ReadWriteWeb

I first saw a startup called Apture demonstrated in an off-the-record session at O'Reilly's by-invite-only FOO Camp several years ago. The room was packed and I had to stand on my toes outside the doorway to see Apture's Tristan Harris navigate around the Internet on a projected screen. He was highlighting words with his cursor and making related articles, photos, Wikipedia pages and YouTube videos pop off the surface of the page in a handsome little box with rounded corners. Everyone in the room made ooh and aah noises when they saw it. Wherever you saw a word - you could learn a whole lot more about it with a little swipe of your mouse.

What will the Internet look like in 5 or 10 years? Will it still be a series of linked pages that users browse through, one at a time? Google may be betting that it will be something very different, if the company's latest acquisition is any indication. Apture, the service you can see in action if you highlight any word on this ReadWriteWeb, has been acquired by Google, the two companies announced this morning. An addition to offering media-rich contextual search pop-ups on the pages of publishers who have installed the service, Apture also offers a browser plug-in that adds the same functionality to any page on the web. Much of that same functionality will be baked into Google's browser Chrome very soon.

Can 'things' be social? That's been one of the most contentious questions around the Internet of Things (when real world objects are connected to the Internet). Several startups have tried to do this, including StickyBits, TalesofThings and Itizen. I've been skeptical of these efforts in the past, but a new product called ThingLink is taking a slightly different tack - and they may just be onto something.

ThingLink allows you to tag and link things in images. For example: tagging a chair inside an image, giving some information about its design, and linking the chair to the store that sold it. ThingLink calls this an "interactive hotspot." While the concept of tagging things in photos isn't new - Facebook, Flickr and others have been doing this for some time now - ThingLink's tagging is richer and offers a lot more information and linking possibilities.

PDFs, love them or hate them, are here to stay as a rich document presentation medium and with the introduction of online services like Scribd, Docstock, even Slideshare and Issuu - static files are getting quite interesting.

Scribd this morning posted a series of year-end Top 10 lists, offering a good view of some of the most interesting and widely-read primary documents on the web this year. As dry stuff goes, this is really interesting. We've embedded those lists below. Keep in mind the company's recent partnership with rich-media lookup service Apture and these docs become not just popular, but also full of multimedia on demand. How many of these hot docs have you read this year?

The Portable Document Format, or .PDF, sometimes feels silly these days - doesn't it? Sure, they are often pretty - but they feel so static and inflexible. No more! With the new integration of contextual search tool Apture, HTML5-powered PDF viewing and sharing community Scribd now offers a radically new way to read PDFs.

Above, you can see an image of my screen while reading a PDF titled The Internet of things: Networked objects and smart devices. I highlighted the name of a company quoted in the report and with two quick clicks I was watching a YouTube video of a product demo. I highlighted an expert's name and was able to learn all about their career and find them on Twitter - without leaving the page.

Apture, the semantic contextual search service that you can see in action by highlighting any word or phrase here on ReadWriteWeb, today launched browser extensions that will allow you to dive deep into any topic you discover on almost any page around the web. (Try it out by highlighting this name, for example: Anna Frenkel.)

Called Apture Highlights, the new plug-in is slammed right now at launch and is performing very slowly. (Update: Looking better.) The company should be able to scale up to fit the demand soon, however, and once it's working well it's something you'll definitely want to install. It's like Augmented Reality for browsing the web. See the demo video below.

ReadWriteWeb readers are some of the most educated on the social web, surveys tell us that. Smart people never stop learning, though, do we? Now reading ReadWriteWeb is all the more educational with the addition of a new feature from startup company Apture.

Try it out: Highlight any word, phrase or name on this page. Now click the little "search" button that pops up. This is a good one: Krishna Bharat.

Pretty cool, huh? Apture's new contextual search feature was incredibly easy to add to our site (one line of javascript) and we think it adds a whole lot to the reading experience here. So find a word or phrase here that you'd like to learn more about - and highlight it. You'll see a web of multi-media connections swirling around our written content at the snap of your finger.

It's no secret that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is interested in scooping up more startups in order to bring their talent on board. From Firefox creator Blake Ross's Parakey (acquired in 2007) through Gmail creator Paul Buchheit's FriendFeed (acquired in 2009), Facebook has made some very high-profile talent acquisitions already.

This Fall, Zuckerberg got early access to his old friend Adam D'Angelo's new question and answer site Quora and used it to ask: "What startups would be good talent acquisitions for Facebook?"

Pop-up info windows: someone had to do it right, right? After years of pushy, worthless little window overlays that pop up when you hover over a link, there are now a number of companies trying to offer bloggers and their readers a whole lot of value in what could be a handy format.

Below we briefly review two of these services, Apture and Zemanta's Balloons. Is this kind of product really worth using? Once you add a pop-up of someone's LinkedIn profile next to their name as you type it, you may never want to go back to not having a tool like this at your disposal.

The most obvious feature of Apture is that it is a pop-up technology. Apture is a Javascript plug-in for publishers that adds contextual information to links - via pop-ups which display when users hover over or click on them. However, because of its association with pop-ups, Apture thinks it's gotten a bad rap. Many people dislike other pop-up products such as CoolPreviews, Snap and a new Microsoft product we covered recently called Gaze. Why? Because pop-ups can disrupt a user's browsing experience and are sometimes even regarded as a nuisance. We spoke to Apture co-founder and CEO Tristan Harris, to find out what makes Apture different.

It's the end of 2008 and everyone on the Web is hurting due to the economy. But we know that things will get better, because slow-downs eventually bury the old and give birth to new evolutionary ways of doing things.

One of these evolutions started quietly in 2008. We are witnessing the rise of a new kind of web: contextual. You might not have heard or thought about it much yet, but you are already using it today. Search remains the killer app on the web, but context is quickly become a viable contender. Why? Because context is what happens instead of search.