Second was the Web of Identities, which is like the Web of Data, but for people data. Its ability protect one's privacy and to cope with data volatility differentiates it from the Web of Data. In the Web of Identities, it's people's social graphs that link one identity to another.

Third was the Web of Services, which makes services accessible and processable. Their semantic annotation makes them a part of this series of webs. Machines can be taught to autonomously detect, apply and replace a service, or even link them by chaining or orchestrating them to solve bigger problems or to achieve redundancy or scalability.

For the last several years, mashups have shown us that through APIs, amateur programmers and startups have the ability to access data and services and thereby create appealing new services at low cost and at a low entry barrier. Often, the interfaces are proprietary and lack a standardization so that mashup services are hardwired to data and service sources. If one puzzle piece fails, the whole service fails. Usually there are no fall-back mechanisms to automatically replace a data or service source on failure.

The three webs form the basis for tomorrow's mashup generation. All webs follow basic Web principles, such as modularization, de-centrality and simplicity, and provide accessibility and detectability. The openness and availability of data, people data and services pave the way to an interoperating ecosystem of companies serving the fragments of tomorrow's services.

The following scenarios all utilize all three webs. Just like Richard MacManus asked "What would you build with a Web of Data?" this time we ask: What would you build given all these webs? Feel free to contribute your own ideas in the comments section! Here are my app ideas.

Pretty Social Recommendations

Bob addresses a service that provides social recommendations, which is based on the webs. He queries "recommend books about Berlin for my mother for Christmas". The service analyzes his query and splits it to a chain of subtasks, which it starts to process.

From the Web of Data, the service gathers general (common sense) knowledge about the terms used in the query. Like this, the service learns that a book is an purchasable item, that Berlin is a city in Germany, and so forth. The service also semantically understands "books about Berlin" and queries the Web of Data for books covering Berlin or authors born or living in Berlin.

This initial book list must be filtered using individual and contextual parameters now: Given permission from Bob, his identity provider (IDP) is called to return his mother's Web ID (a Web ID is a standardized identifier linking to the user's profile at the IDP of trust) from his social graph.

The mother's IDP is called to access data about the the topic fields, books, and, Berlin, she is interested in. The IDP returns a set of information the mother granted access to her family. The data contains general interests, some book purchases, reviews, comments, ratings and some attention data that was recorded observing her reading articles online. The service continues by querying the mother's closest friends' IDPs to see if one of them liked or recommends books about Berlin, since friends' recommendations are the most valuable.

The service now searches and calls a ranking service from the Web of Services that can handle books, personal interests and recommendations as input criteria and returns a ranked list of books.

In order to find the best deals for the remaining books, the service now compares and bargains prices at several book stores via the Web of Services limiting to those that guarantee a delivery before December 24.

Finally, the list of books is augmented with prices from different stores and then presented to Bob. Bob selects a book and pays with a checkout service from the Web of Services.

Mass Customization

Alice recently graduated from a university. She knows that she needs an insurance package but has no idea what it should consist of. She's heard of an intelligent insurance packaging brokerage system which she visits using her browser. She logs into the system with the Web ID she got from her IDP. From the Web of Identities, and with her permission, the system initiates a profile lookup to gather information needed for the components of the insurance package. This saves her precious time.

It queries for information like private address, marriage status, age and gender. Since it can't find her current income, it prompts her directly. From the Web of Data, the system now queries for her neighborhood's crime statistics for risk estimates. The system then looks up insurance services it can find on the Web of Services.

It configures the services with the knowledge gathered, selects the best offers and combines them to a personalized insurance package. The package consists of products from different insurers from around the globe. She signs the contracts through the broker and logs out with the satisfaction that she now is neither under- nor over-insured.

Further Application Areas

The webs can also be used to filter the real-time Web to individual and context-relevant content. Easy-to-use activity stream queries that are above the level of a single social platform become feasible like "filter by private friends nearby" or "filter by business contacts living in Wellington talking about the real-time Web". How about a pinch of sentiment analysis: "filter by my boss but only if he is really upset" or "filter by brand XY but only if the community is getting nasty".

