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.

Apture Highlights Extension Welcome Video from Apture Inc on Vimeo.

I love Apture very much - I want Apture for my iPad, I want it for my phone, I want it to shoot out the end of my finger when I see words printed offline. Unfortunately, the Apture app is going to be shut down by Google in 45 days.

The very good news? The same type of functionality is going to be baked into Google Chrome in the near future. Look out, other browsers, Chrome and its users are about to get a whole lot smarter.

Google emphasized that the literal product itself is not going to be placed directly into Chrome, but said that Apture was being shut down so the team could focus on building "more things like it" as a part of Chrome.

Apture says its scripts get served up on 1 billion pages every month right now. "I'm going to miss it [the product] myself, too Marshall," CEO Harris consoled me today, "but hopefully this kind of thing will be showing up all over the place."

The Next Layer of Search

Will people use functionality like this as part of their browser? Will people think to "highlight to Google?" When I first wrote about Apture's browser plug-in, I said it was like Augmented Reality for the Web. But I wondered if people would use it regularly. "If I told you the world was your oyster, that layers of multimedia explanation and context lay behind every word on the web and are now accessible with a simple flick of the wrist - could you develop a new habit of lifting the covers to look at it?"

Other companies that track copy-and-paste activity say that highlighting things on a page so they can be shared by email is still far, far more common than clicking buttons to links via Twitter or Facebook. I imagine that once those copy-and-pasters learn they can highlight to Google, it could really change the search experience.

Harris:

"I can't comment too much about Google's future plans but what I'm excited about is: in 10 years are we still going to be browsing the web we do today? Is search still going to be 10 blue links? Are we going to still click on links to visit another page? I think those things are going to change and Apture represents just one part of those changes. Infinite background information and videos can compliment your understanding of anything you're looking at.

"When you think about Google's mission of making the world's information organized and accessible, you can't think about that without thinking about the browser. Google.com is v 1.0 of that, and Chrome's performance and speed has done amazingly well, but the browser is still a flat web browser. I think what you're going to see is more moving beyond the traditional metaphors of a traditional web browser. What's beyond everything we've seen with a browser so far? I hope it's beyond the single page and browsing metaphor that started in 1995. I think we'll see a lot more from the browser itself."

Apture now changes from an option add-on to, in spirit at least if the same software itself does not literally live on, a new way to Google for things. Not on Google.com, not in the search bar, not by voice, not by mobile - but directly from the fabric of the web. That's a big responsibility for a little four year-old company that raised just over $4 million in venture capital.

A Win for Human Intelligence

It's also a hopeful turn of events for those who read with curiosity. I love finding peoples' names online, highlighting them and having their Twitter handles appear. I love highlighting the names of companies and instantly watching product demos in an inline YouTube player. The service's Wikipedia integration means you can read words on the web not just with your own understanding, but with the world's largest, most refined, collective encyclopedia always at your fingertips.

When I asked about integration of this kind of functionality into the developer-facing parts of Chrome, Harris said he thought that was a good idea but couldn't comment.

"When you have native access to search in a browser," he said, "I'm really excited to think about other things Google that could do to enhance other kinds of products."

I am too.

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.

(each round dot in the screenshot above points to a 'thing' with more information and links)

ThingLink: Much More Than Socializing Objects

ThingLink has evolved somewhat since we last mentioned them, back in February 2010 when it was in a private beta. At that time ThingLink's Ulla-Maaria Engeström explained that Thinglink was focused on defining the relationships people have with things - who made them, who designed them, who manufactured them, who sells them, who owns them, who likes them. She said that ThingLink was the "social graph of things" and that "every thing has their own social network." Thinglink began in 2005 by giving things identities via their product codes, a.k.a. Unique Identifiers.

ThingLink is now public and it's not so narrowly focused on socializing objects, although that is still part of the plan. The main benefit to ThingLink seems to be that it offers granular contextual information about objects inside images, which is of most immediate benefit to retailers and suppliers. I think this is a much more viable business prospect than enabling social networks around objects, which is both a crowded market (StickyBits, TalesofThings, Itizen) and one with a dubious outlook. ThingLink has their sights set on a broader range of commercial use cases, which I think is very smart.

The below image, from a Tumblr blog called lovegolf, is a great example. It shows a variety of golfing equipment used by the professional golfer Michelle Wie. When you hover over each object, you get information about the object and optional links to more details. This image features a video of Wie and a link to her Twitter account (which you can follow from within the photo).

