PatentSim was presented as a game in which the goal is to make as much money as possible. In each environment, subjects combined objects in a "Creation Box" to simulate an invention. Whenever a subject created an invention and clicked on the "Make" button, money would appear in their virtual bank. In the pure patent and mixed patent environments, subjects could also click on a "Patent" button to increase their profit. Each patent was priced at $20 and each use of a lawyer also cost $20. At the end of the study, students had produced significantly more inventions and profit in the commons environment when they were not being penalized for patent infringement or were busy enforcing their patents.

The study suggests that innovation not only thrives in a competitive environment, but that more profit can be generated by inventors in a commons system. Because PatentSim is just a simulation, readers need to take findings with a grain of salt. While the rate of inventions would likely increase without patents, it's tough to tell if inventors would really see unlimited profit potential in an environment free of patents. After all, how many different zipper pulls does the market demand?

Nevertheless, in some cases, the demand for a product or process is all too evident. Imagine the competitive market for hearing aids and prosthetics, or the success rate of farmers who are free to use the best possible processes. And honestly, does HIV really care if it's being treated by Glaxo, Pfizer or a tested generic knockoff?

This study is important in that it might spur policy makers to question how we look at innovation. Are inventions just disparate exclusively-owned products, or should we be sharing them out of necessity to solve our bigger-picture problems?

The transformation will happen in one of two ways. Some web sites will follow the example of Amazon, del.icio.us and Flickr and will offer their information via a REST API. Others will try to keep their information proprietary, but it will be opened via mashups created using services like Dapper, Teqlo and Yahoo! Pipes. The net effect will be that unstructured information will give way to structured information - paving the road to more intelligent computing. In this post we will look at how this important transformation is taking place already and how it is likely to evolve.

The Amazon E-Commerce API - open access to Amazon's catalog

We have written here before about Amazon's visionary WebOS strategy. The Seattle web giant is reinventing itself by exposing its own infrastructure via a set of elegant APIs. One of the first web services opened up by Amazon was the E-Commerce service. This service opens access to the majority of items in Amazon's product catalog. The API is quite rich, allowing manipulation of users, wish lists and shopping carts. However its essence is the ability to lookup Amazon's products.

The rise of the API culture

The web 2.0 poster child, del.icio.us, is also famous as one of the first companies to open a subset of its web site functionality via an API. Many services followed, giving rise to a true API culture. John Musser over at programmableweb has been tirelessly cataloging APIs and Mashups that use them. This page shows almost 400 APIs organized by category, which is an impressive number. However, only a fraction of those APIs are opening up information - most focus on manipulating the service itself. This is an important distinction to understand in the context of this article.

The del.icio.us API offering today is different from Amazon's one, because it does not open the del.icio.us database to the world. What it does do is allow authorized mashups to manipulate the user information stored in del.icio.us. For example, an application may add a post, or update a tag, programmatically. However, there is no way to ask del.icio.us, via API, what URLs have been posted to it or what has been tagged with the tag web 2.0 across the entire del.icio.us database. These questions are easy to answer via the web site, but not via current API.

Standardized URLs - the API without an API

Despite the fact that there is no direct API (into the database), many companies have managed to leverage the information stored in del.icio.us. Here are some examples... 

Delexa is an interesting and useful mashup that uses del.icio.us to categorize Alexa sites. For example, here are the popular sites tagged with the word book: 

Another web site called similicio.us uses del.icio.us to recommend similar sites. For example, here are the sites that it thinks are related to Read/WriteWeb.

So how do these services get around the fact that there is no API? The answer is that they leverage standardized URLs and a technique called Web scraping. Let's understand how this works. In del.icio.us, for example, all URLs that have the tag book can be found under the URL http://del.icio.us/tag/book; all URLs tagged with the tag movie are at http://del.icio.us/tag/movie; and so on. The structure of this URL is always the same: http://del.icio.us/tag[TAG]. So given any tag, a computer program can fetch the page that contains the list of sites tagged with it. Once the page is fetched, the program can now perform the scraping - the extraction of the necessary information from the page.

How Web Scraping Works

Web Scraping is essentially reverse engineering of HTML pages. It can also be thought of as parsing out chunks of information from a page. Web pages are coded in HTML, which uses a tree-like structure to represent the information. The actual data is mingled with layout and rendering information and is not readily available to a computer. Scrapers are the programs that "know" how to get the data back from a given HTML page. They work by learning the details of the particular markup and figuring out where the actual data is. For example, in the illustration below the scraper extracts URLs from the del.icio.us page. By applying such a scraper, it is possible to discover what URLs are tagged with any given tag.

Dapper, Teqlo, Yahoo! Pipes - the upcoming scraping technologies

We recently covered Yahoo! Pipes, a new app from Yahoo! focused on remixing RSS feeds. Another similar technology, Teqlo, has recently launched. It focuses on letting people create mashups and widgets from web services and rss. Before both of these, Dapper launched a generic scraping service for any web site. Dapper is an interesting technology that facilitates the scraping of the web pages, using a visual interface.

It works by letting the developer define a few sample pages and then helping her denote similar information using a marker. This looks simple, but behind the scenes Dapper uses a non-trivial tree-matching algorithm to accomplish this task. Once the user defines similar pieces of information on the page, Dapper allows the user to make it into a field. By repeating the process with other information on the page, the developer is able to effectively define a query that turns an unstructured page into a set of structured records.

The net effect - Web Sites become Web Services

Here is an illustration of the net effect of apps like Dapper and Teqlo:

So bringing together Open APIs (like the Amazon E-Commerce service) and scraping/mashup technologies, gives us a way to treat any web site as a web service that exposes its information. The information, or to be more exact the data, becomes open. In turn, this enables software to take advantage of this information collectively. With that, the Web truly becomes a database that can be queried and remixed.

This sounds great, but is this legal?

Scraping technologies are actually fairly questionable. In a way, they can be perceived as stealing the information owned by a web site. The whole issue is complicated because it is unclear where copy/paste ends and scraping begins. It is okay for people to copy and save the information from web pages, but it might not be legal to have software do this automatically. But scraping of the page and then offering a service that leverages the information without crediting the original source, is unlikely to be legal.

But it does not seem that scraping is going to stop. Just like legal issues with Napster did not stop people from writing peer-to-peer sharing software, or the more recent YouTube lawsuit is not likely to stop people from posting copyrighted videos. Information that seems to be free is perceived as being free. 

The opportunities that will come after the web has been turned into a database are just too exciting to pass up. So if conversion is going to take place anyway, would it not be better to rethink how to do this in a consistent way?

Why Web Sites should offer Web Services

There are several good reasons why Web Sites (online retailers in particular), should think about offering an API. The most important reason is control. Having an API will make scrapers unnecessary, but it will also allow tracking of who is using the data - as well as how and why. Like Amazon, sites can do this in a way that fosters affiliates and drives the traffic back to their sites.

The old perception is that closed data is a competitive advantage. The new reality is that open data is a competitive advantage. The likely solution then is to stop worrying about protecting information and instead start charging for it, by offering an API. Having a small fee per API call (think Amazon Web Services) is likely to be acceptable, since the cost for any given subscriber of the service is not going to be high. But there is a big opportunity to make money on volume. This is what Amazon is betting on with their Web Services strategy and it is probably a good bet.

Conclusion

As more and more of the Web is becoming remixable, the entire system is turning into both a platform and the database. Yet, such transformations are never smooth. For one, scalability is a big issue. And of course legal aspects are never simple. 

But it is not a question of if web sites become web services, but when and how. APIs are a more controlled, cleaner and altogether preferred way of becoming a web service. However, when APIs are not avaliable or sufficient, scraping is bound to continue and expand. As always, time will be best judge; but in the meanwhile we turn to you for feedback and stories about how your businesses are preparing for 'web 3.0'.

The question addressed was: what will the software solutions of tomorrow look like?

In Part 1 John argued that data should become open and accessible, just like the code in Open Source software. Code is often re-written and re-factored, but systems only work if they agree on the data.

Part 2 contends that people will demand more access to their data and more integration with their apps. This will result in the single minded, all-encompassing applications of today dying off - in favor of multi-celled, specialized solutions. So the future will be combinations of best of breed technology, rather than monolithic software.

John's conclusion:

"And what trait will the eventual winners in this brave new world share? The solutions that can hone their data requirements, move results from system to system, use the best form factor for the job and still keep it on a human level."

I wonder then if we're seeing glimpses of this future in today's Web products? Perhaps, as John suggested, the missing link is babel fish-like "applications whose main purpose is to translate and transpose data from one system to another." Mozilla's intention to make Firefox 3 an information broker is possibly a move in this direction.

This type of 'best of breed' future certainly plays into Google's hands, as they already utilize web standards in their raft of apps - whereas Microsoft mostly relies on the Windows OS (a trend that will probably intensify in 2007 as Vista is rolled out). Of course Google and Mozilla are bedfellows, so Firefox 3 being an information broker would be quite handy for Google.

Are there any other Web products you see today that point to a Best of Breed future for the Internet?

image: Wikipedia

What will the software solutions of tomorrow look like? They will be forged by four powerful elements: The Internet, Open Source, Mobile Devices and Web 2.0. We can debate the merits of each, but taken as a whole they will shape the genetic blueprint for the successful applications of tomorrow -- starting now.

Web 2.0

I had been wrestling with the merits of Web 2.0 for a while and I decided that MyBlogLog would be my case study to figure it out (since bought by Yahoo). It's the vertical strip of 10 avatars found on more and more 'social' sites, including to your right in Read/WriteWeb's sidebar. There's an odd fascination when you see 10 strangers enter your world. In the real world I would keep my eyes straight ahead and focus on the distant horizon. In the web 2.0 world, however, I can let my eyes wander and - best of all - click on somebody. While it may fulfill a voyeuristic impulse, it was hard to make a business case for this social metaphor. In fact, I had just about concluded web 2.0 was more sizzle than substance when I went to a Christmas party...

