Reflecting on the human condition was once a popular past-time. A lot of people used to read poetry as you may have heard. It may not be the Internet's fault that we're becoming less introspective - in fact the huge amount of activity data we're sharing online offers incredible opportunities for reflection, and for learning more about ourselves. It seems quite likely that we're going to miss those opportunities because our software is focused entirely on doing (and advertising) instead of on helping us think as much as it could. Of course that's much harder to do.

Burton Group analyst Mike Gotta wrote a blog post two years ago that articulated both the opportunities and some of the challenges to building meaningful value on top of our streams of aggregated data.

Stream processing systems (and associated analytical components) will become a critical underpinning for much of what is talked about in terms of workstreaming, lifestreaming, attention streams, collective intelligence and so on. Discovering patterns across people, interactions, information, activities and social networks and assessing those relationships is difficult enough. It becomes even more challenging when you also want the results to be communicated in a manner that is contextual, relevant and sensitive to attention (and confidentiality) needs.

Two years later activity streams are far, far more widespread than they were when Gotta envisioned analytics built on top of them. The analytics remain almost nowhere, though. That side of things just hasn't been meaningfully developed. Millions of people are farming for Facebook game makers, who are raking in millions of dollars, but all the social interaction that goes on in this increasingly social web remains otherwise under-utilized.

I want software that will tell me: "On Wednesdays you tend to post messages a lot in the morning, despite the fact that you have a lot of meetings. You post a lot about your health, too. Is work making you feel unhealthy?" Instead we get software like LuckyCal; it's cool but, instead it says to users "I see you're going to Denver next week, can I give you an affiliate link to buy tickets to a concert by one of the artists in your iTunes library?" That's a limited view of life and the world.

When ground-breaking service FriendFeed redesigned its site recently, it didn't build out more analytics than it initially offered each user about who connected most with their content, where their content was coming from, etc. Instead, FriendFeed shut that feature down. The API is still open and so little startups launch projects like FeedStats, but really - that's so limited it's nothing to get too excited about.

Twitter is a great, wide open platform of social data. Content, connections, time and user biographies can all be cross referenced there. The company hasn't allowed for really monster big data extraction for analysis, though.

Facebook is the most closed of all the social eco-systems, but they claim they are opening up. Firefox creator and now Facebook employee Blake Ross recently called our critique of Facebook's lack of openness dishonest but did offer this worthwhile explanation:

I believe it is disingenuous to summarize Facebook as 'fundamentally closed' because we have yet to build an API that would primarily be of interest to researchers and marketing companies. We've opened all of the information that users have granted permission to open, and that most developers have asked for.

Those are telling words. Marketers (and maybe a handful of researchers, though I'd argue that those are pretty important) are the only people who want Facebook activity stream data. Users don't want it. Developers don't, Ross claims. That's sad.

The patterns of activity in that data offer a unique opportunity to learn about ourselves - individually, in groups and as a society. Unfortunately, that opportunity may not be taken advantage of. A better title of this post might be If Web 3.0 Is Poetry, Will Anyone But Marketers Read It? The gleam of contextual advertising has shined so bright that targeted advertising is thought of as gold spun out of the straw of context. Context is being treated as otherwise worthless fodder for the creation of advertising. But the stuff of our lives isn't just a pathway to market to us.

Chris Messina is one of the leaders in the movement to create standards for Activity Stream data, so it can flow from site to site and be processed in interesting ways. It's the processing part that is most "3.0-like." Messina is optimistic. "I've made an assumption that somewhat richer feeds of what people are doing will lead to more aggregate analysis," he says.

"Blake may have a point, but I think the problem is that no one has access to the kind of data we're talking about at scale yet besides folks like Facebook or Twitter. Even FriendFeed is somewhat hamstrung with whatever comes out of these services and they have to try to pick out what's going on, in a somewhat arbitrary manner. Meanwhile, Myspace is trying to be as open as possible to maintain their position in the marketplace, and no one seems to want their data.

"I think there's a Facebook-sized opportunity to address the areas that you mentioned... to do something more subtle and intuitive based on these streams. We're really far off from it happening because the technology is so primitive still - but i do think that connecting the what that someone did with the why that motivated them will become a huge area of academic research. And yes, marketers will lead the way, and probably get a lot of it wrong. But then someone else (like Apple) will come along and synthesize all this data, and help people make better decisions by looking at everything that everyone else has done in the same situation before them...and then we'll start to see it pay off."

It may "pay off" - but if that just means in commercial terms we'll all be the poorer for it. Cool commercial apps sound great, but if that's all the further this goes that will be a real tragedy. There are technical challenges for sure, but hopefully developers will aim for the sky.

Odd "Fail" pic at top by Flickr user Nimbu.

This a personal impression based on actual conversations, not based on the attendance list.

• Serial entrepreneurs seeking their next big venture. I spoke to two of them. What was interesting was that both were very successful, knew very little about the semantic Web (they were there to learn), and were extremely open to seeking where the opportunities lie. In other words, they were at the formative stages of their ventures.
• Semantic Web pioneers. Conference organizers made it very clear they did not want an echo chamber of SemWeb experts talking to SemWeb experts. They wanted SemWeb experts to connect with business people who had problems that needed solving. That seemed to be happening.
• Connectors, money guys, promoters. There were quite a few of these, usually a sign that something is either happening or about to happen.
• Publishers. Well, the conference was in New York, so you would expect publishers, of all types, both big and small.
• Semantic Web ventures that are already getting traction. Most of these appearances took the form of speakers and conference sponsors.

Where Is the Value in this Next Phase of the Web?

This is what the serial entrepreneurs were asking. Here is my view after a few days of reflection. Three big market opportunities will see semantic Web technology used in different ways in the near term:

• Scientific/technical/medical (STM) publishing,
• Market research information created from random social media chatter,
• Improved advertising relevance.

Each of these deserves closer inspection.

Scientific/Technical/Medical Publishing

Open-source data will disrupt traditional data publishing -- in particular and immediately STM publishing -- similar to how open-source software disrupted the software industry. STM publishing is a market worth more than $10 billion, so this is significant. Similar forces will play out in financial, legal, and other data-rich industries, but STM is likely to be in the vanguard for the following reasons:

• Everybody in the eco-system wants this to happen except the current publishers. Governments and institutions that fund research want it to be freely available. The authors are not like book authors; they don't get paid per book sold. They want wide distribution and peer recognition.
• There are huge benefits to the raw data being machine-readable, not the least of which is that the data can be used for further analysis, rather than be squeezed into the artificial format designed for print journal distribution.
• Scientists and researchers will use the semantic Web tools that consumers and business people consider too complex (until some great UI designers take on this challenge).

As in any market transition, there will be winners and losers.