ThingLink is aiming to attract retailers and suppliers to tag their products in images and drive people to buy them. The company claims that their "average in-image campaign click-through rate (CTR) ranges from 1.5% to 5%." ThingLink also allows you to track how your tagged images are shared around the Web.

Can ThingLink Find its Market?

ThingLink reminds me a lot of Apture, a product we use on ReadWriteWeb to offer more contextual information. When you highlight a word or phase on our site, you see a 'Learn More' button which - when hovered over or clicked on - pops up a box with additional information like photos, videos and external links. In some ways, ThingLink is like an Apture for images.

Just as Apture has found a ready market in media publications and professional blogs, I believe ThingLink has a potentially large market in retailers and suppliers. It will also be useful for bloggers or media publications which use imagery a lot, such as food bloggers.

ThingLink currently offers plug-ins to the major blogging or publishing tools including Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr and Drupal. I set it up on my Tumblr blog in a few minutes, so it's easy to get started.

If you want to test out ThingLink for yourself, follow these instructions:

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.

Those are strong words, but really - the user experience is there and remarkable. Apture says that Scribd represents the biggest installation of the company's service to date. Other Scribd docs appear in the Apture search results when searches are performed on site.

ReadWriteWeb uses Apture as well - try it out here by highlighting any word or phrase on any page. Just this afternoon I used it to watch a YouTube video about a historical event brought up in comments here with just a few clicks. I am a big, big fan of Apture. Now that I can read PDFs with Apture in Scribd, that's where I'm most likely to be reading PDFs in the future.

Most of the time right now I read PDFs on my iPad. Scribd says it's working on a native iPad experience for its service, but that won't arrive until later this year or next year. There's not word whether the company will try to incorporate Apture there - but that sure would be great.

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.

When I first saw Apture several years ago, it was a service that required publishers to load up linked-pop-up widgets with multimedia of their own choosing. The company has removed that barrier to entry entirely now with this new release. Everything is automated and it's available almost everywhere.

Will users learn to use the service though? It's definitely new behavior to highlight words and phrases in order to learn more about them. It's outside the usual flow of scroll, point and click.

If I told you the world was your oyster, that layers of multimedia explanation and context lay behind every word on the web and are now accessible with a simple flick of the wrist - could you develop a new habit of lifting the covers to look at it?

Now's your chance. Apture Highlights is available now for Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

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.

Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Crunchbase and more sources are intelligently queried to offer up all kinds of information about your search terms in Apture. We try to make our writing here accessible and offer some definition of terms and introductory explanation of companies or technologies familiar to advanced readers, but sometimes that's easier said than done. Now there's even more information than we can offer - built right in.

We named Apture one of our Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009 and this Summer, government technology site WashingtonTechnology.com offered it as an example of the semantic web, one of what it called the top 5 technologies that will change how government works. I first saw Apture at Foo Camp several years ago, before it launched, and everyone there was wowed.

We haven't mentioned the addition of Apture to our site yet, but thousands of you have already used it here to search for everything from phrases like "assessing cloud performance" to the name Justin Bieber. (We are proud both that RWW is the leading tech blog that makes the most Justin Bieber jokes per month and that we have readers who don't know who he is.)

Let us know how you like the feature. We haven't decided yet how to best let people know that highlighting a phrase here to search for it is an option, but we're pretty excited that it is.

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?"

The winner? Apture.com, the provider of rich multi-media embedded pop-up windows for newspapers and blogs. Founder Tristan Harris is a former Apple engineer who built the first ad server for Wikia, the for-profit arm of Wikipedia, before launching Apture 3 years ago. We've given the product a positive review.

Apture's Harris writes by email: "We we're big fans of Facebook and are super excited about Quora (congrats Adam and Charlie!), but based on the emails that have arrived in my inbox since this article was published I wanted to say that Apture is not for sale. On the contrary we're actually aggressively hiring engineering to join the team and prepping for the release of the next version of Apture. We're totally flattered by the vote of confidence from Quora users, but just wanted to set the record straight."

The next most popular suggestion? Austin, Texas location based social networking service Gowalla. Gowalla is run by CEO Josh Williams, who previously built and sold small business invoicing service Blinksale.