A good friend of mine is co-owner of a medical transcription company. He invited me to their Christmas party to see the whole operation and meet what makes their company work - the transcriptionists. Functionally, the act of transcribing audio files of medical dictation to digital content is what generates cash flow for the company. But the eye-opener was the relationships the transcriptionists had cultivated with their medical professionals. Each doctor may have an idiosyncrasy or two - a pronunciation issue or unknown idiom - which may require a transcriptionist to ask a question or two. One thing would lead to another and pretty soon the doctors would get to know their assigned transcriptionists and trust them.

As I sauntered around the room meeting the various transcriptionists, each of them obviously had taken 'ownership' of their relationship with their medical client. When I spoke to a couple of the medical clients in attendance, it was obvious how much they appreciated the transcriptionists assigned to their personnel. So much so, that a feature demonstrated for the next version of their software had both doctor and transcriptionist information available - something that looked a lot like MyBlogLog from the back row where I was sitting. As I got closer, I could read the additional information that turned audio files and email addresses into real people with names and biographies - maybe even a blog.

Throw broadband internet connections into every transcriptionist's home (the company doesn't have a traditional office) and you have low overhead, motivated employees and satisfied customers. Forget about proprietary file formats, exclusive contracts and sneaky lock-ins, the single best way to keep your customers coming back is an efficient online system and interactive relationships built on trust - on a human level. What Web 2.0 promises, in my opinion, is an online, social and economical way for people to connect. In one sense it addresses the classic 'service economy', where a doctor can work with a transcriptionist, re-imagined for a virtual world. In another sense Web 2.0 can address a 'collegial economy', or peers working together.

For example, every member of a project should have presence, live up to social expectations and have the tools to express themselves in an online environment. Project management, with its origins in academia, has focused more on the technical aspects of allocation, organization and scheduling. However, is there a more social endeavor in the business world than working on a project together? Currently, people are called 'resources' and their working days are reduced to blue bars of various duration. And people hate it. The philosophy of Web 2.0 dictates we turn these resources and blue bars back into people and real life. And people will love it.

Note: Photo of Medical Transcriptionists is from Wikipedia

The Missing Link

It wouldn't be mutation and evolution without a missing link. However, instead of finding the link from our past, we will predict it for our future. Like a Babel Fish crawling from a sea of data, we will begin seeing applications whose main purpose is to translate and transpose data from one system to another. While most current software applications can import from several formats and write to a few, they will soon be overwhelmed by the permutations - as distribution, portability and specialization increase the options.

Perhaps we just caught the first glimpse of the missing link with Mozilla's announcement that Firefox will support Microformats. It may be a little awkward at first, as it sounds like specific extensions (see comment #7) will be required for applications to interact with the microformats, but Firefox has made its move toward the beach. As Mozilla's Alex Faaborg correctly noted:

"... the difficult part of microformat detection is not parsing the data, it is dealing with the wide range of APIs for all of the different applications on all of the different platforms that can consume this data."

Firefox 3 as Information Broker; diagram by Mozilla

If Mozilla can solve this by elegance or by sheer people power, and make this data accessible, Firefox might just begin to encroach on Outlook in addition to Internet Explorer. Call it the inbox for the next generation.

Let's Make a Deal

The internet is delivering more and more useful, utilitarian options. People will always demand more access to their data and more integration with their apps. Mobile Devices will drive specialization, slicing and dicing rich data for their specific needs. And Babel Fish applications will connect this cacophony into coherence. The result? The single minded, all-encompassing applications of today will begin dying off in favor of multi-celled, specialized solutions. As soon as data begins to flow freely from app to app, as Joel Spolsky noted, the size of the ecosystem is no longer a barrier (or lock-in) - instead the efficacy of the solution becomes the desired characteristic for survival.

In fact, the best solution may no longer be under the purview of a single company. It may actually grow, like some genetic algorithm, after several iterations of various combinations. Companies may end up spending more time negotiating all the possibilities, than making up new proprietary formats, as agreements and pacts will become the new means of customer lock-ins. Why did the Motorola iTunes phone fail and the new iPhone take more than a year to appear? It wasn't just the technology.

The coming agreements, pacts and understandings among corporations will need a word beyond byzantine to describe them. But if you lack a legal team and have customers chomping at the bit for solutions, you have more opportunity than ever before to cut your own deal and get a piece of the action. You could try to create all the pieces for the next generation solutions (internet connectivity, open source data interoperability, mobility and usability), but it will be impractical for even large companies to create something compelling. Instead, it will be combinations of best of breed technology.

And what trait will the eventual winners in this brave new world share? The solutions that can hone their data requirements, move results from system to system, use the best form factor for the job and still keep it on a human level.

What will the software solutions of tomorrow look like? They will be forged by four powerful elements: The Internet, Open Source, Mobile Devices and Web 2.0. We can debate the merits of each, but taken as a whole they will shape the genetic blueprint for the successful applications of tomorrow -- starting now.

Evolution and Global Warming have been my themes lately, but today we'll explore what these macro events foretell: mutation. The leviathans of our primordial software world have been busy hatching their vision for the next generation of solutions. But while size and scale have been advantageous up to now, four major events have set off an irreversible chain of events - altering the desired characteristics of software. In this new environment, nimbleness will again be rewarded and size may just be a disadvantage. Indeed, the meek have just gotten another crack at inheriting the earth.

The Internet was a meteor strike unleashing a myriad of possibilities; Open Source was a breath of fresh air; Mobile Devices began a great migration from the desktop and Web 2.0 brought everything to a more human level. We can debate the merits of each -- the Internet was a cataclysmic event, whereas Web 2.0 seems more like a change in the weather -- but taken as a whole they will shape the genetic blueprint for the successful applications of tomorrow, starting now.

How far have we come incorporating the internet into our daily lives? Where once relatives would ask me - being the 'computer guy' - how to format their Microsoft Word document, now they are purchasing their new computers online from the company store and plugging them into their broadband connections. My once promising career in family support is officially in the dustbin.

Everyone knows the virtues of the internet and, at this point, can even harmonize its praises. Combined with those aforementioned broadband connections, the internet has reached the point where its ubiquitous, dependable and - most importantly - taken for granted. It took years for a robust electrical grid to hook up all our houses. A few more for the novelty of flipping a light switch to wear off. Finally, once electricity from the wall could be counted on, we began to get cool things like radios and tvs. Ultimately the indispensable items like refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and washing machines - the stuff of everyday life - started showing up.

The internet grid is up, web sites have long passed the novelty phase and we've got our iTunes and YouTube. Now its time for the indispensable stuff. We'll have to wait a little longer to see what an internet-enabled vacuum cleaner looks like, or even what form it takes, but we do know how it will get there - online.

Save a Tree, Buy Online

Other than the massive MSDN software package that is trollied into our office every quarter, I cannot remember the last time I bought software in a box. Similarly, now that I've had my iPod for a while, my CDs are getting dusty and the last place I bought one is out of business. And guess what - my company makes software products and we don't even bother with packaging. At least not any packaging that needs trees.

It's all gone online. If the internet went down tomorrow and stayed down for a month, or long enough that people thought physical media was important again, we would very likely be out of business. Losing the internet probably wouldn't be very good for Read/WriteWeb either. In fact, all that our collective competitors have to do is take down the net!

The point is, it used to be only web applications betting their business existence on the internet. However, now it carries only a bit more risk than betting your company on electricity. Entities that used to either rely on physical media (publications and software houses) or combined the real and online worlds, are making the leap to be purely online. It can be a difficult leap to make if you're a newspaper looking at multi million dollar printing press investments. But if you blog, write software, transcribe medical dictation, produce music or direct movies, then you only need one thing to deliver your product: a large pipe.

Ubiquity, reliability and accessibility. Now we need a philosophy.

Open Source

The first things that come to mind when mentioning Open Source is Linux, code in the public domain and young idealists. A grassroots competitor to the world's dominant software company is irresistible; stripping preternatural algorithms from the cloak of intellectual property is daring; and who doesn't like a young idealist? But for all the good Open Source philosophy has done, it hasn't accomplished what should be its true calling. Indeed, whereas a young curmudgeon has no heart, an old idealist has no head. Providing a legal means to open source code was nice, but it's more important to apply Open Source principles to data.

In fact, I would go so far as to say (if given a choice) that I would rather data be open and accessible -- than code. Code can, and often should, be rewritten and refactored again and again, but systems only work if they agree on the data. As we, and our computing devices, become more and more intertwined, it will become less and less important whether code reading my calendar appointments is proprietary or open; served by Microsoft's or Apache's internet servers, shown on a .NET or X.org display. What will matter is my calendar data adhering to (for example) the iCalendar format. As the importance of data becomes clearer, the origin of software applications, proprietary versus Open Source, will diminish.

It's All About the Data

Jeff Atwood recently accused Joel Spolsky of jumping the shark. While there may have been something fishy in that post, the fact is that Joel has written more than his fair share of brilliant essays - including one in particular that has always resonated with me, explaining how Excel reading and writing Lotus 123 data turned out to be the tipping point for success.

The immediate goal was removing the barriers for an application to win market share from a competitor. But the real lesson is even greater: if any spreadsheet application can read and write with any other spreadsheet application, then they can be evaluated on how well they work instead of how large their ecosystem is. Instead of resting on the laurels of one's barriers, companies will have to continually improve their products. You can choose what you eat, where you shop and what car you drive. Shouldn't we demand the same flexibility for our spreadsheets, appointments and online presence? Heck, the software code you buy isn't even yours - it's on extended loan. But your data is yours; created, edited and archived by you.

To Market, To Market

Open Source has captured the attention and time of many talented programmers; and as a result has shown the world what can be done. But what the Open Source movement needs is the attention and time of many talented marketers to explain why it's important. In typical engineer fashion, marketing has been the afterthought. But if the same effort in writing operating systems were put into marketing data standards, the idealists would be a step closer to their better world.