Winners:

• Scientists and researchers,
• (Indirectly) everyone who benefits from the products created by scientists and researchers,
• New publishers (or some other entity) that add enough value to free source data that they are still able to charge for it.

Losers:

• Traditional STM publishers who cling too tightly to their current cash cow and so cannot effectively ride the next wave.

After it goes through the STM sector, this wave will crash through other data-rich publishing markets, such as:

• Finance
• Law

Market Research Information Created from Social Media Chatter

The Web 2.0 era has unleashed an enormous amount of social media chatter. These conversations are inconsequential to all except the participants... until, that is, they are aggregated, structured, and analyzed. This is not simple to do, as security and intelligence agencies have long understood. When you can record any conversation you like, you quickly find that discovering something useful is really hard. Historically, only intelligence agencies have had access to this volume of chatter. And the public has only had access to conversations between "important" people about important subjects. Multiply the chat you and I had about what we had for breakfast a few million times, and someone might get interested, specifically someone in the market research industry.

Market research is a large industry. Obtaining explicit data about people by getting them to fill in surveys is becoming increasingly hard and expensive. Perhaps gathering data about what people are actually talking about and deriving something useful from that would be easier.

This is not likely that elusive native revenue model for social media. But it could be a useful add-on revenue stream. Semantic Web ventures that can pay social media sites for raw data, extract that data, add meaning, and sell it to marketers could do very well. That won't be easy to do well, though.

Improved Advertising Relevance

AdWords represented a massive advance in advertising relevance. It changed the advertising and media industries beyond recognition and made Google the most powerful technology company on the planet.

But is this as far as we can go with advertising relevance? Almost certainly not. Whether Google or another venture leverages the semantic Web, there is little doubt that semantic Web technology will improve advertising relevance. Quite how to do this is the subject of another post.

Disclosure: Web 3.0 was a sponsor of ReadWriteWeb, but we have no other financial interest in the event.

In 2009 we're seeing more products based on open, structured data e.g. Wolfram Alpha. We're seeing more real-time apps e.g. Twitter, OneRiot. And we're seeing better filters e.g. FriendFeed (and Facebook, which copies FriendFeed - er, I mean is inspired by).

• Open data
• Structured data -> smarter
• Filtering content
• Real-time
• Personalization
• Mobile (location-based, so you could say that's smarter use of data too)
• Internet of Things (the Web in real-world objects)

I pointed to Google's announcement last week of Search Options and Rich Snippets as one recent example of some of the above trends.

Because this was a relatively short presentation, I didn't go in-depth on these (and other) trends of the Web circa 2009. So we'd like to ask your help to fill in more details. Please leave a comment with your thoughts on the trends I mentioned - and what you would add. Also tell us what products you've seen this year that are doing something new and 'not Web 2.0'.

I'll do an update post later in the week, hopefully presenting a fuller look at current trends thanks to your comments.

For more on the above trends, check out these recent ReadWriteWeb posts:

• Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web
• Linked Data is Blooming: Why You Should Care
• Introduction to the Real-Time Web
• 3 Models of Value in the Real-Time Web
• The Man Who Made Gmail Says Real-Time Conversation is What's Next

Cartoon screenshot from Geek And Poke (see full cartoon in the presentation).

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Introducing the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management

Our First Premium Report for Businesses

This week we released our first premium report: The ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management. It's been in the works for more than four months and we believe it's unlike anything else you've seen. Businesses seeking to engage with online communities on their own websites or all around the social web will find the guide invaluable in getting up to speed on the state of the art and making sure their employees have the foundation they need to be effective.

The end product is in two parts. Part one is a 75 page collection of case studies, advice and discussion concerning the most important issues in online community. Part two is a companion online aggregator that delivers the most-discussed articles each day written by experts on community management from around the web. The Guide is available for purchase at a price of $299. (You won't be charged until you complete a few simple steps on that page.) You can download a free sample section of the report here.

Web Products

Twitter Puts a Muzzle on Your Friends: Goodbye People I Never Knew

It's not exactly a silent spring, but a change made to Twitter's settings this week greatly reduced the tweets its users are witness to. In what the company called a small settings update, users no longer saw public replies sent by friends to people they themselves are not following. (Fragmented conversations, they are called.) This isn't a small change at all; it's big, and it's bad. The new setting eliminates serendipitous social discovery. Fortunately in less than 24 hours, Twitter changed this policy. Read our coverage to see what all the fuss was about.

Google Search Evolves: Adds Search Options and Rich Snippets

At this week's Google's Searchology event, which we live-blogged, the search market leader announced two significant features to its search product: Search Options and Rich Snippets. It also previewed a new fact-finding search product called Google Squared. The first two features are already live on google.com and they've notably extended Google's core search product. As we sit back and reflect on the meaning of this, one thing is starkly clear: the core Google search experience is now much more than a simple search box on a plain white background, which it was for so long.

ReadWriteWeb had an opportunity to talk with Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products and User Experience at Google, about the new products the company announced this week. We've embedded Mayer's video below, it runs about three minutes.

Amazon Opens a Kindle Store for the iPhone

This week, Amazon finally released an iPhone-specific version of its Kindle eBook store, which makes it a lot easier to browse and buy books while on the go. Sadly, though, Amazon did not release a new version of the Kindle app with a built-in browser (yet). So users are still being kicked out of the iPhone app and taken to Safari in order to browse the store and complete transactions. A button that takes users back to the Kindle app only appears after a purchase in Safari has been completed.

OneRiot: Web-Wide, Real-Time Social Search

OneRiot, a social search engine, announced this week that its search results pages now update in real time with content from Twitter, Digg and the wider social web. Results are prioritized based on an algorithm of about 26 factors, filtered for spam, and unduplicated if links are shared through multiple URL-shortening services. There are two search modes: Users can browse real-time results or (in "pulse" mode) see links ranked by social relevance. We spoke with a caffeinated and exuberant Tobias Peggs, general manager at OneRiot, about 20 minutes before the new release went live at 9 a.m. "We're trying to get a sense of current social relevance; what are people talking about right now," he said. And more than any competing product currently available, OneRiot succeeds.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

• Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
• Smub, a bookmarking and link posting tool for the iPhone.
• Web 3.0 Conference, semantic web and linked data, May 19-20 NYC
• Semantic Technology Conference, the future of the Web, IT, search, business.
• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• hakia is a semantic search engine.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• Socialtext brings you 5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration Success
• Calais brings semantic functionality into your website or app.
• Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteStart

Our new channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

VC Cash Is April Showers on Web Startup Flowers

Do you remember the headlines about VC investment "falling off cliff" after some data was reported by NVCA in early April? We took a contrarian view, saying the trend was down, but challenging the doom and gloom that was jumping from the headlines. This was based on our own online research and some anecdotal data from interviews. Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures also dug a bit deeper. The more we looked into this, the more we saw that the underlying data was not as authoritative as one might imagine. Many people popped up in the comments offering additional data. One was a New York City-based startup research firm (founded as recently as February 2009) called ChubbyBrain (great name!), which tracks this kind of data for a living. So this month, we relied on ChubbyBrain to help us dig deeper and get you the facts.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Trends

Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web

We've been following a fascinating 3-part series of posts this week by Greg Boutin, founder of Growthroute Ventures. The series aimed to tie together 3 big trends, all based around structured data: 1) the still nascent "Web 3.0" concept, 2) the relatively new kid on the structured Web block, Linked Data, and 3) the long-running saga that is the Semantic Web. Greg's series is probably the best explanation we've read all year about the way these trends are converging. In this post we highlight some of Greg's thoughts and add some of our own.