Without a doubt these data and services sources can help to improve lots of existing services at low cost, including augmented reality or location-based services. Valuable knowledge can be provided for locations found on the Web of Data, friends can be displayed if they agreed to expose their location to the querying person via the Web of Identities, and so forth.

These are only a handful of thoughts for a whole new era of applications fueled by an open, linked and semantic basis for data and service sources. What applications can you think of? Or do you find all this creepy?

This time, we'll focus on the Web of services, which makes services accessible to and processable for machines. These Webs all have a semantic architecture in common and follow basic Web principles, such as being decentralized, modular, simple, addressable via URIs, and built for machines.

The effort to standardize such things as service-oriented architectures (SOA) and Web services has taken years, but still we have no clear definition of what constitutes a service at a conceptual level. The interface, which is the format of what goes in and out of the service, is often described formally, but what the service is actually doing, semantically speaking, is not. While there are a number of different approaches to semantically describing Web services, such as OWL-S, WSMO and WDSL-S, none so far has managed to break out of its academic confines.

Today, there are already all kinds of services with different levels of complexity, and their number is expected to grow exponentially. The services follow different standards, and a lot of them are proprietary, uni-directional and designed to be used by humans to mash up something new. Editorial catalogs such as ProgrammableWeb and search engines for Web services such as seekda are designed for humans who are searching for a particular service for that reason. For tasks that are unsolvable for machines, there are even Web services such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which have humans in the back end answering tricky queries.

The problem with all of this is that each of the tens of thousands of services is accessible but not findable by a machine without a machine-understandable description. Thus, every service nowadays has to be wired to a machine by hand. So, what would machines be capable of if services were annotated with semantic descriptions?

• Service discovery
  Given an index of Web services, a machine charged with finding the right service for a particular problem could choose one among those that have been indexed.
• Contracting and execution
  Once a service has been selected, a machine could look up its terms and decide on contracting and execution details. How often would the service be needed? And what would be the cheapest contract then?
• Billing or revenue sharing
  Depending on the autonomy of the machine, one could imagine something like an Autonomous Agent, which automatically makes the best deal with the service provider on such things as billing or revenue sharing for service usage.
• Replacement on failure, based on experience
  Of course, the machine would be able to replace a failing service with an equivalent one. It could also rate a service and publish it.
• Service orchestration
  A machine could, given enough intelligence, split a task into sub-tasks and then discover, contract and orchestrate services to solve these sub-tasks. And after the sub-tasks have been addressed, the main task would be solved. Such orchestration could involve the parallelization of tasks, for speeding up or redundancy purposes, or chaining services (whereby the output of one service is inputted into the next).

Research projects such as TripCom, SUPER, SHAPE and SOA4All are dealing with these ideas and scenarios.

Future scenarios are limited only by our imagination: machines could autonomously pursue goals on behalf of their master user or company, according to a specified level of freedom. These agents could solve increasingly complex problems and be granted increasingly more autonomy (finally ending up as Skynet).

In the next and final post in this series, we will discuss how all of these scenarios could become a reality with the arrival of all three Webs: a revolution in the ability of machines to access, process and apply information.

Do you also count the Web of services as a third Web? Where do you see its limits?

(Photo by zorro-art.)

An Amsterdam based holding company called PPF and the Paris based World Association of Newspapers are funding a fascinating project that will launch 30 different websites covering hyperlocal news throughout the Czech Republic. Google will provide technical training and the sites will run AdSense in exchange. In order to maximize contact with the local community, the project has hired 90 mostly young reporters who will work out of offices with public coffee and internet shops built into the facilities.

The idea brings to mind the Lawrence Journal World, a well known model of effective local online reporting. If Google and other online specialists could help more newspapers rock like LJWorld.com does, then things could really look up for local news.

To be fair, some people attribute LJWorld's success to its local near monopoly across different media types - but the company has been wildly innovative in terms of types of content, interactivity, mobile and the creation of a content management system (Django) that is now used by newspapers around the world. The company even offers an RSS feed of their most-clicked classified ads and displays those in a widget throughout the site. That's cool. Anyone interested in local news online should make sure to spend some time looking around the website of the Lawrence Journal World.

Do You Think the Web Industry Has An Interest or Obligation in Helping Old Models of Reporting Transition Online? RSS readers can click here to view and participate in our poll on that question.