Those sound like good suggestions and both got votes from other Facebook team members on Quora. Remember, this isn't about what technologies should be integrated directly into Facebook - FriendFeed has become little more than an occasional test bed for Facebook feed developments. The question is about scooping up teams of red-hot developers.

Other suggestions offered include Dodgeball co-founder Dennis Crowley's new location based social network Foursquare (it's only a matter of time until Facebook starts doing location check-ins, right?) and social question answering service Hunch, built by Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake and engineering whiz Chris Dixon.

Who do you think would make a good talent acquisition for Facebook? Mark Zuckerberg wants to know.

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.

Apture

We started by testing out Apture's WordPress plug-in (on my personal blog) and were very happy with the results. It takes just a few minutes to install, and learning to use it is quite intuitive. We wrote an extensive review of Apture in February.

Pros:

• It's beautiful. From the admin section to the pop-up windows, design has been emphasized at Apture.


• Lots of user control. The amount of control users have over what's included in their pop-ups is amazing. You can choose between assets with a few clicks, or you can pick out start and end timestamps in an embedded YouTube video. The list of options is big and keeps getting bigger, as evidenced by the recent addition of really nice LinkedIn and Twitter profile options.


• You can now include multiple tabs in one link, making it easy to pack a lot of information inside.


• The user experience is solid, and the product is pretty well baked.

Cons:

• Apture is proprietary software offered by one company, unlike Zemanta's standards-based offering, which was built as part of a consortium of developer- and community-minded companies.


• Sometimes it hangs on the UI. We found one bug that the company has since fixed, but pop-up loading is sometimes slower than we'd like.

Zemanta

Zemanta is a feature-rich service for bloggers and has a great API that developers can use to automatically discover keywords in bodies of text in lots of different scenarios. You should check it out. It's quite easy to use. Last week the company released a feature that competes with Apture, called Balloons. Balloons is now automatically included in the blogging plug-in from Zemanta, which is very easy to get started with.

To be frank, we would recommend installing the core Zemanta plug-in for the rest of its features but using Apture for info pop-ups instead. The way the two products are administered is very different; Zemanta detects key concepts in the text of your post and suggests Balloon links you can add with a click. You're limited to adding just those handful of Balloons; you can't link up just any text you want.

Pros:

• Zemanta is open source and standards-based. It feels good to use.


• Zemanta works with the rest of the tech community and has some awesome tools for supporting non-profit organizations. Did we mention that it feels good to use Zemanta?


• The auto-detection of key concepts -- just click on the buttons and they're linked to resources -- makes Zemanta a little bit faster to use than Apture. It takes fewer clicks.

Cons:

• This tool isn't nearly as pretty. In fact, the pop-ups are almost the opposite of pretty.


• You have far less control over the sources of information you can include. Zemanta's Balloons is tied to the ambitious CommonTags standards effort and apparently does not include anything outside the world of standards. That's noble but limiting.


• Most of the links Zemanta inserts are to FreeBase, which is like a machine-readable version of Wikipedia but also a noble, well-funded mess. Thus the pop-ups you get from Zemanta are quite hit and miss.


• There are Amazon affiliate ads in the Zemanta product; Apture's business strategy appears to be to serve bloggers for free and ad-free and charge big publishers to white-label the service. Zemanta's Amazon ads might get on your nerves.


• This is a very early product, having just launched last week. We hope it is further developed.

That's our experience so far with these tools. If you've tried either or both, we'd love to know about your experience as well.

Apture is a similar service to Panels.net, which pops up useful contextual data about companies and people. Probably what differentiates Apture is that it makes great use of rich media, such as video and audio. The product was created by 4 Stanford computer science graduates and it is very much targeted at media publishers, from small bloggers to big media companies. One of the customers using Apture is WashingtonPost.com, which we will take a look at in this post.

Examples: Washington Post & Brand South Africa Blog

Apture enables publishers to offer extra third-party content on their website, without the user having to leave the host site. For example in the screenshot below Washington Post has a link to Senator Amy Klobuchar - when the reader hovers over it, up pops up a new window with not only biographical information about Klobuchar, but details on what she's voted on and financial disclosures. Many of the links in the pop-up lead to more information presented inside that same window (the only links which open a new browser window are the blue official website links). It's rather impressive how much extra information is offered in just one little pop-up.