Introduction to the Real-Time Web

Real-time information delivery is fast emerging as one of the most important elements of our online experience. This week alone: Google declared real-time search to be one of the biggest unsolved challenges it faces; the NYTimes put a link to a new real-time view of all its news stories on the front page of its site; Facebook announced a new feature that will let users be notified instantly when their friends interact with media related to themselves on the site. This is big stuff, but what does it all mean? We offer a collection of readings on the real-time web. Give these articles some time and you'll have a solid foundation to understand, discuss and act on this emerging paradigm.

Hulu Keeps on Growing, But the Big Winner in April was MTV

According to the latest data from Nielsen Online (PDF), overall online video usage in April declined slightly compared to March (-2.3%), and all the major players, except for Youtube (+0.2%) and Hulu (+7.1%) saw the number of video streams on their sites decline. The real winner here, though, is MTV, which streamed 15.7% more videos in April than in March, and which has grown 359.6% year-over-year. Interestingly, Disney-owned ABC.com, which just struck a deal to syndicate its videos on Hulu, saw the largest decline in streams since March, with a 15.9% drop in total streams.

BIGOmaha: The Little Conference That Could

Recently in the gorgeous Nebraska sunshine, about 300 techies, entrepreneurs, and creatives from all over the country gathered in a large but simple room to learn, listen, and make connections. The one-day, one-track show was just a hashtag to some and entirely unknown to others; still, the pre-show buzz on Twitter and in various blogs had resonated with freshness, immediacy, and inspiration. A week before it opened, the first-ever BIGOmaha conference was sold out. Our own Jolie O'Dell was there to check it out...

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

Enterprise

Google Apps Continues Push Into Enterprise: 30,000 New Users at Valeo

This week marked another step forward for Google in pushing its web office suite Google Apps into large enterprises. Valeo, a leading automotive supplier company, is deploying Google Apps to 30,000 of its employees.

Overall, business is good for Google Apps. Google noted in the annoucement that "more than a million businesses" are now using the Google Apps suite - which includes Gmail, shared calendaring, collaborative word processing and spreadheets, and private video sharing and websites (internal and external). As Google continues to tap into the enterprise market - competing against the desktop office software monolith Microsoft - deals like the Valeo one show that its web office suite can scale for large businesses.

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Part 1 of Boutin's series was about how Web 3.0 will not solve the vexing issue of Information Overload, at least not yet, because there is so much groundwork to lay first. Specifically, there is a lot of unstructured data on the Web right now; and it'll take a lot more sorting out before it gets to be structured.

Last year Boutin loosely defined web 3.0 as "the Web of Openness. A web that breaks the old siloes, links everyone everything everywhere, and makes the whole thing potentially smarter."

There is a lot of debate about what Web 3.0 is and the term itself is open to derision. In my view Web 3.0 is an unoriginal name for the next evolution of the Web. What's important to note though, is that there is a difference in the products we're seeing in 2009 compared to the ones we saw at the height of 'Web 2.0' (2005-08). If Web 2.0 was about user generated content and social applications such as YouTube and Wikipedia, then Web 3.0 is about open and more structured data - which essentially makes the Web more 'intelligent'.

The smarter the data, the more things we can do with it. The current trends we're seeing today - filtering content, real-time data, personalization - are evidence that 'Web 3.0' is upon us, if not yet well defined. We actually saw a great example of Web 3.0 this week, with Google's release of Search Options and Rich Snippets. Those features added real-time search, structured data, and more to Google's core search.

Linked Data: Structured Data, But Not Necessarily Semantic

In Part 2 of his series, Greg Boutin tackled Linked Data. He explained that "Linked Data offers a new medium to link structured data that is then more machine-readable." However, he added that Linked Data "does not by itself add any semantic meaning to the information, but it better carries that semantic information once you have it. So, while Linked Data is not semantic, creating links at the data level paves the way to a true Semantic Web."

Alexander Korth wrote a guest post on ReadWriteWeb recently that explains Linked Data more. It is a concept that comes from the W3C, which has a Linking Open Data (LOD) project. The image below illustrates participating data sets as of March 2009. Some of the more well-known commercial data sets are Thomson Reuters' Open Calais project, Freebase, and DBpedia. As Alexander explained, the data sets are set up to re-use existing ontologies such as WordNet, FOAF, and SKOS and interconnect them.

According to Greg Boutin in Part 3 of his series, the Linked Data format "does not create smart data, it only enables it." He suggests that "technologies to turn unstructured data into structured data is really where we ought to invest, and focus our efforts." Another piece of advice he gives is that entrepreneurs would do well to "consider mashing up Linked Data with other technologies."

Semantic Web: Google Will Play a Big Role

So where does all of this leave the Semantic Web, that great white whale of the Internet? Boutin referenced a ReadWriteWeb post from October '08, that asked Where Are All The RDF-based Semantic Web Apps? And that is the crux of the problem with the Semantic Web. While Tim Berners-Lee claims that the Semantic Web is open for business, the reality is that there are precious few real-world apps that use RDF currently.

However RDFa, which enables web publishers to embed RDF into HTML, gives some hope. Google announced this week that it will support RDFa in its "rich snippets", following on from Yahoo's brave Search Monkey launch last year (which did a similar thing).

Google is going to play a big role in making the Semantic Web mainstream. We noticed here on ReadWriteWeb in January that Google had begun to expose semantic data in search results. We noted that Google appeared to be parsing the semantic structure from semi or unstructured data. An anonymous commenter in Boutin's third post claimed that he'd published a similar finding 6 months prior to us - he said that "Google's algorithm [is] a lot more sophisticated than just statistical methodology and that it was definitely already developing semtech knowhow and capabilities [in mid-08]."

Google isn't the only big company doing this either. We've already mentioned Yahoo, but Microsoft paid over $100 million to try and do the same thing last summer when it acquired Powerset.