Honestly, though, the starry-eyed Open Source non-business model is just about a thing of the past. The most prominent Open Source projects today - Linux, Apache and Mozilla - have some extremely deep pockets behind them (IBM and Google). Do you think it's an accident that Firefox has been marketed so well? Something a bit more tangible than a dream is needed to incent the backers watching the bottom line. What's needed is a new catalyst.

Mobile Devices

Sales of mobile devices rocketing past sales of personal computers goes a long way towards capturing peoples attention. What are the ramifications of this? Whereas a personal computer was designed to be a generic device driven by complex software, allowing it to do most anything adequately, mobile devices are designed to run simpler software - combined with a more targeted form factor, allowing it to do a few things very well.

Today's desktop computers, and even laptop computers, have more in common with steriod laden athletes than trim computing devices. The new computer my aforementioned relative just bought came with 250 Gigabytes of disk space. It's going to take a lot of pictures of the kids to fill that up. In fact, if we average 100 100K pictures per week, the kids will be 480 before grandma's hard drive is full.

Clean Computing

Mobile devices don't have it quite so good. They have to undergo rigorous testing in order to be light enough to carry, small enough to fit in your pocket and slim enough to be chic. Sure, single purpose mobile devices like the iPod can have large drives too - but programmers want wireless internet connectivity, more gadgets and widgets, and a development platform. The result is something akin to the early days of desktop computing, when the most memory anyone would ever need was 640K. Mobile devices don't work well with most data on desktop and laptop computers, simply because the amount of data is too large.

What mobile devices should do is work only with the amount of data they need to. Or to put it another way, you shouldn't need an entire dataset in order to be 'correct.' As long as you have a unique identifier, any other part should do. This will not only allow data to be more mobile, but will also make it easier to refine and specialize data interaction.

Wake Up and Smell the Data

Going back to the iCalendar example, we can imagine a circular mobile device supporting WiMax with two bells at the top that tells time - we'll call it iAlarmClock. While the completeness of the iCalendar specification makes it useful for just about any time based event, with the iAlarmClock we only have one pressing concern: when should the alarm go off? A proper, well formatted iCalendar entry may contain enough information to fill four pages of UML. Our iAlarmClock just needs the information from page four - Alarm Component Properties. Better yet, if I use the manual override - the roundy knob on the back - to adjust the alarm time, then the source iCalendar entry, and any other device depending on that source, should be updated automagically from my data fragment. That way all my iAlarmClocks will let me sleep-in, no matter where I take my nap.

We programmers have to get used to working with pieces of data instead of the whole thing. Sometimes it's ok not to have the complete picture, we just need that part that makes sense for the task at hand. The goal isn't data completeness, it's data usefulness - just enough to enable boring stuff like alarm clocks, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and washing machines.

Go to Part 2 to read about Web 2.0, Social Glue, and The Missing Link!

In our previous post we reviewed the Web trends of 2006, noting trends such as the hyper-growth of social networks, the push of RSS into the mainstream, consumerization of the enterprise, and the continued rise of the read/write Web. 

In this post we look forward to 2007 and ruminate on what trends will be important over the coming year.

RSS, Structured Data

- RSS will go mainstream in a big way next year - not only integrated into Microsoft's new Vista OS, but also fully integrated into Yahoo Mail when it comes out of beta (the Ajax version). Plus we expect some of Google's RSS experiments to come into play more in 2007 - especially Google Base, which uses an RSS variant called GData. In addition to all this, new and interesting (if not overly innovative) services will be built on top of RSS - e.g. the Techmeme RSS Ad-delivery.

- Widgets exploded in 2006 but will continue rising in 2007 thanks to blogs and social networks like MySpace. MyBlogLog is an example of what we'll see more of, but also look out for more e-commerce and multimedia widgets.

Enterprise

- Web Office continues to ramp up. Especially watch Google and Microsoft battle it out in this domain. The smaller startups (Zoho, Zimbra, ThinkFree et al) will continue to innovate and there may even be acquisitions by the big Internet companies.

- The consumerization of the enterprise trend will start to infiltrate corporate IT, in the form of web-based office apps and more collaborative systems. Virtual solutions (teams and offices) that deliver high productivity at lesser expenses, will be hugely popular - for example SKY-click. Corporate blogs will continue to proliferate, although there may be more controversy to come in this area (think sensitive information leaked on corporate blogs).

Web Development

- Rich Internet Apps will be a major force in 2007 (a continuation of the Hybrid web/desktop apps theme we focused on this year). In particular watch out for Adobe's Apollo platform, but you can be sure that Microsoft will also be very active in this domain with its Windows Presentation Foundation. Also in the mix will be Laszlo with its open source OpenLaszlo platform. The general trend going on here is that platforms that leverage both the desktop and the Web will be compelling next year, in terms of offering rich functionality that usually can't be found on purely browser-based apps.

- On the other hand, Google in particular will continue to push the boundaries of browser-based apps. Ajax is known to have its limitations, so some people have been wondering what will be next after Ajax? But also 2007 may be the year that rich web apps using vector graphics (VML/SVG)+AJAX make an impact.

- Semantic Web products will come of age in 2007. Make no mistake (to use presidential language), the Semantic web is coming - particularly with the work of companies like RadarNetworks and Metaweb. We think companies like that will come up with the plumbing to help generate RDF based on HTML.

- Amazon Web Services were a surprise hit in 2006 - and expect more big things from Amazon next year, to fill in the stack and to provide the foundation for a Web/Amazon WebServices-based OS. We also think there will be moves toward an Amazon-like web services stack from other players, particularly Google. For example Google may want to catch up with Amazon's S3 - EC2 services. And where Google goes, you can expect Microsoft to go too.

Search and Online Advertising

- Expect some shakeups in the online advertising market next year. AdSense will have some competition, in the form of MSN AdCenter and Yahoo's advertising platform. 

- Also due to ongoing issues with (CPC/PPC) online advertising, there's a real need for a better, more robust online ad model - perhaps something more than CPA. So watch out for developments in 2007 along those lines.

- 2007 will be about Search 2.0 and the rise of the vertical search engines. However don't expect Google to lay down and do nothing - they will counter the verticals. Google Code and Health are two early examples of Google's response. Also note that Google is moving towards being a more meaning-based search engine. For instance, when you enter a company name in Google, the first result not only returns the homepage of the company but also some semantic meaning extracted from the website. And the right bar of SearchMash (Google's test search site) shows that Google is planning more features.

Microsoft vs Google

- Microsoft's Windows Live services will gain real momentum next year, thanks to Vista and also Live services going out of beta and usurping their MSN counterparts (e.g. Windows Live Mail taking over Hotmail).

- WebOS /GoogleOS: To counter the Vista and Windows Live threat, Google may come out with some form of GoogleOS. This is contentious, but one theory is that if Vista's default services (Live.com) can put pressure on Google, then we may see a Google optimized Linux . 

- In line with this, Open Source Desktops will continue to gain momentum in '07. Red Hat and Novell will bring out new versions. Linux Desktops are getting more fun with 3D effects and KDE4 (Plasma) and AIGLX - Xgl and Beryl - Compiz technologies. But can they compete with new Vista and expected web operating systems?

Browsers

- Browser War II. In 2007 expect the competition between IE7 and FireFox (plus Flock, Opera and Maxthon) to be intense. Perhaps we'll even see a G-Browser? Stranger things have happened.... or will Google continue to utilize Firefox as its cover? The latter is more likely, as Google does not want to seem too distracted with operating systems and browsers; this would be a bad signal for the NASDAQ investors. 

- Speaking of browsers, 2007 will see an increase in WebKits. Adobe's Apollo will be WebKit based, enabling developers to ensure Safari compatibility as well as other browsers. We also think the Konqueror browser of Linux/KDE will drop its KHTML engine in favor of WebKit. So expect Safari compatibility to rise sharply in 2007. 

Multimedia

- Internet-based TV will ramp up in 2007, thanks to products like Brightcove and whatever Google does with YouTube/Google Video. Also we'll see more of Interactive TV (iTV etc). On this theme, the Venice Project (from the founders of Skype) promises free TV all around the world.

- Mass adoption of IPTV technology in 2007 and Bittorrent will be an important part of the online video landscape too.

- P2P: With Azureus and BitTorrent, P2P got approximately $30M funding for 2007. So 2007 will undoubtedly be a good year for P2P. It will get more accessible and we'll probably see web based P2P interfaces. Bittorrent has already become a major part of most connected software. For instance, DemocracyPlayer - an IPTV client similar to Venice Project - had an embedded bittorrent client. Bittorrent will probably continue to be embedded in many new apps in '07.

- Virtual worlds: SecondLife will become an important platform for marketing, promotion, and of course social networking - as people and businesses figure out different uses for it. Also we think SecondLife will continue its expansion worldwide. Currently you can find Habbo and SecondLife cards in most supermarkets (Wallgreens, CVS) in the US, so this trend should continue in other parts of the world. In short, virtual worlds will become an integral part of the real world in 2007.

- Virtual Money: Paypal showed the way, and we're seeing more of it now - SecondLife LindeX, Microsoft points etc.

Consumer Apps

- The online real estate market will grow rapidly in '07.

- The search for disruptive business models will continue! :-) In other words, free consumer web apps still need to find a business model.

- While social networks dominated 2006, we wonder if the amount of time an average user spends online will start to negatively impact on their social lives in 2007 and lead to a downturn. Could social networks prove to be anti-social? ;-) At the same time, social networks will probably also become more open - and data portability will start to occur, although MySpace will hold out. See also widgets above.

International Web

- International Web will finally start to get its due in mainstream media (or maybe this is wishful thinking). China in particular is a hot market right now, but as Keith Teare observed on R/WW recently, it is still early days and the revenues are not big at this point.

- OLPC: One Laptop Per Child will create good buzz and may increase the adoption of thin-client like computers (internet and web apps dependent) and Linux for the mainstream. See also Web Office above, which may find its true niche in non-traditional markets which can't afford Microsoft Office.