What stood out most to us about Apture though is its ability to present - and manipulate - multimedia. Not only can publishers add links to videos inside an Apture pop-up, but they can select which point in the video to jump to. For example if there's a quote from a Barack Obama video that is relevant to readers, and it starts 5 minutes and 10 seconds into the video, you can link to and start the video at that 5:10 mark. Below is an example from a government blog in South Africa. You can also see that it opens a separate Apture window for the video - you can have multiple Apture windows on the same page.

Human Editing Trumps Algorithms

Another interesting aspect about Apture is that it relies on publishers to make the ultimate decisions about which media items to add to a webpage. In other words, algorithms don't do all of the work - although they do select the sources for the editors to select from. This is a point of difference from products such as Snap and Adaptive Blue's SmartLinks, which are both fully automated. How Apture works from the publisher's perspective is that editors (at e.g. Washingtonpost.com) select related content, as suggested by Apture's algorithms. The editing work is currently done post-publishing, because Apture hasn't yet found a way to easily integrate into multiple CMSs - although it is working on solving that issue. Right now though, Apture works as a javascript plug-in on the host site, and editors can add pop-ups via their Apture account.

According to Apture CEO media Tristan Harris, Apture has "lowered the cost of inserting a [multimedia] link". He said that the majority of journalists are not technical, in terms of HTML and related web technologies, but that Apture is simple 'point and click' and so it makes it very easy for them to add multimedia. We asked Harris if there is much Semantic technology happening in the back-end. He replied that they do some "semantic guiding" - e.g. when on a book page, Apture pushes up book content in the results presented to editors. But overall, Harris likes to think of Apture as a "hyper-relevant web" technology, rather than semantic web.

Conclusion: Useful and Visually Appealing

We came away impressed by Apture, because of the amount of multimedia that can be packed into such a little pop-up. Also the end-user experience is sophisticated - readers on washingtonpost.com and other Apture sites can see rich, relevant, contextual content from the likes of Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr without leaving the host site. Apture is positioning itself as "more than a pop-up site". Actually we still think it's a pop-up technology, but we have to say that it's a sophisticated and useful application of it!

Apture is free for bloggers and works via one line of javascript at the bottom of your site. Although Apture's business model was initially advertising, now the company has turned its attention to premium offerings for big media companies. It is looking for monthly subscription fees from large media companies, in exchange for premium services.

Tell us what you think of Apture - and indeed pop-up technologies in general - in the comments.

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.

Until recently on the web, most sites have not been software - only data, a bunch of flat HTML pages. The software that you used to look at them was, of course, the web browser. The problem was that the browser had no idea what the pages contained, and it did not know what you were doing. Because the browser could not infer your context, it could not help you explore related and relevant information.

The contextual web experience is fundamentally different because there is an understanding of what the user is doing. The combination of the information on the page and the user's behavior creates the context. Once you understand the user's context, you can be more helpful. So, contextual technologies have the potential to bite into the pie that today belongs to search, because it is able to bypass search.

Consider the difference between looking at the IBM home page and a movie page on Netflix. The context is very different, and so likely is the user's intention. The user may be looking at IBM because she is looking for a job or researching IBM products. When the user is looking up a movie, it is because she is thinking about renting it.

The Key Properties of The Contextual Web

The Contextual web will happen when browsers and websites evolve to recognize what users are trying to do. It is the web with less choice and more meaning, where instead of Googling all the time, we Google once and then the rest of the information is available to us automatically, based on our current context.

Here are the key properties of the contextual web experience:

• Relevancy: understanding the user's context better drives content relevancy.
• Shortcuts: contextual shortcuts reduce the need for raw search.
• Personalization: context is based on user intentions and history.
• Remixing: relevant information from around the web is instantly available.

What are some specific examples of contextual technologies that are improving our web experience right now?

Markup Technologies

One of the keys to inferring user context is understanding the underlying information that the user is looking at. This is why the contextual web is related to -- and, to be more precise, is powered by -- semantic web. We have written a lot here on ReadWriteWeb about semantic technologies. Notably, we discussed the difference between the top-down and bottom-up approaches to semantic web, both of which are important for understanding the contextual web.

The bottom-up approach to context is about annotating pages. For example, all modern browsers can detect if the page you are looking at contains an RSS feed. This happens because the browser looks for a tag in the head of the page, which declares type . The fact that the page offers an RSS feed creates an obvious context: subscription. So, the browser then invites you to subscribe using your favorite RSS reader.