Conclusion

Web 3.0 is an amorphous term, and possibly one that people shouldn't even attempt to use. Nevertheless, it's clear to us that the time for structured data has come. We're beginning to see it in the current wave of Linked Data sets being released, and in the support that big companies, like Google and Yahoo, are showing for structured data. Who knows, maybe the Semantic Web is nearly upon us too.

Notes

Why 2.5? Because we are in transition. The old is still with us, and the new is emerging but has not yet arrived. This was also true when "Web 2.0" was coined: only later did orthodoxy emerge.

2.5 is named "Get real" because we all have to do that. The punch bowl was taken away.

3.0 is named "Main Street" because the web is maturing... for everybody.

Social Media: Closed social-network sites cannot survive in their current form, and yet they are so dominant today. So the transition to open and pervasive will be a big and messy fight... which will be great fun for journalists to cover!

Advertising: Advertisers will adopt a barbell approach: CPM for branding, and CPA for direct-revenue generation (as soon as publishers figure out how to make money selling CPA). CPC will still be dominated by Google but will become less dominant as CPA gains traction. Google will play in CPA and CPM but won't dominate as it does in CPC. Publishers will sideline CPA because nobody will be able to compete with the CPC price set by Google. Ventures that bridge the gap between publishers wanting to sell CPM and advertisers wanting to buy CPA will do well.

Revenue: Primary revenue will come from subscriptions and transactions, with advertising as one driver of those revenue lines. Today, we are in transition and in recession, so any revenue is good.

Content: UGC reduced the cost of content but created too much junk. Curation (adding human editors to automated UGC content) will be aided by semantic technologies that aim to do what humans currently do well.

Start-Up Hero: Today, it's "Nobody" because we are all in a hangover funk. In the near future, entrepreneurs really will hold the best cards; financiers will be secondary.

Funding: The "Big VC" model is broken but will carry on for ages ("Zombie VC"). Angels and small VCs are in the cat-and-bird seat today. But they need a revived public market or something other, which we'll call "private + transparent."

Prime Market: This is a century-long shift, like the one from Europe to America. Asia is not ready yet, America is in turmoil, and Europe is conservative, so this is another transitional phase.

One brilliant commenter will win our swag bag from our recent trip to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco - ironically an expo that seemed to be more about Enterprise 2.0 than it was about the consumer-oriented startups of days past. In fact, the most jam-packed sessions at Web 2.0 Expo were about harnessing the power of Web 2.0 for enterprise, for marketing, for advertising, etc. They weren't about you and me and our cool new web 2.0 applications built in the proverbial garage.

So is Web 2.0 declining? If so, why? It's the economy, right? That's the easy answer, of course. But is it possible that maybe Web 2.0 was already reaching its heyday when the big crash occurred? Was its number about to be up, anyway?

Or is the opposite true: now is Web 2.0's heyday. Now, everyone is on Facebook, everyone shares videos on YouTube, everyone looks up information on Wikipedia. Web 2.0 is everywhere - which, really, is the opposite of being dead.

What's Next?

But if you think Web 2.0 is over, then what comes next? Where's Web 3.0? The Semantic Web? That hasn't really come to pass yet. Or will Web 3.0 be the mobile web? That's my opinion, to be sure. The only real innovation that excites me these days is happening on mobile, not on the traditional web.

But this isn't about my opinion today or those of any of the ReadWriteWeb authors - today it's about yours. Share your thoughts and we'll pick our favorite commenter to win the goodie bag from the Expo filled with t-shirts, stickers, pens, CDs, notebooks, and other goodies from the conference. Just be sure you use a real email address so we can get in touch.

The Goodie Bag:

Two themes stood out: sensors will surpass humans in front of their keyboards as the primary data source on the web and Moore's Law will need to be applied to humanity's greatest problems.

1. Google Voice Search on the iPhone

Google launched an iPhone app in November that lets you search by voice. It uses the iPhone's built in sensors in ways that other voice searches can't. It's not just voice recognition, it's also gesture recognition - the application starts listening when you put the phone to your face. O'Reilly asked, rhetorically, if the service was "a tipping point for the web" when it launched and it's still on his short list of key technologies today.

2. Gracenote's CDDB

The CDDB, or Compact Disk Database. This technology isn't new but it represents the kind of thing that O'Reilly expects to become much more common in the near term future. Their time has come, these tools for pulling patterns out of large and seemingly random sets of data. As he explained on stage tonight, the CDDB service identifies CDs by looking at the unique fingerprint created by the duration of songs in any collection on a commercial music CD. It doesn't identify individual songs but rather analyzes the aggregate data on albums in order to identify the collection. That's pretty cool.

See also the non-profit MusicBrainz.

3. AMEE Smart Grid

The AMEE smart electrical grid company tracks energy use in customers' homes and offers all kinds of valuable information based on what they see. TechCrunch UK called it "like an OpenID for your carbon footprint" in its coverage of O'Reilly's investment in the company.

O'Reilly said tonight that much like CDs in the CDDB, AMEE has discovered that the energy fluctuations of home appliances are so unique that they can tell what make and model of refrigerator you have by the way it acts when the motor turns on. Then it can suggest a more energy efficient appliance.

4. The NASA/CISCO Planetary Skin

NASA and CISCO unveiled plans last month to build what they call a Planetary Skin of sensors to monitor global climate change. The ability to process all the information that will come in through such a network of sensors is a good example of what O'Reilly called "applying Moore's Law to the world's biggest problems."

5. IBM Smarter Planet

O'Reilly highlighted the IBM Smarter Planet project in his talk about the future tonight. Smarter Planet is a broad body of initiatives by IBM to integrate efficient technology into a wide variety of systems around the world. Much of it is public infrastructure work.

Last week IBM announced that it would make bringing its channel partners into the Smarter Planet project a major priority and that it will be sharing the huge amounts of data it collects through the initiatives with channel partners as well.

Those are Tim O'Reilly's favorite examples of technologies that point beyond the last five years of the Web 2.0 era. Have you got other examples in the same vein? Perhaps you've got a different big picture vision of the next stage of the web. This fifth anniversary of the first Web 2.0 Conference is a great time to reflect on where we are as a web connected world and where we're going.

At this month's DEMO 09 conference, one of the most apparent trends was the emergence of several new intelligent web services. In this transitional period between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 (or whatever it is that comes next), the tools of the future are just now being revealed. Although at first glance some of these services and applications may seem somewhat incomplete, in many cases they actually represent years' worth of work to have reached the point they're at now. These are no simple Web 2.0 applications; these are highly complex and intelligent tools of tomorrow's smarter web.