- Broadband continues to grow: For example Fiber Connections in France. There will be similar baby steps towards faster internet all around the world. After all, the broadband revolution created web 2.0, Google and web apps. So it's worth following this trend!

Mobile

- VoIP space will really hot up. Skype and a bunch of new competitors will compete and potentially disrupt the telecoms industry.

- Mobile Web may be the big story of 2007 - certainly in China, Korea and Japan; but perhaps even the US and other 'behind the times' places like New Zealand and Australia. Related to this is that online/offline mobile technologies like Smartpox may become more popular in the West (they already are in Asia). 

- Mobile will be a bigger development and advertising platform in '07 (jajah mobile etc).

- Also watch for an emerging Webphone market - for example Apple's rumored iPhone and a GooglePhone.

Courtesy of mobile Web expert Rudy De Waele, here are 10 specific trends for mobile Web in '07:

1. Flat fees will become more affordable bit by bit.
2. Thus, more user-generated content will become available to the phone; opening the way for mobile users to start using new web/mobile 2.0 services on their phones, such as podcasting, RSS feeds, more user-generated content to upload and use.
3. Big Media Youth Networks going mobile - MySpace, YouTube, MTV and many more players will resolutely go mobile; allowing users to upload pictures, videos and create/consume content straight from their mobile phones. And to share with friends (including mobile forwarding functionality).
4. Mobile search - the big players will start positioning seriously in the mobile market (watch out for deals with carriers/operators and device manufacturers)
5. Mobile ads - the market is growing at a rapid pace (just watch AdMob's ad views ticker box daily)
6. QR codes will start to enter retail markets.
7. Mobile image recognition will pop up in mixed marketing campaigns.
8. Cell Phone memory card swapping - to exchange music/video files.
9. Multiple network download hotspots become available in urban zones - enabling 'on the spot' mobile download and internet access possibilities via wi-fi/wimax/bluetooth/nfc/etc.... (all build in or available immediately)
10. Rise of 'smart client' solutions, for convergence of content and application functionality on mobile devices in general.

Summary

Whew! There are a lot of predictions in this post, but of course we've probably just scratched the surface. We'd love to hear your own Web predictions for 2007. What have we missed? Please leave a comment and/or participate in our poll.

What Time got right

Yes, the Web is "a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before." It is about normal people contributing to media on a mass scale, thanks to web sites like MySpace, YouTube and Wikipedia. It is also about "an explosion of productivity and innovation" which is "just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy." 

All of this is what I refer to as the Social Web, or the read/write Web. Time magazine generally refers to it as Web 2.0 - which they archly note is what "Silicon Valley consultants call it". 

This isn't a "revolution". It's an evolution of the Web - and I've written a hundred times about how Tim Berners-Lee always wanted the Web to be read/write, or editable. Sure Sir Tim probably never envisaged the Web he created 15 years ago as being the center of our electronic social lives in 2006, at least on the scale it's become. But he always wanted the Web to be a two-way medium - which is exactly what Time magazine is celebrating today. So no, it's not a revolution - the Web has evolved to be what it is over 15 years, including a few years of growing pains in the early part of this century known as the 'dot com' years.

I also somewhat resent the (usual) mainstream media condescension about blogs and social networks. Consider this passage from Time's cover article:

"Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

The answer is, you do."

Gee, thanks Time. I'll just go and blog about my state of mind now... I'll leave the real journalism to the professionals. And btw, what the heck are "steak-frites"?!

One final thing bothers me.... Time goes to great lengths to say that the Web is a democratizing force for 'the people'. Yet their view of the Web seems to be very centered on one place: Silicon Valley. I can understand this, to a degree. The Valley is where most of the action is, just like Hollywood is where it's at for movies. 

But still, it seemed like the international people that did get mentioned were just clichéd bit players in this Web 2.0 world: the French rapper, the Pakistani Flickr user, an "irreverent Chinese blogger", "a mother in Baghdad with a videophone"... you get the picture. Meanwhile Silicon Valley bloggers Dave Winer and Om Malik got to explain what the new Web actually means and in another part of the Time coverage Web 2.0 was described as "an excess of democracy" (which, let's face it, is a very US-centric way to view the Web). I'm not sure what my point is here, other than I think the international players on the Web deserved wider and less clichéd coverage. But then I would say that.

Overall though, I can't wait to pick up a paper copy of this edition of Time magazine - I'm thrilled that the Web is their Person of the Year!

Turning the Tide

The other day I was trying out IE 7. It has a nifty feature that downloads all the elements of a web page and stores them together in one file for future viewing. We do a lot of work with SharePoint at my company and I was curious how many bytes a generic, freshly created Document Workspace takes. It turned out to be 715K or so, which is surprisingly close to a megabyte. Thinking maybe this was MS/SharePoint specific, I tried a new Google Docs page (472K), a new Google Spreadsheet page (418K) and the front page of Yahoo Finance (429K). Somewhere along the lines, as HTML pages have entered the mainstream as real workhorses, the nimble HTML burros of the early web have morphed into plodding, three-tiered-architecture clydesdales. It doesn't take too many clicks and page refreshes before you've downloaded more bytes than a comparable rich application. Many, many more bytes. And that's just one page.

Could history repeat itself? What will be the tipping point for a few rich application machines to replace scores of web page clydesdales? One possibility is an increase in the cost of all those bytes, which is why Google (and most other web application providers) really would like to see a Net Neutrality amendment or bill [update: we edited the previous sentence after publication, based on comment 14 below].

More likely is something like Ektasis, a startup company that recently introduced itself to the world. Building a new platform, as noted earlier, is difficult enough. Handicapping it with a startup's cash constraints is insanity. But it's folks like these that make the world a better place. And thankfully, they do have a very impressive solution to the install/uninstall problem facing rich applications today. It's a solution that Microsoft would do well to copy and Google to study: fully functional client software that can install and run with a click, and an automatic code versioning/updating system. This means instead of downloading entire applications, pieces of applications - individual classes or object files - can be retrieved and fine-grained, surgical updates can be performed. What they've done is taken the best practices of browsers and web page assembly - and applied it to desktop apps. Ektasis has a great strategy for merging the desktop and web environments. Perhaps they will be able to catch the right wave.

Any virtual machine can also use this piecemeal download and assembly strategy. In theory, an operating system like Windows could do it too. But in practice, because of its own success, there are too many millions of windows applications to support - some written by software publishers, most written in offices and cubicles in every part of the world. Therefore the better solution is to lay new groundwork for a better virtual machine, something that includes a smart loader/linker like the Ektasis framework. This will negate the installation/uninstallation advantage web applications enjoy today. Furthermore, it will give developers more choices in how they want their apps to work.

More choices? The other nice thing about virtual machines is that they are portable, just like a browser. But it's not for running .NET apps on Macs, though that may happen. Rather, portability is gaining in importance for mobile devices. Any company with an eye for growth has noticed cell phone sales far surpassing PC sales. Add millions of cell phones, Blackberries, SideKicks to the environment and it's clear the playing field of tomorrow is a whole lot bigger than the playing field of today - if you're able to span devices.

Google's Dilemma: The Next Big Thing?

As enormous as Google seems, its position is far from unassailable and their options are surprisingly limited. There is nothing preventing Microsoft from duplicating Google's online strategy, other than prime mover momentum. Even with copious advertising profits and their astounding growth rate, Google makes only a little more than 10% of what Microsoft makes. Which means MSFT can easily outspend GOOG. Enough to slow Google's current momentum? Probably not. Enough to pounce on Google when advertising profits suffer a downtown? Most definitely yes.

In fact, Google 2006 reminds me a bit of AOL in 1996: long on one cash cow, short on any others. In 1996 AOL was the growing giant. By 2001 the giant's food source had changed. The cause of AOL's problems was over-reliance on their growth engine. Once it started sputtering, they had no other profitable property to rev up. As a result, even though they had well known properties (AIM, 'You've got Mail', etc), they could not monetize them and thus were dead in the water. 

For all the apps Google puts out, very few can be considered 'sticky', and even fewer can be monetized outside of advertising - it's too easy to go to Yahoo or MSN for the same free service.

Indeed, Microsoft is already encroaching at each potential feeding ground. Google offers Earth, Microsoft offers Virtual Earth. Google offers AdWords, Microsoft offers AdCenter. Google offers documents and spreadsheets, Microsoft offers Office Live. Google invests heavily in Firefox, Microsoft shakes the dust off Internet Explorer. Google has built its momentum by brilliantly exploiting the web. While Microsoft just seeks to match them, they have a fighting chance. But what happens when Microsoft takes the battle to the next level and introduces a smarter, portable virtual machine that unifies the development experience for PCs and mobile devices? Google answers with... what?

Perhaps they can invest more in Firefox. Perhaps Eric Schmidt fondly remembers his Sun days and resuscitates JavaOS (he did just resuscitate 'The Network is the Computer,' after all). Unfortunately for Google, Microsoft is more than a match for them on both counts. One possibility is buying an undervalued property aligned with its business, but currently lacking frothy sizzle. A company like EMC (an information infrastructure company). It aligns well with Google's information driven goals, has lots of assets and even more relationships. But even that may be window dressing for EMC's crown jewel, which might be worth the acquisition alone: VMWare.

Acquisition options for Google

VMWare has actually, unbelievably, beaten Microsoft on its own turf - building a better virtual machine (the V and M in VMWare). I'm sure they could create virtual machines that would run .NET and .NET apps. While Google would never be able to root out Windows on PC machines, they could capture the bulk of billions and billions of cell phones, mobile and personal devices that will deluge us over the next several years.