Another form of markup that has been discussed recently is microformats, which offer an XHTML-compliant way of embedding metadata about people, places, events, and reviews in existing web pages. Even though microformats are not ubiquitous today, there are clear benefits to using them. The image below is from an excellent post by Mozilla UI lead Alex Faaborg about leveraging microformats in the browser.

Building on the hAtom microformat are Web Slices, introduced by Microsoft in Internet Explorer 8. Web Slices enable publishers to notify users when the information in their web pages changes. For example, Weather.com can create a Web Slice that tells the user when a local weather update is available. eBay can deliver a Web Slice that notifies the user when the price of an auction changes. Similar in concept to RSS, Web Slices focus on updates in part of the web page, enabling publishers and users to communicate directly via the browser.

There are other markup formats that help provide context. For example, popular add-on Cooliris offers a markup format for signaling that a site contains images. By placing a bit of XML code in their home directory, site owners enable users to experience their images using the stunning 3D visualization developed by Cooliris. Another markup format, developed by AdaptiveBlue [disclosure: this is the company I founded], is called ABMeta. This format allows publishers to annotate pages that contain information about books, music, movies, wine, restaurants, stocks, and other everyday things.

All of these markup-based approaches face the same issue: publishers have to do the work of actually annotating the pages. And while the semantic web community has been very vocal about the benefits of annotation, the majority of the web is still flat HTML.

Page 2: Widgets

Widgets

In the meantime, we are seeing a surge in applications that deploy a top-down approach to inferring user context and being helpful. Instead of relying on markup in pages, these applications use heuristics and APIs to recognize the information that the user is interacting with. Based on their recognition, these smart tools then offer contextual shortcuts to the relevant bits of information. Speaking broadly, today there are two primary categories of top-down contextual applications: blog plugins and browser add-ons.

Blog plugins offering a contextual experience have been around for some time, starting with preview technologies. One of the first recent unsuccessful attempts at a preview technology was delivered by Browster. Despite its failure, its successors, CoolPreviews, SnapShots, and Apture, have done much better. While CoolPreviews literally focuses on a preview of the page, SnapShots and Apture deliver a compact summary of the information behind the link. The basic premise behind the previews is sound: if the user is not interested in what is behind the link, the preview can save the user an unnecessary click. Because the user context (in this case, the link) is known, relevant information can be brought to the surface and delivered to the user instantly.

Closely related to previews are widgets that offer contextual shortcuts. Like previews, these widgets work by being anchored to links. Examples of this technology include Yahoo! Shortcuts and SmartLinks from my company AdaptiveBlue. Instead of providing a preview of the underlying content, these technologies offer links to related content around the web. The example below shows a SmartLink on a New York Times movie page, which invites the user, for example, to buy the movie on Amazon or rent it on Netflix.

Our last example of contextual widget technology comes from Colorado-based Lijit. Lijit has developed a search technology that focuses on the individual. You claim your presence around the web, on blogs, Twitter, Flickr, etc., and then others can search your pages on specific topics. Say you are on someone's blog and want to do a search on that person; it makes the most sense to search through this person's pages first; after all, you are in this person's context.

Remarkably, Lijit offers another contextual nugget, called Re-search. It is simple, but a great example of the power of context. If you search for a term on Google and end up on a blog that has a Lijit widget, a header appears with additional results and a prompt to search for more. Lijit automatically infers your context, does a search, and offers additional helpful shortcuts.

Page 3: Browser Add-Ons and Conclusion

Browser Add-Ons

Widgets and markup technologies are making inroads into the contextual web, but an even bigger inroad is being made by browser add-ons. Since Firefox introduced its platform for delivering additional features to the browser, many thousands of browser extensions have been developed. A lot of these extension focus on enhancing the browsing experience by leveraging context. Probably the granddaddy of them all is Greasemonkey, an extension that allows users to install bits of JavaScript that alter the look and content of web pages they visit. We wrote an introduction to this popular add-on and recently followed up with a post on 7 New Greasemonkey Tweaks.

While Greasemonkey scripts are mainly regarded as experimental tools for power users, quite a few other extensions are aimed at building a business around contextual enhancements to the browser. One example is a company called WebMynd, which focuses on enhancing Google search results. WebMynd's extension automatically pushes down Google ads (clever!) to insert its contexual gadget. It allows users to simultaneously search posts on Twitter, book matches on Amazon, video matches on YouTube, and many other sources. An example of what shows up when searching for "semantic web" using the gadget is shown below.