A.I.-Powered Shopping (Gazaro)

Gazaro is a new service that lets you make what they call "personal sales fliers." Instead of sifting through the local paper to find the latest deals, you just tell Gazaro what sorts of products you're interested in. The service then scours the web for the best deals and presents its findings in a clean, easy-to-read interface. But Gazaro isn't simply a price comparison engine. It's a really smart one.

Gazaro knows that a "camera" is a "camera" or that an "LCD" is an "LCD." It's not doing simple keyword matching, it really understands the difference. In other words, you'll never get results for a camera lens or camera accessories when you're searching for just a camera because Gazaro knows those are not the same things.

The reason it can differentiate between items is because it's powered by Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) on the back end. In this case, "A.I." is no buzzword - the company was incubated by Apption Software who had developed A.I. technology for use in the enterprise. They realized that the same technology could deliver value in a consumer application as well, and from there came Gazaro.

When Gazaro goes out and crawls the internet, it compares the items it finds to the items it already knows in order to determine what exactly the new items are. If it encounters something it doesn't know, it makes an educated guess using its A.I. "brain." And the more it crawls, the more it learns.

After identifying what an item is, Gazaro then determines if the item found is actually a good deal. How good of a deal it is or not is represented with the "Gazaro Deal Score." These deal ratings are based on Gazaro's knowledge of historical prices, how often an item goes on sale, what other retailers are selling it for now and what they've sold it for in the past. All that analysis is done using the A.I. technology in order to rate the deal on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best deal.

To the consumer using the system, the complexity of what the A.I. is doing is all hidden behind the scenes. The end user only sees a simple interface where they can enter in the items they're shopping for and then find the best prices. Gazaro can also alert users to new sales and deals using email, RSS, or Twitter. At the moment, Gazaro is for consumer electronics shopping only, but in time the system could expand and learn more product categories.

Understanding Intentions (Primal Fusion)

Another company of interest is Primal Fusion whose new "thought networking" service is a semantic technology platform designed to help you research the subjects that interest you. Unfortunately, "thought networking" is a buzzword-sounding phrase that doesn't really convey what the system does. Primal Fusion essentially is an alternative to doing traditional web searches when you want to learn about a particular topic.

Once signed up for the Primal Fusion service, you enter in your topic in the search box provided and you'll see a tag cloud of words appear which are relevant to the word you initially searched on. You can either select those words by checking them or you can click on the individual words to further drill down into a more specific aspect of the original topic.

In the example they demonstrated today, a student researching climate change might see a tag cloud featuring words and phrases like "pollution," "co2," "greenhouse gases," etc. In addition, the service can also return relevant photos to your topic from sites like Flickr.

Initially, Primal Fusion searches Wikipedia to deliver the tag cloud, but once you have your specific interests checkmarked you can then change a drop-down box to search the web instead. This web searching is done courtesy of a Yahoo BOSS integration and it's here where Primal Fusion one-ups a normal search engine. Instead of just returning the top 5 or 10 results on the original keyword, it sifts through all the results found and returns only those relevant to your specific interests - even if those results would have been pages deep on a normal search query. Whatever Primal Fusion retrieves can then be extracted to a web page, document, or RSS feed. At the moment, Primal Fusion only extracts to web pages - files and feeds will come later. The web pages created by the service are public sites representing your research around a particular topic and are filled with links and images relevant to your query.

Because Primal Fusion comes off as somewhat of a confusing mind-mapping tool, many folks will probably miss the point: Primal Fusion is infrastructure, not an application. The way it understands the relationships between words and phrases and how it can then extract the most relevant search results based on that understanding is what's most important about the company's technology.

Remember: This Is Only the Beginning

If you go out and try most of the services we've profiled in this series, you might walk away feeling a bit disappointed. You'll probably be thinking of all the things the service doesn't do but that you wished it could. Or perhaps you'll find the UI unappealing or the recommendations provided somewhat incomplete. However, It's important to understand that many of these services aren't ready for mainstream use just yet. Instead, they represent the beginnings of tomorrow's web - a web that better understands the data it contains. And by better understanding itself, the new intelligent web of the future can then better understand and serve you.

We're moving beyond the days of a simple search box in which you type a query and get a list of results. Today, companies are trying to build a smarter web - one that understands what things are, how they relate, and perhaps most importantly, what things you're going to like. But has Web 3.0 arrived in its full semantic glory? No, not yet. But it's clear we are getting closer than ever before.

To begin, there's the seemingly minor announcement from Xmarks, the company formerly known as Foxmarks, but now rebranded thanks to their multi-browser support. Xmarks has introduced additional features to their bookmark synchronization product which include things like site suggestions and smarter search. By leveraging their large stash of data (600 million bookmarks), Xmarks is now able to recommend sites right within your search results. This is done by placing an Xmarks icon next to those results which are most popular, meaning most bookmarked, on their service. Also, when you visit a web site and click the Xmarks icon in your address bar, Xmarks will return a list of sites similar to the one you're currently browsing.

The data used to deliver these recommendations and suggestions are anonymized - a good thing considering that our browser bookmarks are often the ones we have specifically chosen not to share with others. For bookmarks to become recommended in this fashion, they must be fairly popular on the service - a level that's determined by the number of times saved as a percentage within a particular category.

In a way, what Xmarks is doing is very similar to what StumbleUpon's browser extension does too. Like Stumble, Xmarks annotates our search results highlighting those that may be of value to us. Yet Xmarks takes it a step further by discovering related sites, too.

The Smarter Tracking Tool (Evri)

Another company revealing new innovations here at DEMO 09 is Evri, a semantic search engine which understands what's called "natural language." Evri knows the different parts of a sentence (subject, verb, object) and it knows how those parts are connected to each other.

Although still too raw to be your main search engine, Evri has a new "Collections" feature which lets you follow topics (aka search queries) that are of interest to you. After returning a list of search results which include Wikipedia entries, news articles, videos, and images, you can click the star labeled "Follow this" to continue to track that topic. What's missing from this feature, though, is an alerting system which will inform you of updates via email or RSS. However, the company says that's coming later on.

Evri is also branching out from being a web destination alone by introducing Evri widgets which can now be seen in action on the Washington Post's web site. These widgets parse the content on the page to deliver smart recommendations of similar articles both on the site itself as well as elsewhere on the web. 

Another new feature launching now is Evri's browser toolbar. By clicking on a button next to the Evri search box in the toolbar, the people, places, and things on a web page are highlighted. Click on these items and pop-ups appear with more information about the keyword, what's related to the topic plus news, images, and videos.

This additional layer of information on top of standard text makes browsing the web and reading articles a deeper and richer experience. No longer do you need to perform web searches in a separate window to understand definitions, context, and meaning. Instead, Evri's toolbar adds an intelligence to the web that was never there before. It's clear that the company is still working towards making that additional layer more accurate and more relevant, though, but conceptually the idea is solid.