Such a staid purchase, however, might wash a bit too much glitter off Google. For something a little more snazzy, and just a bit more affordable, they could make an even bigger splash and buy Adobe. It's all funny money for Google at this point and buying Adobe would give them fabulous software assets in PDF, Flash and Photoshop - three pivotal areas of the web, and markets Microsoft has been unable to capture. Furthermore, Adobe's ambitious Apollo project could become a crown jewel, too. Finally, Adobe is just up the creek from Mountain View. (Full Disclosure: I'm a former employee and own shares of Adobe)

But Google will have to act soon. Microsoft has already taken away one potential option for Google - Novell's .NET Mono project. Microsoft must be thinking about the mobile deluge too. They've already met Google head on at every online PC location, and there's every reason to believe the same thing will happen at every mobile hotspot as well.

If Google wants to avoid being the next AOL and instead make a real grab for software supremacy, it needs to expand and diversify its revenue source. Fast. Firefox is not enough; their own OS is not viable. With their stock price Google has some options. Perhaps a solid information infrastructure provider like EMC, or a 24 carat technology treasure like Adobe. Either way, Google needs continued brilliance at managing their search armada, stickier internet properties they can monetize and an extra boost to propel their ascent past Windows.

And they need Microsoft to make a mistake.

Windows is Dead. Long Live Windows.

Have you ever read Slashdot and noticed that every article about Microsoft is accompanied by a picture of Bill Gates made up as a Borg? While it may appear in bad taste, it's actually a very flattering compliment. For most of their history, Microsoft has been able to adapt like very few companies before it - and it speaks to the very core of their success. Though the software environment may be warming in Redmond - the water lapping at their ankles and the investors clamoring for greater returns from the hunt - Microsoft has usually been able to make hard, but correct, choices. And when they don't - then scariest of all, they learn from their mistakes. The result is that Microsoft has a solid position at the top of the software food chain.

Learning from their mistake with Linux is what led to the recent deal with Novell. Microsoft's initial mistake? Not taking Linux seriously. Now it's a serious headache for them. Though it may seem a stretch today, another headache had been looming on Microsoft's horizon - especially with the growing importance of .NET. That was Novell's Mono project. Mono allows .NET code to run on any machine that can run Mono, similar to HTML code running on any machine a browser runs on. But Novell needed the money; Microsoft needed to remove a threat. The solution: pay chump change (for Microsoft) to Novell for access to Mono. Lesson learned and problem solved.

But just as Google 2006 reminds me of AOL 1996, Microsoft 2007 will soon have a major decision to make similar to Microsoft 1997. Back in 1997, strange as it may seem, Java was the rage and elements within Microsoft were comparing and contrasting the virtues of virtual machines with the ungainliness of Windows. A management shakeup resulted and Microsoft, correctly, continued to orient itself around their OS and fortified any cracks in the foundation. Fast-forward to 2007 and Microsoft will again be comparing and contrasting virtual machines with an even more unwieldy Windows.

This time however, Windows is acting like a dam blocking a surging ocean of innovation. Further fortifications are useless - you can't stop a sea change in technology. Of course this time Microsoft happens to own both options on the table: a nimble virtual machine that can run on as many devices as needed, or an unbowed warhorse ready to fight the last battle. Once again it's the horse that must go. Not Windows the brand, but Windows inextricably tied to the PC platform.

Except in 2007, it won't be Bill Gates delivering the memo. The mantle of technical leadership, and compelling memo writer, has fallen on Ray Ozzie's shoulders. His greatest test? Slowly defocusing Windows bound to a PC and refocusing on a portable, virtual machine 'Windows' fueled by .NET and online services. My company worked with Ray's former company, Groove, for many years and while I haven't had a chance to sit down with him, I know he's very capable technically. But it's the selling part - the clarity of vision, the sureness of direction, the respect of employees, the sheer force of personality - that is extremely difficult for 99.9% of the world. In that respect, Bill is an exceedingly tough act to follow.

How important is it to have a leader when coming to a fork in the stream? History tells us that most empires start crumbling from within before the outward edifices are breeched. Microsoft head count has nearly quadrupled since 1997, as has revenue. There's a good chance the number of internal fiefdoms has quadrupled - as well as competing interests. It was definitely surprising how little the web was mentioned in the recent Vista/Office 2007 press event. Perhaps Google's best bet is whispering sweet nothings in every willing ear.

When the Storm Clears

But for all the managers, marketers, salesmen and saleswomen hired, Microsoft is still, at its core, a technical company. In order for the outside world to know if the technocrats at Microsoft have bought in to Ray's vision, the key development to watch will be 'old' Windows being put out to pasture. Again, Windows the brand lives on; Windows the tightly integrated OS for x86 computers does not. It's not a unique situation, it's just that the stakes have never been higher. DOS was a tremendous cash cow before Microsoft replaced it with the greatest cash cow in history: Windows. There's every reason to believe the next cash cow will be even greater. If Microsoft engineers can convince everyone it's time for Windows, following the revolutionary trend, to disappear and be re-imagined as a virtual machine intricately tied to the web, then Google will be up a creek no matter what they do.

Remember, you always want to follow the data. Microsoft and Google are struggling to own it on the estimated 234 million PCs shipping this year. But it will be the first company that can extend their reach to the 245 million mobile devices shipped last quarter that will be the winner. While Google has the richer feeding grounds as Microsoft struggles with the current Windows/Desktop status quo, it's actually Microsoft with the canoe, the paddles and the most rods and reels. If they get everyone on board, then Microsoft should continue ruling the land and the seas.

Until the next unintended consequence.

The most insidious thing about global warming is that it's everywhere, but not right in front of you. And really, it has more to do with things disappearing than appearing - things like glaciers, ice shelves and low lying islands. The odd thing is that the progenitor of global warming, the Industrial Revolution, was rooted in making things disappear as well. For example, teams of horses became a steam engine or two.

Though not as pernicious as climatic change, the software environment - admittedly nowhere near as complex, but growing more convoluted every day - is tracking a similar course. Just as odd, the Information Revolution was also rooted in making things disappear. For instance, teams of typists became a shared printer or two. But now newspapers are shrinking, phone and cable companies are mutating and the distance between people is vanishing. In fact, just like the first scientists researching the rise in ocean temperatures, a group has recently been commissioned to study the ramifications of the web.

Windows is leaking, while a Google hurricane forms...

Revolutions have many components, including the seeds of their own destruction. Once the genie escapes from the bottle, he begins enforcing the Law of Unintended Consequences. Ask an industrialist in 1875 if his coal burning plant could change the earth's climate and he would have thought you're from another planet. Ask a venture capitalist a few years ago if operating system hegemony could become an albatross weighing a company down, hindering entry into new markets and emboldening competitors - and he or she would have thought the same.

It hasn't happened overnight. Rather, its been a trickle - which started the very second that Windows shipped. Water actually started pooling around Windows back in the mid 90s when Netscape offered a portal to a new frontier. Bill Gates - well acquainted with weather in Seattle - recognized the moisture in his foundation, installed an Internet Explorer sump pump and weathered the storm.

Now it's the mid 00s, and it's Google gushing with ideas, cash and optimism. Many observers think a hurricane is forming in Mountain View that threatens to swamp not just Windows, but Redmond's entire empire. Well, forecasting has never been an exact science - and I wouldn't fret for Microsoft quite yet. Sure the vista may be a bit foggy, but Microsoft has a few more resources than anyone else. Even as the tide rises, they already have newer, more sea-worthy vessels well under construction. And Google? They might just miss the boat.

GoogleOS actually fogging the field

The mere mention of a new operating system competing with Microsoft reminds everyone how much fun the old days were. Apple, IBM and Microsoft continually sparred, parried and blocked each other for many years before Windows finally won the battle. It's gotten downright boring since those days, so it's easy to understand the tizzy surrounding even the prospects of another brouhaha. But Google building, releasing and supporting their own OS? I'd sooner believe them walking on water.

Bringing an operating system to market is an extremely poor idea if you want to grow a business. Indeed, recent history has plenty examples of great new operating systems - OS/2, Taligent, BeOS, JavaOS to name some prominent ones - that siphoned off huge amounts of resources and either left the company in ruins or seeking greener pastures. An ill wind blows for any OS leaving the comfy confines of its incubator. And Linux? It's not a business, and therefore not in this article - but I think Microsoft fears Linux a whole lot more than GoogleOS.

First a brief primer on why it's great to own an operating system. In short, it's a lot like owning an industrial age railroad. Railways and trains are like operating systems and applications. Operating systems are the rails themselves. Applications are the trains which, of course, run on the rails. In order for trains to travel on a railway, they must match the railway's gauge. In order for applications to run on operating systems, they must match the OS's API. If a train doesn't match a rail's gauge, or an application doesn't match an OS's API - things don't turn out well.

As the robber barons found out, when a railroad achieves critical mass you make a boatload of money. Better yet, once that track is laid it's very difficult to move aside. Like any good robber baron, Microsoft would love for Google to compete on the same field where Microsoft owns all the rails and most of the trains. In fact, that kind of GoogleOS is Microsoft's wildest fantasy come true. Microsoft would be fully capable, and would probably relish the opportunity, of roughing Google up, dragging them through the mud and sending them on their way - just like they did with Sun, Apple, IBM, Netscape, Novell and Digital Research.

What Google wants is new real estate on a higher level - a better location where they can lay their own rails. But while it may look like they've found the best location on the web, Google is in fact still traveling on other peoples rails - Microsoft's, Apple's and Linux's. They do so by offering free train rides on various implementations of the world's most successful virtual machine. But the free ride won't last forever. Google most likely will need another virtual machine to compete and grow. Otherwise, they may face a fate similar to yet another high flyer from the 1990s (see if you can guess who!).

A perfect Virtual Machine storm is breaking Windows

If you can't run on the rails, you can always take to the air. Such a notion probably would have seemed silly to Jay Gould or Leland Stanford - at least until Orville and Wilbur Wright traveled by rail to North Carolina. While Orville and Wilbur might have not have understood the business pitch of Larry and Sergey, they would have recognized kindred spirits riding along the world wide web on someone else's infrastructure.