Why not have web specialists offer training to more old fashioned news organizations in order to create a more compelling product? This morning I was watching a trailer for an immersive multiplayer game about to launch and thought: lots of people are willing to pay $20 to $50 once or as a subscription for these really compelling game experiences - couldn't the news organizations of the future better leverage the internet to create an experience that people would pay for? Either pay for or view advertisements through? From games to iPhone apps to really useful software otherwise, I know I'm willing to pay for things. The local news rag just doesn't do anything moving enough for me to pay for it, other than a weekend print edition that I have delivered to my house. Their website certainly isn't interesting enough to visit.

Be it through subscriptions, micropayments or advertising, this whole historic dilemma of the death of newspapers, local news and investigative reporting sure seems like it would be a different scenario if the news producers just made a more compelling product. Our expectations are higher these days because we have the internet. So make something awesome that takes advantage of all this technology. (Granted, this doesn't take into account the reticence of local advertisers to buy online. That's not the only problem newspapers are facing, though.)

Programs that put technical specialists into the newsroom to teach technical skills sound like a great avenue to explore. It would be good to see Google's program in the Czech Republic expand outside of that country and for other vendors to be offering similar services. Let's see a Vimeo Professional Services. Reddit is used by papers but not nearly as well as it is on Reddit.com. How many microblogging services could do themselves and the local paper a lot of good with some symbiosis through training services? I think this is a very interesting idea.

For more on this general topic, I'm going to listen to this collection of podcasts by Dave Winer and NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen, titled Rebooting the News.

It needs to be said, though, that Facebook's user base has exploded over the last year, while Digg's traffic 'only' grew by about 50% according to Compete. During its fifth year, Facebook's traffic more than doubled from about 28 million visitors to over 73 million.

As Jay Meattle points out in his guest post for Compete, Digg will have to come up with something very special if it wants to continue to match Facebook's growth.

Can Digg Become Mainstream?

In a way, though, comparing Digg to Facebook isn't even necessarily fair, as they provide two completely different services, but in terms of the users they want to reach, both have very similar aspirations. For now, Digg, however, hasn't been able to break into the mainstream (even though Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht made an appearance on Jimmy Fallon last week), while there is a good chance that even your mother is now joining Facebook. If Digg wants to continue its growth, it will have to find a way to attract more mainstream users without alienating its base.

Not all identity theft is through electronic means. Although some of the incidents include cyber fraud, there are still plenty of cases where physical theft, including lost and stolen wallets and checkbooks, is a factor.

But when fighting the ever-growing identity theft problem, technology gives financial institutions an edge. However, leaving the battle entirely in the hands of banks may not be the solution. Despite the anti-fraud technologies and methods financial institutions employ, their customers may be the most important and effective factor in preventing theft. Says James Van Dyke, president and founder of Javelin, "Customers can be just as effective...because one out of two fraud cases is first detected by the customer."

With the new technology from Clickatell SMS Receipts, customers can either verify or cancel transactions as they occur in real-time. If fraud is detected, it will be spotted almost instantly.

Clickatell's solution isn't the first example of SMS technology being used in this manner - earlier this year Barclays Bank implemented a similar service. But Clickatell is already being put to good use. E-Wallet provider Moneybookers is using the service, as is Santam, S1 Corporation, and First National Bank of South Africa. In addition to this fraud prevention service, Clickatell also partners with financial institutions to provide SMS-based banking which allows for balance inquiries, fund transfers, and person-to-person payment services. This sort of technology offers more than just modern-day convenience - it also lets people take advantage of banking services from anywhere in the world, even when they're far away from a branch or ATM.

Like Yotify and Alerts.com, Trackle is your personalized web scout. Instead of having to constantly revisit web sites and services for the news you want to follow, you can use Trackle to be updated automatically when there's a change in whatever it is you're following. Want to track prices of a new Canon camera? Want to know when your favorite band has a new album on iTunes? Want to get the latest sports scores? Trackle does all that and then some.

Trackle Has the Most Alerts

What makes Trackle unique, though, is the sheer quantity of alerts they've made available. It's here that Trackle really outshines their competitors. They've also added some alerts that are unique to their service (at least so far), like the ability track crime in your neighborhood - you can even select and de-select checkboxes for the types of crime you want to track when setting up that particular alert.