The RSS Reader That Learns (Ensembli)

Ensembli, an RSS reader of sorts, takes a different approach to tracking topics than Evri does with its "Collections" feature. Where Evri's UI can sometimes feel a bit cluttered with its multimedia results, Ensembli's interface is simple - you just type in a topic and it will continue searching for new articles related to what you entered. But this reader doesn't simply pull information for you - it learns what you like. Every time you read, ignore, or discard a story, Ensembli gets to know your tastes a  little bit better.

While this feed reader is far too simplified for RSS junkies like us, it's easy to see how Ensembli could be a good introductory tool for RSS beginners. Still, the sources it returns sometimes seem lacking and it's hard to say if this will ever be any more useful that a simple Google Alert, for example. Nevertheless, it's not really the feed reading itself which makes Ensembli intriguing, it's the learning element. Whatever algorithm is at work behind the scenes figuring out your likes and dislikes is what's the most important aspect of this new technology.

Getting Smarter...Little by Little

Taken by themselves, the above announcements may have seemed more evolutionary than revolutionary, but look at them within a broader scope and you can see a pattern beginning to develop. In this transitional period from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, we're starting to see tools and services that aim to expand upon the traditional search experience in order to deliver us to a more intelligent web. On this new web, we're moving beyond SEO and PageRank to determine relevance and instead are seeing new technologies develop that better understand meaning, context, and personal preferences.

Stayed tuned...part 2 of "The Smarter Web" will continue tomorrow.

With the extraordinary growth of the Internet and the interlinking of information that the social Web has brought with it, it's time to examine the footprints we leave on the Web as we move into the future that promises to "throttle the 'wisdom of the crowds' from turning into the 'madness of the mobs,'" as described so eloquently by Jason Calacanis.

With Internet usage growing at a remarkable pace it comes as no surprise that comScore recently rated Google as the most popular Internet property in the world, attracting over 777.9 million visitors as of December 2008. Not surprising either is the growth of social and news sites. According to Compete some of the top social sites attracted visitors in the millions during December 2008:

• FaceBook: 59 million visitors
• MySpace: 59 million visitors
• Digg: 33 million visitors
• Twitter: 4.4 million visitors

This growth can be contributed in part to the media as they realize the benefits of instant access to an enormous well of information that the Web provides. As media folk are becoming increasingly tech savvy, they're realizing results from search engines are often lacking. In an effort to gain as much insight into specific topics they are now turning to social sites for research.

Interconnected on the Web

While it's exciting to live in an ever connected and always on world, the flip side that we have to accept is that we also live in a world where information is becoming increasingly interlinked. Today it is relatively simple to follow footprints on the Web if we want to track both people and brands.

For instance, take a look at my public profile on Twitter and you'll notice I can also be found on other sites: BlogWell, ReadWriteWeb and The Drill Down. Visit BlogWell and you'll notice I can be found at WebMama and TechTalkRadio. Visit The Drill Down and you'll see my contact information for Digg. While I occasionally use different user names on sites, I publicly declare my affiliations and unless you know me really well, or have reason to follow me across the Web, you may not realize the relationships I have or where I can be found online by visiting any one site.

While the information about me on the Web is not terribly exciting, I do leave a little bit of information on every site I visit. And therein lies the rub. Say something in passing on a social site and it may come back to haunt you.

There is No Delete Button on the Web

It is becoming increasingly difficult to remove content from the web. The Internet Archive and its Way Back Machine gives you a historical snapshot of a site within seconds. Google gives you cached pages displaying pages that may have been deleted for any number of reasons. Photo sharing sites that store images online combined with services like Twitpic that let you quickly upload pictures to social sites - all of these great social Web resources also leave your historical Web footprints open to dissection in the future.

And although the information you put out on the Web may seem insignificant today, you have to ask the question of whether it will be insignificant tomorrow, or in five years when you need to apply for college or seek new employment. Additionally, you have to ask yourself whether you're just leaving more junk for the next generation to clean up.

New York Times' Policy on Social Networking

Poynter Online recently published the New York Times' policy regarding social networking sites, as provided by The Times' assistant managing editor Craig Whitney. In the memo, Whitney, who is responsible for overseeing journalistic standards, points out that social sites "can be remarkably useful reporting tools," but is quick to warn reporters to take care when using them. "Anything you post online can and might be publicly disseminated, and can be twisted to be used against you by those who wish you or The Times ill."

For a long time, The New York Times Company has had a policy on ethics in journalism and this move to document a social media policy can only be seen as a step in the right direction. However, there are some that see this as one of the reasons "mainstream media is doomed to irrelevance."

For the record, it is possible to remain passionate and true to your beliefs while participating on the social Web. What social sites should not allow - nor excuse - is a belief held by many that common courtesy and simple manners should be bypassed simply because you're not there in the flesh.

Whether you agree or disagree with Whitney's take on the social Web, it's important to recognize this huge step that The Times has taken. It has finally worked out that information on the Web is intricately intertwined. The article is well worth a read.

Getting Caught on the Web with Your Pants Down

There have been many instances where people and corporations have been caught out by content they upload to the Web. Whether the content is an image, a 140 character Tweet, or a blog post, we hope the following examples will give you time to reflect on the content you are uploading today.

Meltdown on Twitter

Last week, the Applicant blog talked about a hypothetical human resource bot in an attempt to persuade its readers of the importance of being aware of what they post to the Web. It was predominantly written to encourage readers to consider the ramifications of outbursts on the Web as applied to career and employment.

The very next day Twitter user Astrospace suffered an online meltdown which was captured as an image and posted on Applicant, giving their hypothetical post a great big shove into reality. "If I were an employer this certainly wouldn't be my ideal applicant, and at this point their brand is without a positive brand image," the Applicant post says.

While Astrospace may have had good reason for his rant (as most of us do), his outburst has now been captured and will possibly remain online for a very long time.

You Never Know Where Your Dulcet Tones will Turn Up

Last year when David Berkowitz boarded a train in New York he heard an argument between a woman and a man. While his first instinct was to get off the train, he made the decision to continue on.

This turned out to be fortunate for those with a sense of humor as he decided to record the argument and it now resides somewhere out there on the Web.

In this instance it may be more difficult, if not impossible to track the folks involved in the argument across the Web, but it still shows the importance of putting your best foot forward when in public - whether online or off.

Do You Know Who's Following You Online?

Peter Shankman recently discovered a seemingly off-the-cuff Tweet by James Andrews, an executive of Ketchum New York.

"True confession but I'm in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say "I would die if I had to live here!"