Consider two classic applications for two platforms. One is more or less owned by Microsoft, the other more or less owned by Google. The apps are familiar to every programmer: 'Hello World' done in C++ and HTML.

In C++:

#include <iostream.h>

int main( int args, char **argv ) {

cout << "Hello World" << endl;

return 0;

}

In HTML:

<HTML>
<BODY>
<P>Hello World</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>

As always, the devil is in the details. What is not shown is the C++ compiler and linker that turns code into executable. Also not shown is the web browser which takes HTML and makes it presentable. And that's really the only difference between these two programs. Of course the ramifications are profound: the C++ application can only run on the operating system it was built for, whereas the HTML application can run on browsers, which in turn run on operating systems. In fact, the browser is really a virtual machine. The world's most successful, widely deployed, virtual machine.

There are two additional properties that add critical value to this virtual machine: 

1) An explicit contract on how to install and uninstall applications; and 

2) An explicit contract on how an application can affect a user's machine. 

These two features have tipped the balance so far that users are willing to put up with a more rudimentary web UI than rich desktop UI.

Google's high tide?

When you visit a web page for the first time, you are installing an application. The HTML page your browser is reading is both a manifest for additional resources (images and graphics, cascading style sheets, javascript and embedded objects) and instructions for how the page should be rendered. Your browser stores as many of these resources as possible on your local disk, in order to start up faster the next time. Better yet, it checks whether these resources need updating on each visit. So why doesn't your IT person freak out when you install HTML pages, like when you install desktop applications? Because of the explicit contract that limits how an HTML application can affect your machine.

Purveyors of C++ applications realized the advantages of HTML applications immediately and even tried to address the manifest issue. But while they could create a download manifest, they couldn't enforce the necessary constraints that make IT people happy. Additionally, the applications they were downloading were much larger than piecemeal HTML pages. Throw in a few security holes and well publicized exploits and it's obvious why HTML web applications are in such favor.

These are the advantages Google enjoys today. However, two fissures exist that will force them to move:

1) Microsoft's ability to use the exact same HTML based strategy (like their current Live initiative); and

2) More threatening is Microsoft leapfrogging the current environment by solving rich application installation/uninstallation and enforcing an acceptable contract regarding what rich apps can do on a user's machine.

Unfortunately for Google, Microsoft is a lot closer to solving these two issues than people think. Microsoft has the best virtual machine with .NET, the best development tool with Visual Studio and the best access to developers with their MSDN programs. And they have a notion. Steve Ballmer himself has started touting the exact strategy they need - Click Once and Run. The final thing they need is a technical solution for .NET - similar to what a little startup in Redwood City, CA has done for Java...

TO BE CONTINUED... Join us for the next installment, when we find out just who this little Redwood City startup is!

Image by Jon Cornforth

Update: Part 2 of this series is now available.

"We started confab.yahoo because we want to push the web and its applications up to the next level. After slightly more than a decade, we as an industry have only scratched the surface of the web’s potential. The opportunities are virtually infinite, and we aim to bring together the people that can inspire the next generation web."

The next generation web is what R/WW is all about, of course :-) The feature panel is one entitled 'Prediction Markets: Tapping the Wisdom of Crowds' and is being moderated by author James Surowiecki (whose book 'The Wisdom of Crowds' is oft-cited by web 2 fans). The other panels feature an impressive line-up of speakers - including from the Big 3 Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Prediction markets are, according to Wikipedia, speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions. The idea is a great one to apply to web technology, because it is such an exciting and fast changing environment. On a related note, check out the blog for The Institute for the Future. It's a non-profit research organization located in Palo Alto, California and has some excellent background material about predictive marketing and technology.

The event is on Wed Dec 13, 5:30-8:00pm. Unfortunately I'm unable to attend - so if anyone wants to volunteer to be a R/WW guest blogger for this, send me an email :-)

John Markoff's recent article in NY Times has generated an interesting discussion about Web 3.0 being the long-promised Semantic Web. For instance, a short post on Fred Wilson's blog had a lot of lengthy comments attempting to define Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. Some people think that the Semantic Web is about AI, some claim that it is more about semantics, while others say that it is about data annotation. All agree however, that we will all be wonderfully more productive and simply happier when it arrives. Lets take a look at the ingredients, definitions and approaches to the Semantic Web so that we can recognize it when it is finally here.

What is the Semantic Web?

The Wikipedia defines the Semantic Web as a project that intends to create a universal medium for information exchange by putting documents with computer-processable meaning (semantics) on the World Wide Web. The core idea is to create the meta data describing the data, which will enable computers to process the meaning of things. Once computers are equipped with semantics, they will be capable of solving complex semantical optimization problems. For example, as John Markoff describes in his article, a computer will be able to instantly return relevant search results if you tell it to find a vacation on a 3K budget.

In order for computers to be able to solve problems like this one, the information on the web needs to be annotated with descriptions and relationships. Basic examples of semantics consist of categorizing an object and its attributes. For example, books fall into a Books category where each object has attributes such as the author, the number of pages and the publication date. The basic example of a relationship comes from various social networks that we are part of. In one network the relationship might be a friend of, in another a family member and in another works with.

There are billions of fairly unstructured HTML pages which contain no annotations and meta data. The fundamental engineering question is how can we go from today's unstructured web to one rich with semantical information? W3C consortium authored specs for RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Languages) attempt to enable the collective capture and description of information, along with the ontology and the relationships with other pieces of information, in a rigorous, mathematical way.

RDF is an XML-based language which enables description of relationships via predicates. The Wikipedia explains: The subject denotes the resource, and the predicate denotes traits or aspects of the resource and expresses a relationship between the subject and the object. For example, one way to represent the notion "The sky has the color blue" in RDF is as a triple of specially formatted strings: a subject denoting "the sky", a predicate denoting "has the color", and an object denoting "blue".

OWL is another XML-based language used for describing and reasoning ontologies. In a nutshell, OWL facilitates semantic descriptions such as Dog is an animal or Dog has four legs. There are three flavors of OWL: OWL Lite, OWL DL and OWL Full - each flavor capturing a different side of a trade off between expressiveness and computability. This RDF/OWL framework is comprehensive, but is difficult for people without a background in mathematics and computer science to understand. Given that this is a bottom up approach, it is clear that if it is to succeed, there needs to exist an automated mechanism that takes existing HTML content and turns it into RDF and OWL meta data. This, however, is a chicken-egg problem because if we could already do this, the problem would not be there to begin with. Still we can envision tooling which does 80% of the work automatically and then interacts with the person to complete the other 20% of the work.

Microformats

Recognizing the complexity of RDF and OWL, a group of people are trying a different approach called Microformats. The goal of microformats is to embed the basic semantics right into HTML pages. It is not as expressive right now as RDF and OWL, but it is very compact and uses available XHTML facilities to add semantics to the pages. For example, there is a microformat for describing contact information called hCard. Using hCard it is possible to annotate the HTML so that a microformat-aware browser or a search engine can deduce the information about a person such as first and last name, a company or a phone number. Another mature microformat called hCalendar enables page authors to describe events. Many popular event sites, such as Facebook and Yahoo! Local use this format to annotate events in their HTML pages.

Leaving the aesthetics of the representation aside, the microformats approach is clearly simpler than RDF and OWL. And even though it is less powerful, it is becoming very popular. Many site authors are starting to embed microformats into their HTML pages. We are also seeing some early examples of search engines based on microformats, like this one from Technorati. The simple gain in using microformats and doing search is removing ambiguity. In a way, it is similar to the vertical search engine - which knows which vertical you are searching. With microformats inside the pages, the data is also no longer ambiguous, so the search results are more precise.

Still, there are some issues with microformats. The first one is the same as with the previous bottom up approach - people have to do the work to annotate the pages. The good news is that since the format is simpler, more can be done via reverse engineering and automation. The second issue is that the current set of microformats does not cover many things that we encounter online. For example, we are not aware of a format that would help represent a book or a movie. Many more formats need to be created before they can really "cover" the web.

Semantic Web is Personalized Web

The problem of annotating data is very complex and is far from being solved completely. But let’s leave it aside for a moment and think of what we can be doing once all the data becomes annotated. The promise is that we will be doing less of what we are doing now - namely sifting through piles of irrelevant information. Given that the amount of information is growing exponentially and our tolerance is shrinking, this is a very intriguing proposition. If the computer can return relevant results instantly, we can potentially save a ton of time.

But having semantics and knowing all relationships between the data is not enough to do that. Take the simple example of a travel agency. When you show up there for the first time, the agent does not know what to offer you, even though she knows the semantics of travel, the relationships between things and the prices of everything. In order to be effective, she needs to know where you've been already and what kind of destinations you like. That’s why she asks you questions. All services that we receive work this way and the results are better and more refined over time, because service people have time to learn what you like.

So the second important ingredient of the Semantic Web, the one that will facilitate productivity, is a set of persistent personal preferences. Once the computer knows your preferences and has a semantical representation of it online, it can then run an algorithm to deliver you precise, personalized results. To put it differently, your personal preferences is the filter that needs to be applied to the results that the computer returns in response to: Find a vacation for under 3K. And when this happens, then we can claim that the Semantic Web has arrived.

Conclusion

So will the 'Web 3.0' be the Semantic Web? Probably. But are we there yet? Not quite. It will take some time to annotate the world's information and then to capture personal information in the right way, to enable the kinds of applications that we have discussed. We are certainly getting close and it will be interesting to see how things unfold over the next few years.

Incidentally, if you would like us to write more about the Semantic Web please let us know and we will do follow up posts.

Web science will have both social and engineering dimensions. As the NY Times reported, it will include the emerging research in social networks and the social sciences that is being used to study how people behave on the Web. For example trust and privacy are two specific areas that can be studied more. Also Web Science will look at more technical areas, such as how huge decentralized Web systems work. In the conference call, it was made clear that researching the economic consequences of the Web (and "web 2" was mentioned) is part of the agenda too.