There are also plans to give third party developers the ability to create their own alerts in the next version of Trackle. And the company promises their service can scale to support however many new ones are created.  

Alerts We Love

For the Facebook obsessed, a Trackle alert can notify you when someone sends you a message, adds you as a friend, posts to your wall, etc. Of course you can see all these things on Facebook, but with Trackle, you can set up an SMS alert for this. That's especially useful for students and employees who have to deal with Facebook being blocked by their I.T. department or for anyone who doesn't spend their entire day in front of a computer.

Bloggers and other information hounds will appreciate Trackle's scouring agents that let you track anything on the web, including blogs, RSS feeds, news, and more. Although other sites allow this too, what's different about the way Trackle works is that you can set up one alert but associate it with different keywords. So, for example, you could fill in "TweetDeck," "Twhirl," and "AlertThingy" as keywords you wanted to track across blogs, but save the whole alert as "Tracking Twitter Applications" instead of having each keyword as its own alert.

Smart and Well-Organized

Trackle is smart, too. Once the system has shown you something once, it's not going to show it to you again and again, even if that particular link rises to the top of Google's search results. Your alerts will always be new information so as not to waste your time.

However, one of the best things about Trackle is the look and feel of the site. The overall design is visually appealing which makes the service easy to use. Left-side navigation leads you to just the type of alert you need and each alert is clearly marked with an "Add," "Info," and "Share" button. ("Share" because Trackle lets you email or Twitter alerts). That same sense of organization is available in your Trackle inbox - the tab where you can catch up on your alerts. When you have new alerts in a particular category, a number appears next to the category name, designating the number of new alerts available. You can click the category to be taken right to it or you can scroll down through your list.

Only One Problem

The only downside to Trackle - and watch out, it's a big one - is that it appears to have been designed mainly for U.S. usage. So for example, when you're tracking crime, home prices, events, etc., you have to pick from a list of U.S. states. That's too bad, because Trackle's service deserves to be used the world over. We hope they'll expand to include other parts of the globe soon.

The white-label service LetMeKnow allows any web publisher to easily integrate the company's alerts technology into their web site by using just a small bit of copy-and-paste code. According to branchnext, that means the LetMeKnow platform can be implemented, tested, and released in days without placing the burden of software development on the web publishers themselves.

They call their technology "alerts-as-a-service" or "AaaS," but we think perhaps they haven't read that acronym out loud yet...it's not good. There's no need to use clever abbreviations to sell this product, though; the idea makes sense and can stand on its own without trying to join the "as-a-Service" bandwagon. Put simply, LetMeKnow allows anyone to integrate alerting technology into their site with little effort, adding additional value for their site's visitors, be them blog readers or shoppers.

Using LetMeKnow

After publishers implement LetMeKnow, visitors can use the service to stay informed about new posts, content updates, price changes, new comments, new reviews, saved searches, and more. The alerts they sign up for can arrive via email, mobile (SMS), instant messaging, RSS, or even via a downloadable Adobe AIR desktop software program.

Also included in the LetMeKnow service is the ability to add in extensible widgets that allow broadcasting of the alert notifications across the web, including to sites like Facebook, MySpace, and iGoogle. Users wishing to share their alert notifications can do so using email, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, and StumbleUpon, which are also integrated with the service.

Like Yotify, LetMeKnow also includes the social recommendation technology "AskFriends." With this, users can solicit input from their friends by sharing their scouts on sites like Facebook and FriendFeed and then gathering the responses.

For the Publishers

Besides the ease of implementation, LetMeKnow provides publishers extensive reporting tools which enable them to see how their site's visitors are using the service. There are 50 different metrics tracked that indicate how, when, and where the content is being viewed, shared, and published. Businesses using LetMeKnow also have the option to completely brand the service to their liking, so it appears to be a part of their web site and not some outside tool. Additionally, brandnext promises to deliver 99.9% uptime and support.

How much this will all cost or how well it will work isn't known as of yet. There isn't word on pricing for the service - only a sign-up form for those interested. However, if Yotify is any indication, LetMeKnow may be worth a look.