Sounds innocuous enough right? Not so. Andrews was in Memphis and on the way to meet his client FedEx. Turns out a Fed-Ex employee was terribly offended and responded with an e-mail that was copied to a variety of people including the folks in charge at Ketchum and the execs from Fed-Ex.

According to Shankman, the letter begins like this:

"Mr. Andrews,

If I interpret your post correctly, these are your comments about Memphis a few hours after arriving in the global headquarters city of one of your key and lucrative clients, and the home of arguably one of the most important entrepreneurs in the history of business, FedEx founder Fred Smith."

Read the entire e-mail here.

Clearly, what you do on social media leaves traces and cannot be easily removed from the Web. Information can fairly easily be tracked back to you and what you say and do will be public for a long time. Whether you believe in monitoring yourself online or not, don't forget the point of the social Web: to get to know other like minded people, share resources, have fun, and leave the place a little nicer than you found it.

Although we were planning to include a resource list of tools and services to help you monitor your online presence today, we've decided to leave it for next weekend given the length of this post.

As always, your opinion is very much appreciated and we look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments.

Image Credit: Vu Bui

The first demonstration of the OpenKnowlege system is aimed to enhance the abilities of those seeking health-related information on the web. Instead of solely relying on a doctor to prescribe a course of treatment, people today tend to seek out medical information on their own using the web. Unfortunately, that data is often inaccurate and misleading. What OpenKnowledge intends to do is provide patients with structured information that has been checked for accuracy. To test this system, OpenKnowledge is working with Cancer Research UK on a project related to treatment methods.

2) Emergency Response

When there's an emergency situation, there is often a centralized point that disseminates critical information to people in need. But if that system itself breaks down, people are out of luck. OpenKnowledge aims to decentralize those systems so that a "backup" decentralized network of peers could be put into place. There, people could help each other out when the centralized system failed. This is currently being testing with emergency response authorities in Trentino, Italy.

3) Protemoics Research

Protemoics research (the study of the structure and function of proteins) can also benefit from the OpenKnowledge framework. In this area of science, many researchers worldwide rely on a small number of databases, creating a bottleneck of sorts which stresses the infrastructure of the databases themselves as well as those that maintain them. Researchers also find it hard to share data and results directly with other groups. In addition, the quality of the information in those databases is very mixed.

OpenKnowledge aims to solve all three problems by letting the researchers share data with each other directly, peer-to-peer style. This relieves the burden on the databases while the feedback will continually improve the quality of the data shared. This is currently being tested in an existing proteomics network in Spain called ProteoRed.

So...What Is It Exactly?

Understanding how a system like this works is difficult and the Open Knowledge web site doesn't make the process of comprehension any easier. Even despite the cute, Harry Potter-themed slideshow meant to describe the process, the actual details are hard to grasp. Obviously written by brainy researchers, they can't even call the slideshow a "slideshow," instead referring to it as a "simple pictorial introduction."

Still, if you can wade through the academic speech on the site, what you may find is a creative idea for sharing information. Basically, through open source downloadable code, OpenKnowledge sets up a peer-to-peer network where users can trade in information and data similar to how BitTorrent users trade mp3s and video files.

In the OpenKnowledge system, anyone can easily become a peer or even create their own peer by sharing existing code or writing their own. In order to become an OpenKnowledge user, you simply need to download the OpenKnowledge kernel from here together with some additional components that you might want to use. In addition to users, services, such as WSDL services, can also be made into peers on the OpenKnowledge network.

OpenKnowledge is more of a framework for decentralizing the systems on the web. It's not so much of a consumer-friendly web app than it is a model for information sharing that can help advance areas of science and research. You may not ever use OpenKnowledge yourself on your home computer, but your life may very well be impacted one day by the innovations it made possible.

For those of you who don't know, Zigtag is another entry in the social bookmarking collection of tools. Like delicious, Diigo, and Ma.gnolia, Zigtag helps you categorize your bookmarks and share them with others. When Zigtag went into development, bookmarking was all the rage. The company's goal was to make bookmarking easier by adding a layer of semantics to the tags themselves.

Zigtag, you see, understands the meaning of the words you assign to a tag. When you tag to a page, Zigtag actually assigns it meaning rather than just a simple word. If that sounds revolutionary...well, that's because it is. Sort of.

Not the Only Semantic Tagging Service

Because of Zigtag's slow progress, they can no longer claim to be the only semantic tagging application available today. Another, Faviki, also offers an intelligent tagging service based on structured data. Both services attempt to address the problem of user-generated tags. That is, even though what you tag "NY" may be the same link that I tagged "New York," no bookmarking service ever knew the tags were related.

Zigtag and Faviki attack this problem in different ways. Faviki suggests tags for you to use, not from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted from DBpedia, a community-maintained database created by extracting information from Wikipedia.

Zigtag, however, eschews suggestions and lets you tag items as you wish. It doesn't matter what personal system you use for tagging (one word, two words, underscores, plus signs, etc.) because Zigtag understands the meaning of the tags. In Zigtag, a link tagged "New York" is returned along with other links tagged "New_York." Zigtag also understands that one tag may have different meanings and groups those items accordingly. For example, there's a New York and Company clothing store and a New York in England that may have been tagged "new york." That level of understanding is something that's unique to Zigtag and sets it apart from other bookmarking services.

Thanks to the service's ability to understand meaning, Zigtag users can join groups related a shared interest. Since Zigtag knows what you mean by your tags, it is, in theory, easier to find links you would be interested in on Zigtag than with other bookmarking services.

Is This Really Web 3.0?

Zigtag may be one of the first tools to step out of the Web 2.0 box. Where "Web 2.0" implies there is a social element to a service, it's generally speculated that Web 3.0 will bring about the intelligent web. Zigtag delivers this intelligence, but is it enough?

The only downside to Zigtag is that it requires you, the user, to manually insert the tags. In fact, it even relies on user-generated tagging and has built its entire service around that concept. That may be where Zigtag went wrong. Although two years ago, what it offered was ground-breaking and unique, as we enter 2009, we're asking the question: "Is tagging dead?"

At first, collaborative tagging, also known as a folksonomy, appeared to be the future of the web. It was a rejection of the search engine in favor of the community. It was our collective intelligence harnessed for the purpose of applying meaning and order to the pieces of the web in ways that computer-based tools could not.

As time went on, though, the one thing that made a folksonomy appealing - it was made by people! - was also the very thing that gave it problems. User-generated tags were likely to produce unreliable results. Zigtag addresses that problem, but it does not address what may end up being the true source of failure for folksonomy-based systems: people are lazy.

Now that there are myriads of services using tagging, thanks to the explosion of Web 2.0, we're getting sick of all the manual labor involved. Tag your links, tag your photos, tag your blog entries, tag your RSS feeds, etc.