"What we're saying is that it's becoming so important that things like Wikipedia are being created, new business models are emerging and that it's changing our lives so much that we have to have a science to understand this."

In terms of how Web Science will shape the future Web, Sir Tim told the BBC that the Web is a creative medium - and so the Web has to develop new features that "express the social properties of information which specify what it is, where its from and how trustworthy it is."

Highlights from conference call

In the conference call Tim Berners-Lee started off by mentioning the 100 million Web sites milestone recently reached by the Web. He went on to say that Web Science is about understanding the macroscopic network-driven effects of the Web, which have evolved from the microscopic aspects of the Web which he created. Ultimately though, Sir Tim said that "the goal is social" and the Web is about helping humanity.

Berners-Lee spoke about how even in the field of economics, it's not just about studying the money part of the dot com era, but how things like Page Rank have influenced the system - "the way effectively the currency now flows across the links as kudos, as reputation of web sites". So with this initiative they want to bring together lots of different disciplines (computing, biology, economics, etc), as well as focusing on understanding and engineering the Web as one big system.

According to Tim, Web Science is about "building a new Web, a better Web, building things on top of the Web infrastructure" - making the Web infrastructure a space where things can happen and making that space more powerful. He spoke about how the Web started off with simple rules - e.g. http. But you can't tell the macroscopic effects of that by looking at the rules of http - "the macroscopic system is very complicated". He also mentioned building "a fractal society", which he's spoken about a lot before and I've written about in the past too.

In the Web Science initiative, Tim said they'll be "developing new ways of analyzing things and we'll be building systems which have completely new properties". But he made a point of saying that because the Web is about people, social aspects will be a very important part of it. Also the creativity aspect of the Web - Tim said at one point that "the really important thing about the Web is that it's a universal space".

Summary

I for one am very pleased that studying Web systems is now an official discipline - and who better to lead it than Tim Berners-Lee and MIT. In many ways, some of us tech bloggers have been unofficially studying the Web for quite some time, but of course you also need hard data and complex analysis as well - which is where Web Science will hopefully shine. As Tim Berners-Lee said, the Web system is huge and complicated. There's a lot we're still learning about the Web and its effects on society and business.

The days of purely desktop-based applications are clearly numbered, but so are the days of exclusively web-based apps...

The two elephants of personal computing these days are Microsoft and Google. Microsoft rose to dominance by capturing the desktop. Google is rising to dominance by capturing the web. Both strategies revolve around who can capture your data. Elephants require massive amounts of food to survive, so it's no surprise that Microsoft and Google are eyeing each other's data. Microsoft has started a 'Live' initiative to engage Google on the web. Google has tinkered with productivity apps that might just work offline, to join Microsoft on the desktop. If either Microsoft or Google is successful at grabbing the other's data, the most useful byproduct of their efforts will be new ways to easily move data between the desktop and web. The result of this battle will further blur the lines between purely desktop and exclusively web applications.

But as often happens when elephants trample the landscape, they create new opportunities for smaller, more nimble animals to grow and prosper. As Microsoft and Google narrow their focuses on each other, they will either fail to notice the landscape is changing underfoot, or will be unable to adapt quickly enough. It's not just naive optimism; there's plenty of historical precedent. Just as Ford couldn't build all the world's cars, AT&T all the world's telephones and IBM all the world's computers - neither Microsoft nor Google will be able to write all the world's software. In fact, the very rise of Google demonstrated this to Microsoft. As a result, the consumer and business software markets are poised to open up as never before.

Can a foundation become an elephant? And not elephant as a pejorative, but as a measure of power - the power to change the environment around you. The Gates Foundation is such an elephant. The Heritage Foundation has certainly had an outsized impact. In the software world, the foundation to keep an eye on is Mozilla. How does a lizard become an elephant? By doing something nobody thought possible, of course. Take on a product that dominates the web experience and is embedded in over 90% of the world's computers, carve a niche for yourself with inspired innovation and market yourself into one of the top ten brands in the world.

Though there may be infinite user interface features to invent, I would like to see Firefox address the area in most distress: data distribution and replication. The browser is uniquely positioned among all applications as the desktop gateway to every existing web application. It's so obvious it seems trivial. It's not. Just as every desktop app needs an OS, every web application needs a browser. Forget standards, pay no attention to partnerships and don't let XML web services fool you - the web browser represents a GREAT opportunity to connect web applications together.

But first the web browser needs a feature. And in the spirit of open source I'm happy to dispense my advice freely: data recognition. Right now the browser excels at data caching, which is how your email pops up on different web pages in any edit box named 'EMail'. It's time for the next step. The browser should start recognizing the concept of email and be able to offer suggestions for fields of similar ilk. It wouldn't even be that hard.

Have you noticed the anti-phishing features included in the latest browser releases? Solving the phishing problem is cool, but the method is even cooler: the browser constantly checks against a server for the latest exploits. What if a browser started keeping rich profiles of sites? And what if Mozilla started defining some common field groups, like 'User Information,' as rich data types? Mozilla could define rich data types and provide canonical lists of field names describing them. A web designer could then tag their forms to match rich types. Perhaps they match Mozilla's canonical names or perhaps they upload a field mapping to a Mozilla server. Much like checking the anti-phishing server, Mozilla could check this server for a site's rich data mappings and syntax turns into semantics.

With its popular browser, penchant for innovation and willingness to extend what the user experience can be, Mozilla has a chance to solidify itself among the giants and lay the groundwork for a real semantic web.

Trumba: A Hyrax

Richard MacManus recently reviewed Jeremy Jaech's latest company, Trumba. Mr. Jaech has enjoyed incredible success with two desktop business applications: PageMaker and Visio. Rather than rest on his laurels, his latest venture seeks to unify calendaring systems. It's an excellent idea - certainly a sweet spot for data distribution and replication issues. If Trumba can pull it off, it will certainly grow and Mr. Jaech will indeed  have a well-deserved hat trick.

However, while the idea is excellent, Trumba has an implementation problem: they have no desktop presence. In order to achieve ubiquity, Trumba is providing calendaring customizations and is pushing standards for web designers. This might work, but what about all the desktop organizers? What about Blackberries, SideKicks and cell phones? And if you're not online, it's impossible to read your current event information at all. Perhaps this is why consumers are still grappling with Trumba. Though the company is well rooted in desktop business apps, they seem a bit mired with a philosophical devotion to a 100% web solution. As a result, though consumers can see the basic problem and Trumba sounds interesting, the solution isn't compelling enough.

I think they need to return to their roots a bit and develop a browser plugin. Something to give them a foothold on the desktop, able to synchronize with mobile devices and, most importantly, synchronize with the most common personal organizers. Start with MS Outlook. Entertain Thunderbird. But by all means make it a one-button-and-done issue for the consumer to note an event and publish it to every relevant device. Perhaps a Google calendar, perhaps a Blackberry or cell phone - most likely all of the above. Remember it's the browser that offers a connection point today. Maybe you can convince everyone to adopt your calendars and your standards tomorrow. But if you make it work today, then you can dictate instead of cajole.

Strangely enough, a company is attempting to do something similar right now. SpanningSync works only for the Mac, but that's never stopped a good idea before.

By happy geographic coincidence, Trumba and my company TeamDirection are both located in Seattle. If I've gotten anything wrong, then I offer to be re-educated in person. Perhaps they have a suggestion or two for my project management solution. Like Trumba, TeamDirection is focusing on connecting tools together - in this case bidirectional synchronizing with MS Project, MindJet MindManager, SharePoint and Groove. I won't bore you with the details here, but I'd be happy to here.

Adobe: The Darkhorse (Darkelephant?)

One company has all the needed pieces on the desktop, but is searching for the right server parts. It's the best software company you've never heard of, even though it has a market capitalization of $22 billion US. It's the company that liked Mr. Jaech's PageMaker so much that they bought it. They were even critical to YouTube's success, yet somehow stayed out of the headlines. Of course the company is Adobe Systems. (Full Disclosure: John Milan is a former Adobe employee and owns some stock.)

Adobe's purchase of Macromedia was also a masterstroke, giving them two ubiquitous desktop applications, PDF and Flash, that derive much of their value by working across the web and across different systems. Adobe is currently touting their Apollo project, which looks like a very promising lure for developers. As they state:

"Apollo is targeted at developers who are currently leveraging web technologies, such as Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript and Ajax techniques to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications."

In other words, it's a toolset that anticipates desktop and web convergence. If they can convince enough developers to sign on to their Apollo platform, then Adobe won't need to build any server parts - all those developers will do it for them.

It's an audacious strategy which has been flying mostly under the radar. While Microsoft and Google have been trying to encroach on each other's turf, Adobe has been trying to move the whole playing field. I believe if they can include a few popular mobile devices as well, it just might work. According to Adobe, their HTML rendering engine was chosen because it works on mobile devices, so they're thinking along the same lines.

Conclusion: The Promised Lands

The days of purely desktop-based applications are clearly numbered, but so are the days of exclusively web-based apps. Both Microsoft and Google are racing toward a happy medium. However, they aren't the only players in town, not by a long shot. Both Mozilla and Adobe are well positioned to take advantage of desktop and web convergence. Companies offering solutions that connect desktop and web apps together will get their chance too. Calendaring and project management are two obvious choices, but every productivity app deserves to be re-examined.

Who will the winners be? To borrow a catchphrase, "Just follow the data." The key for success will be how easily data can be identified, distributed and synchronized. Soon enough it will be immaterial where your event or task originated. Instead, what will matter is that your data being everywhere and in sync.

Written by Guest Blogger John Milan and edited by Richard MacManus. John is Senior Software Architect and founder of TeamDirection, one of the companies mentioned in this post.

What amount of time is the right amount of time for two people to tie the knot? Three months? Two years? One decade? It turns out to be not so much a specific duration but an appropriate duration - long enough to understand each other, but no so long as to get bored.

