan the blogosphere for trends to see what's getting buzz. Trendpedia also lets you compose visualizations of those trends as charts and graphs, which can then be shared on the social web.
Ok, well, maybe not easy -- you do still have to build the software. But Rails Kits has created a software as a service "starter kit" that provides a pain-free way to add subscription management, recurring billing, and credit card management functionality to any Rails app. At the Web 2.0 Expo this week, software as a service was a major trend, enough so that Tim O'Reilly included the SaaS trend in his latest definition of the "Web 2.0" term.
A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a weekend piece entitled In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop,
which focused on the stressful nature of blogging. Using our friend Marc Orchant's death and Om Malik's heart attack as examples, Matt Richel built a case for web journalism as the cause of certain health woes because of its non-stop, 24/7 real-time nature. There is no doubt that news blogging is stressful.
But it is not just blogging. Real-time anything is stressful. Take TV news, is Anderson Cooper not stressed? Looking broader,
what about air traffic controllers or traders on Wall Street? Any human being that has to make decisions in real-time will be under a lot of stress.
Something struck me while listening to Tim O'Reilly's keynote speech at the Web 2.0 expo yesterday: glancing at my notes after he walked off stage, I noticed that his current definition for Web 2.0, is a lot like the definition he's given for Web 3.0. Based on this, plus past comments from O'Reilly that I dug up via a few web searches, I am forced to one conclusion: Tim O'Reilly, the man credited with popularizing the term Web 2.0, doesn't actually believe it exists. For O'Reilly, there is just the web right now. 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 -- it's all the same ever-changing web.