We have mentioned Cooliris several times already. The most popular Cooliris product is the browser add-on that shows stunning 3D views of photos and videos around the web. Cooliris works contextually by automatically recognizing popular photo sites like Flickr, Google Images and Photobucket. Another contextual add-on that works by recognizing content on pages is Glue. This add-on shows you friends and other users who have visited the same book, music, movie, restaurant, wine, and other pages around the web. The context here crosses the content you are viewing with your social graph. Unlike lifestreaming applications that deliver you information about your friends out of context, Glue only brings to the surface information that is relevant to your current context.

A very different example of a contextual web add-on comes from Slovenia-based Zemanta. Its add-on makes it easy for publishers to add contextually relevant links, photos, and video to their posts. Zemanta works by applying its semantic engine to the body of the post and automatically recommending related content. Using Zemanta, bloggers are able to instantly add relevant content to their blog posts, in turn creating a relevant web experience for their users.

Our last two examples of contextual add-ons are Zentact and App Discover, both recently launched. Zentact -- developed by the folks who brought us another contextual phenomenon, MyBlogLog -- aims to solve a problem of staying in touch with people who matter to you. First, you import and tag your email contacts with different tags that reflect their interests. Then, as you browse, Zentact pops up a reminder to contact a person if it deems the page relevant based on the tags. It is a simple yet powerful example of the contextual web.

App Discover works by recommending related applications to the sites that you are visiting. Today, it requires publishers to add markup to their sites, but one can easily imagine how this technology could work top-down. The example below shows App Discover recommending TweetDeck when the user navigates to Twitter.

Browsers

Without a doubt, web browsers are in the best position to deliver the user's contextual web experience. While add-ons are taken in a variety of directions, the two dominant browsers, Internet Explorer and Firefox, have already incorporated the basic contextual experience: shortcuts. Internet Explorer 8 features technology called Accelerators.

According to Microsoft, Accelerators give you ready access to the online services you use everyday, from any page you visit. Accelerators are defined as little chunks of XML based on pre-defined variables and defined by the browser. Some examples of variables available to Accelerator are the active URL, the active domain, and selected text. The most common action that Accelerators do is perform contextual search based on the user's selection. Another common Accelerator function is the in-place lookup, such as looking up a map based on a given address.

The problem with Accelerators is that they are not really based on a selection; that is, they lack semantics. When you highlight an address, you still have to decide which Accelerator to use. If you have dozens of Accelerators installed, this quickly becomes hard to manage. Firefox has recognized the issue with the menu-driven approach and instead offers its contextual technology via text. Called Ubiquity, this contextual technology is still only available as an add-on today but is likely to be a part of Firefox core soon.

Marketed as user-generated mashups, Ubiquity is actually a contextual technology based on language. As with Accelerators, the user is able to select a piece of text and then invoke Ubiquity and type a command. In the screenshot above, Ubiquity is used to insert a map into an email. Hundreds of Ubiquity commands have been implemented to date. ReadWriteWeb has already written about Ubiquity commands.

Will Context be the Future of the Web?

So where is all of this heading? Are these technologies signal or noise? We believe we are witnessing the birth of a fundamentally new kind of web, a smarter one, a contextual one. Unlike the old web we are used to, this one understands what we are doing and helps us. It is a web in which we search less and find relevant content faster. This new contextual web is still very young and unevenly distributed, but it is definitely here.

The fact that these contextual technologies are springing up is not accidental. The Contextual web is made possible by our push into semantic web and the rise of web services/API culture. The combination of basic semantics and API is fueling all of these contextual applications. Bit by bit, the web is getting smarter, friendlier, and more enjoyable.

Web browsers are in the best position to deliver these new contextual experiences to users because of their wide reach. The fact that Microsoft made Accelerators its flagship feature for Internet Explorer 8 and that Mozilla is putting much effort into Ubiquity tells us that contexual browsing is a priority. This is really good news, because these technologies bring great benefits to the user.

It is great to see that in these tough economic times, evolution is brewing. The tremendous effort that all of these companies are making with contextual technologies is beginning to come to fruition. It may be that we are seeing glimpses of what the next generation of the web will be like.

And now, as usual, let's turn the tables. Tell us examples of your favorite contextual browsing technologies. Do you think context will be play significant part in the next evolution of the web?