Does the same hold true for software technologies and philosophies? It took about thirty years for a robust operating system to successfully join with a fetching graphical user interface. It took about forty years for the internet and markup languages to hook up and bear the web browsers we can't live without today.

Thirty years. Forty years. It takes a long time for technologies to understand each other. So how long will it take for social and business applications to embrace each other, much less produce the next generation of applications? It turns out not too much longer, because social and business applications have both been around the block a few times. If you believe that the first personal business applications arrived at the same time as the first personal computer; and if you believe that the first massively social application arrived when Dungeons and Dragons fans began to learn how to program, then social and business apps have been courting each other for well over twenty years now. It's starting to look like commitment time!

What exactly is a social application? As Ebrahim Ezzy observed in a recent Read/WriteWeb post, a social application is one that allows groups of people to coordinate certain kinds of interaction. However, he traced its origins back to only the late 1990s. I claim it dates back to the first MUD programs in the early 1980s. An older fellow with a better memory than both of us might claim it was the IBM 360 Mainframe, which brought SABRE to tens of thousands of travel agents and allowed them to coordinate ticketing interactions.

Or would that be an example of a business application? As Microsoft defines it: "business application refers to any application that is important to running your business". For example, the most critical application for most companies today is Email, which helps people coordinate certain kinds of interaction. Could Email be the first social business application?

Yes - and it also happens to be the most successful application of all time. The reason is simple: because it shares aspects of both social and business computing. Email is everywhere. Desktops or webtops, phones or blackberries. And because it has both social and business aspects, it can be used by corporate CEOs or PTA moms or dads - anyone who needs to coordinate group interaction.

That sounds like the definition for social business applications: software that coordinates group interaction that is important to running your business.

People, Data and Identity

There is one more feature critical to social and business applications - and it's the reason why Email can be everywhere. Identity.

If you want to be social or in business, you need an identity. With an identity you can build web pages and blogs. You can sign up for memberships and services. And you can participate in groups, discussions and the marketplace. As technology evolves, you see more features relying on identity - such as presence (for both instant messaging and workspace activity) and authority (such as Richard MacManus being an authority on web technology or Apple being an authority on coolness).

But what about Email messages? Do they have identities? Absolutely. Without an identity, how would the sender and the recipient(s) know and agree that the message on each person's computer is the same? As with any communication, we need assurances that the message we send and the message people receive are equivalent.

Identity is fundamental to any social or business application - not only for the humans involved, but also for the data.

Take a purely social application like match.com. Its value is not only in presenting individuals, but in presenting data about those individuals that everyone can agree on.

Or take a purely business application like salesforce.com. Again, its value is not only in presenting client applications - but in presenting data about those clients that everyone can agree on.

Finally, take an incredibly successful application like iTunes - which works equally well with the identity of the consumer and the identity of the merchandise. iTunes makes acquiring more songs via your credit card very easy. It shows social awareness by listing songs other people also like and manages the songs themselves superbly - both with licensing and by providing a handy carrying case. 

The iTunes/iPod experience is an excellent example of the next wave of social and business computing - applying social and business philosophies to both people and data.

Example Social Business Applications

After a few million years of evolution, it's not surprising you have an identity. After a few hundred years of litigation, we have established that corporations also have an identity. It's taken a scant 60 years to understand the implications of giving data identity, but then we're working on internet time these days. And social business applications? They're starting to appear today.

Microsoft Live Meeting

Purchased by Microsoft in January 2003, PlaceWare (now called LiveMeeting) was an excellent example of merging the social possibilities of the internet with the business requirements of the workplace. People could create and join meetings, have a presence visible to other members of the meeting, and share files - or even real-time desktop states - with an entire group.

Groove

Founded by Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie back in the late 1990s, Groove joins the immediacy of online presence and instant synchronization - with business context like permissions, roles, secure communication and offline capabilities. The origin of Groove can be traced back to Ray watching one of his kids playing online games and seeing how these virtual groups interacted. He drew parallels for how business groups could collaborate on problems (remember those MUDs?). Microsoft acquired Groove in March 2005 and Bill Gates has since transferred his visionary duties to Ray Ozzie.

TeamDirection

Founded in 2002, my company TeamDirection created the Project Management tools for Groove Project Edition. TeamDirection took advantage of the Groove infrastructure to provide a workgroup environment for all participants of a project. This allowed people to schedule, track and report their individual pieces - while TeamDirection kept the entire project synchronized and up to date with a master MS Project. We are extending the business aspects of Project Mangement by integrating with SharePoint web services. Similarly, TeamDirection is also extending the social aspects of Project Management by integrating instant messaging.

Colligo

Colligo Networks, Inc. was formed in April 2000 to address the collaboration challenges faced by mobile teams. In response to a significant customer problem, Colligo developed technology to enable users of IBM Lotus Notes to replicate their databases directly between laptops - without the need to connect to the Domino server. This was then expanded to enable laptop users on Microsoft Windows to connect directly over ad hoc wireless links to share messages, files, folders and resources. More recently, the company has developed products that enable users to take Microsoft SharePoint team sites offline.

The Future of Social Business Applications

While you might not be able to teach old dogs new tricks, you can certainly teach old applications a thing or two. Even old stalwarts like Email. While Email does a lot to connect people together and coordinate group activities, it would be even better if it incorporated a simple little feature most social applications use - an unread marker.

The Inbox has an unread marker. What if individual Emails could have unread markers too? That would allow users to update their Email messages. Would that break the social contract of everyone looking at equivalent messages? Not if a sender's updates are synchronized with all the recipients copies.

Why would this be a nice feature? The most common problem with Email today is that email fills our inboxes to the point of obfuscation. As the recipient list broadens and the discussion lengthens, it becomes too difficult for humans to organize sequential messages into a coherent structure. The Emails begin to lose their context.

But what if we could keep the discussion in context? People like to use social features (the sender, the message title, the date it was sent, whether I replied or not) to organize their messages. Nobody I know of can recall a message id (e.g. AaLLsd32232o002dad), but we do remember Bob's Email from last week.

If we re-factored Email to include a little social engineering, we could not only cut down on the sheer volume of email in our inboxes - but increase the utility of larger groups participating in a discussion. If it matches the original message id, then the new information can be merged seamlessly. And if it's merged seamlessly, then the context can be preserved and Email can be a productivity tool once again.

Enhancing Web Applications

You may have noticed that each of the above social business applications has a significant presence on the desktop. What might not be so obvious is that each of the above applications also has significant web awareness. 

Indeed, the job of social business applications is not to obviate web applications, but instead to enhance them. 

Each of the above applications makes tremendous use of web infrastructure to transfer and synchronize data. In the case of TeamDirection and Colligo, they treat the location of data agnostically- either in their environment or in a web (SharePoint) environment. Groove requires the internet for all communication, be it server-based or peer-to-peer. And LiveMeeting could not function without the internet. These apps all focus on synchronizing data to provide a uniform view for their clients. Such a view is only possible with the agreement of identity - be it a person or a bunch of bits.

It is also interesting to note the moves Microsoft has made in the social business application world. Holders of two of the the most lucrative franchises of all time, Windows and Office, Microsoft has been looking for ways to leverage their hegemony and lay the foundation for the next generation. Rich, internet enabled applications - by all outward appearances - seem to figure prominently in Microsoft's plans.

Summary

Social business apps are not about raising the profile of desktop applications, or diminishing the role of web applications - but rather enabling the flow of data in such a way as to make its location immaterial. As Email has aptly demonstrated, there is no one correct way to interact with messages. Rather, there is an incorrect way to stifle access of messages. 

The task at hand is to expand options for richer types of data: files, meetings, tasks, calendars and much more. When this individual data is synchronizable and accessible anywhere, anytime on anything offline or online - the next revolution of the Web will be at hand.

Pew has released its analysis of how the Internet will evolve over the next 14 or so years (2020). I'm inclined to agree with Om Malik that the conclusions about the technology are rather obvious: "a global, low-cost network will be thriving in 2020", which will bring about a "'flattening' of the world". You don't need to be Stanley Kubrick to figure that out.

The part I enjoyed the most was the section labeled: 'Thinking ahead to 2020: Some revealing quotations and predictions from the thousands of answers that were submitted to open-ended questions in the survey.'

I don't know if it was just me, but most of the predictions sounded remarkably like the plots or themes of famous sci-fi books or movies...

Some took inspiration from The Matrix movie...

"The evolution of smart machines: “Fear of enslavement by our creations is an old fear, and a literary tritism. But I fear something worse and much more likely – that sometime after 2020 our machines will become intelligent, evolve rapidly, and end up treating us as pets. We can at least take comfort that there is one worse fate – becoming food – that mercifully is highly unlikely.” – Paul Saffo, forecaster and director of The Institute for the Future"

Others took their cue from 2001: A Space Odyssey...

"“Until testing, bug fixing, user interfaces, usefulness and basic application by subjectmatter experts is given a higher priority than pure programmer skill, we are totally in danger of evolving into an out-of-control situation with autonomous technology.” – Elle Tracy, president of The Results Group"

There was the obligatory William Gibson-inspired Virtual Reality fantasy:

"The allure of virtual reality: “A human's desire is to reinvent himself, live out his fantasies, overindulge; addiction will definitely increase. Whole communities/subcultures, which even today are a growing faction, will materialise. We may see a vast blurring of virtual/real reality with many participants living an in-effect secluded lifestyle. Only in the online world will they participate in any form of human interaction.” – Robert Eller, technology consultant"

Even the boardgame Monopoly was evoked...

"How information disseminates: “Profit motives will impede data flow … Networks will conform to the public utility model, with stakeholders in generation, transmission, and distribution. Companies playing in each piece of the game will enact roadblocks to collect what they see as their fair share of tariff revenue.” – Peter Kim, senior analyst, Forrester Research"

But don't get me wrong, I love reading this stuff! It's just that I usually get my fix of such content from sci-fi books and movies :-)

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