While at one time, a semantic-based tagging system like Zigtag may have seemed like a vision of Web 3.0, we've now come to a point where we wonder if it does enough. It's possible the next revolution of the web won't be a system that understands the meaning of the tags we created, but knows how we would have tagged things if we had bothered to do so and then does it for us. And if that's not the future of the web...well...perhaps it should be.

Web Trends

Why Platforms Are Letting Us Down - And What They Should Do About It

In good times everyone wants to be a platform. But when times are bad and platforms are just an expense, the resources suddenly shift away. The recent re-design of Facebook, the slow down of Google's Open Social, and Flock closing its extension site - these are all part of the same pattern. Platforms that don't have monetization wired in are only good for marketing. This is why the platforms of the future need to think about not just short-term marketing and buzz, but long-term sustainability and monetization.

AOL Quietly Launches One of the World's Biggest App Platforms

AOL announced the new developer site for MyAOL this week to almost no fanfare, but at a time when some are declaring the Facebook platform "dead" - AOL's new platform warrants some serious attention.

The new MyAOL platform is an OpenSocial container based on the gadgets.*API, meaning developers shouldn't have to do much to get their widgets up and running on it. A fair number of MyAOL gadgets already have millions of users, so the new developer site seems like a real opportunity.

The Future of Web 3.0 According to Yahoo!

At the Web 3.0 Conference and Expo in Santa Clara this week, Dave Beckett (principal software architect at Yahoo!) and Tom Hughes-Croucher (technical evangelist, Yahoo! Developer Network), answered questions about the recent consumer release of Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) and discussed the company's future plans to open up almost everything.

"The open source, hacker attitude has been part of our culture for so long; now we're opening up the different pieces," Hughes-Croucher told the packed room. "We're taking data from across our sites and sharing it."

Resisting Change: iGoogle and Yahoo Profile Updates Shock Users

Our review of the new iGoogle homepage was generally positive. For a large number of users, however, the latest updates, including the stronger emphasis on the full-screen canvas view, were simply unacceptable. Just this weekend, the New York Times reported about the difficulties of making drastic changes to popular web sites without alienating users. Judging from the reaction of some of iGoogle's users, Google's switch to the new iGoogle layout is a textbook example for how not to update a popular product. If Google had made these changes incrementally instead of foisting a completely new version of iGoogle onto its users without warning, it could have surely prevented the current outrage.

RWW Live: Online Personal Finance

You can't turn on the TV, visit Yahoo Finance or pick up the Wall Street Journal without hearing about the economic crisis we're in. It's caused most of us to step back and look at our own financial situation. In this week's episode of RWW Live, we looked at how you can use Web tools to improve your personal finances. We had executives from Mint, Wesabe and Tip'd on the show.

Here's the audio:

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SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

• FreshBooks offers professional online invoicing.
• SocialText provides an enterprise wiki platform.
• WildApricot is Membership Management Software.
• Strands provides real-time recommendations of products.
• Calais brings semantic functionality into your site.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• The Web 3.0 Conference is on October 16 - 17 in Santa Clara.
• Direct Media Exchange is a solution for managing ad networks.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• SmartyPig is Simple. Smart. Savings.
• Quintura is a visual-based search engine.
• Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

Web Products

Three Places To Shop For Android Apps? How Confusing!

This week, T-Mobile stocked their stores with G1 handset, the first smartphone to feature Google's mobile operating system "Android." Along with the device itself, the Google Android Market also went live. There, developers are offering a number of applications for installation on the new phone. However, the Android Market isn't the only place to get apps. Both Handango and MobiHand have app stores of their own. Will this open ecosystem be good for the "Google phone" or will it lead to consumer confusion?

See also: Android Goes Open-Source

Bloglines Returns to Challenge Google Reader - Thank Goodness

Popular RSS reader Bloglines says it's solved the much publicized recent problems with feed updating that lead smaller services to pursue its users and Google Reader triumphalists to declare the RSS reader market all zipped up. It's true that Bloglines has a lot of problems, but all software does and competition is incredibly important in any sector, including among RSS readers.

Despite its shortcomings, Bloglines is worth a look and when it works it works very well for many people. RSS is such a powerful media that it's essential that the market leader, Google, be kept on their toes.

Twine Launches 1.0 Version - Eyes Facebook, Google Reader, Delicious, Digg, ...

When Twine announced itself to the world exactly one year ago, it claimed to be "the first mainstream Semantic Web application". However despite raising millions of dollars in its quest to bring the Semantic Web to the mainstream, Twine has been beset by usability and performance issues in its beta period. Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote probably the most brutal review. The post title said it all: Twine Disappoints After Semantic Web Hype.

However Twine has just launched publicly, confident that it is ready for prime time. We spoke with Twine founder and Semantic Web proponent Nova Spivack this week to find out what's changed, who's been using Twine up till now, and where the service is headed in the future.

Make Your Own iPhone/Android Apps With New App Generator

Today AppLoop launched a mobile application generator which lets you turn any RSS feed into a mobile application for either iPhone (available this week) or Android (coming soon). The company, which competes with the analytics and advertising solution MediaLets, wanted to provide everyone with the tools to make a mobile app, even if they didn't have any programming experience. To do so, they've created their new Mobile Application Generator, a tool which creates a mobile-ready application in less than two minutes.

Adobe's Ichabod and The Headless Search of Flash

While Adobe Flash has remained popular with Web developers who want to deliver fluid user interfaces, database-driven content, and nonstandard typography on the Web, it has suffered from one glaring shortcoming: search engines have been unable to effectively index the content held within the Flash file. With Ichabod, Adobe is hoping to fix that problem for Flash.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

RWW Enterprise Channel

Caspio: Gritty and Profitable In a Tough Market

As part of our Gritty Entrepreneurs series, we interviewed Frank Zamani, Founder/CEO of Caspio. Their pitch is "no more programming for custom web applications". That is a tough market, which we will explore in this post. But Caspio is bootstrapped, profitable and can point to some real case studies. So they must be doing something right. Let's tell you this entrepreneur's tale and assess their future prospects.

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

The session is open to 500 people and 10 have the opportunity to pitch Sramana. You can follow the session live by clicking here.

NOTE: RWW is getting no commission or payment from either the roundtable or the book. We agreed to partner with Sramana and Dimdim on this for free, because we think our readers would like the opportunity to pitch Sramana. And if people enjoy it, we may run more sessions like this in the future. Basically it's an experiment for us, so we're looking forward to seeing how it goes.

Some more detail about Sramana Mitra: she is a Silicon Valley-based technology entrepreneur who has founded three companies and provided strategy consultation to over 75 organizations. She writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy and is a columnist for Forbes. Sramana has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

To register for the event, please visit here.

UPDATE: The event is now finished, you can view a recording here.