The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), a project co-led by the Association of Educational Publishers and Creative Commons, today took the next step towards submitting its specification to Schema.org, the collaboration between Google, Yahoo and Bing that maps out 100 different types of content online in a standardized format.

Active participants working to figure out how to construct LRMI and how to integrate it into Schema.org include people from small non-profits like open curriculum community Curriki, corporate education technology giant Pearson, international information standards group Dublin Core and intellectual property law group Creative Commons, among others.

Participants debate on the official mailing list over new terminology, balancing concerns like coherence with Schema.org, ease of input by people who will enter metadata to go with resources being published online and specificity gained or lost by the way that metadata fields are named and framed.

While some semantic technologies are able to assert categorization from the top down, whether content publishers participate or not, it seems likely that the kind of data that will be communicated in LRMI will require informed participation by the producers of the content themselves. Requiring participation in categorization could pose a challenge to hopes the spec will gain meaningful adoption.

The LRMI effort doesn't seem well-known yet outside its own ranks, either; the official website has almost no inbound links indexed by Google yet and none of the education technology blogs we track here at ReadWriteWeb have mentioned LRMI yet. The project was just announced last month though and in the education market, a month isn't a very long time.

LRMI isn't alone though, either. Nathan Angell, a Board Director at the collaborative open education software community Sakai Foundation and a Product Manager at rSmart, calls LRMI "another welcome intervention in growing list of data specifications for education."

"These days we have access to an unbelievable number of learning resources--both open and proprietary--but it's still hard to find the right ones, quality resources, suited to your needs, when you need them.

"For example, in the Sakai community, we have built a new platform--the Open Academic Environment--that helps people create and tag learning materials, and most importantly, share them openly by default.

"With the LRMI specification, we can help people tag their materials with exactly the right information that will make them easy for others to find and use...and even better, we can augment the suggested content widgets we already have in place to discover resources in the moment that match the very specific needs of a particular educator or student."

Angell, who isn't associated with LRMI in particular, sees data specifications like this as potential game changers. Those suggested content widgets are really shorthand for computation that can begin at a higher level of abstraction if the hard work of content categorization and description has already been done in a standardized way. That means education technology providers, search engines and others don't have to invest time and energy into understanding educational resources online - they can begin with a pre-existing understanding of that content and then offer higher-level features and services on top of already-organized information.

"LRMI helps set the stage for the hive mind that will help our children's children learn faster and better than we ever thought possible," Angel says. "In comparison, school today will look like drawing pictures in the dirt with a stick."

The new jQuery Standards Team says that the broad adoption of jQuery, they say it's used on 50% of the top 10,000 sites on the web, means they have a strong perspective on the needs of developers everywhere. They don't mention it, but they are also people that are widely liked who are responsible for very cool technology. At least that's the way supporters see it; the group isn't without its critics. Perhaps as all things standards related are.

They will also represent Web developers in conversations with Web Browser companies, who often dominate standards organizations, and they will work to help the jQuery project as a whole adopt new standards as appropriate.

The team says its goal is "to give a voice to the millions of web developers interested in contributing to the process, but without an easy way to do so."

Community Reactions

Reactions in the developer community so far have been generally positive so far, but not without some dissent. "When marketing (and that is what jQuery is) controls web standards, there is a problem," said Garrett Smith on Twitter. (See the critique jQeury is for NOOBS, for example. It's said by some that jQuery's primary strength is marketing itself.)

"jQuery and standards - now that is a contradiction in terms," complained Swiss developer Thomas Lahn.

Others voiced hope that the new organization would help counter balance Mozilla's influence in standards and browser discussions; still others said something like this was long overdue.

Update: A Mozilla representative argues that big companies jockeying to dominate the web standards process are a more pressing issue than any concern about the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. That argument seems compelling to me and I defer to their more informed judgement of the details.

Given how long, slow, detailed, political and frustrating formal standards organizations can be, though - Texan Jason Petersen may have offered the most realistic critical perspective this afternoon.

"These are GREAT people to be leading this effort," Petersen tweeted. "Hope they aren't wasted."

It just so happens that something like that may now be under development in the most official of venues. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced today the formation of a new Web Real-Time Communications Working Group to define client-side APIs to enable Real-Time Communications in Web browsers, without the need for server-side implementation. The Group is chaired by engineers from Google and Ericsson. It sounds like Opera Unite to me (see video below), but democratized across all browsers. It sounds like it could be a very big deal.

"These APIs should enable building applications that can be run inside a browser," the new Working Group's charter says, "requiring no extra downloads or plugins, that allow communication between parties using audio, video and supplementary real-time communication, without having to use intervening servers (unless needed for firewall traversal, or for providing intermediary services)."

The working group is focused on the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that devices will use to implement these connections, but is working with an IETF group developing a technical protocol for transmission of the data between browsers. The first indication of this work appeared two months ago with the discovery of a mysterious flag inside Google Chromium.

The W3C's new working group on all this is chaired by Harald Alvestrand of Google and Stefan Håkansson of Ericsson. It plans on meeting regularly through February 2013 and is placing a special emphasis on ensuring users have control over and are aware of what media they might be transmitting from their browsers to others.

The Steering Committee of the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) has endorsed the United States Thoroughfare, Landmark and Postal Address Data Standard, a product of the Committee's Address Standard Working Group. What does that mean? It means it's now possible to start referring to adresses, streets and landmarks with the knowledge that everyone will refer to them in the same way. The standard was developed with the use of drafts posted online in wiki format and received thousands of edits and comments from stakeholders.

"The United States Thoroughfare, Landmark, and Postal Address Data Standard will have a significant impact at all levels of government and is an essential component of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure," said Ivan DeLoatch, Executive Director of the FGDC in the group's announcement of the standard's completion. "We encourage government agencies, as well as others, to implement the standard for it provides a foundation for understanding and developing solutions for the many challenges in our communities."

We'll see if that happens. Hopefully it won't just be government agencies and it won't take another five years.

None of the hundreds of geotechnology blogs we follow have mentioned the standard beyond a few reposts of the press release. None of the hundreds of geotech specialists that follow our dedicated Geo Twitter account responded to our request for comment on today's news. None of the geo developers we communicate with regularly had any response to our request for comment. It's a little depressing.

Such data standards make it easier to develop apps that use your calendar data and make more viable the development of new calendar software without fear that users will be locked out of application ecosystems.

"Internet TV" no longer means simply bringing Internet content to the television screen. Internet TV is no longer encompassed by the idea that users want to check their email on the big screen in the living room. Instead, Internet TV has shifted from that of an Internet-enabled device to that of an integrated service, available on a number of devices.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the official standards organization of the Web, has issued a report on the transition of TV to a service, identifying several points that need to be addressed for Internet TV to become a widely available, open, cross-platform service.

According to the report, the conversation arrived at a number of "convergence priorities." Among these priorities are adaptive streaming, or keeping a steady stream of video despite changing bandwidth, home networking, the role of metadata and Semantic Web technology, and even the possible extension of HTML5 for television.

"In a world migrating from TV as a device to TV as a service available on any device," said W3C's François Daoust, co-chair of the Workshop, "the W3C is looking forward to developing ubiquitous Web technologies to enable scenarios that combine local (e.g., from home network devices) and global (e.g. social networks) sources to enhance the user experience on TV."

Right now, devices and services often compete on content offerings rather than functionality. This will change with time, however. "As television evolves further into a service," reads the press release, "people will expect the service to be available on a variety of devices, and to connect smoothly with other favorite services, including social networking and shopping. As the number and diversity of devices grows (across multiple industries), interoperability challenges will also grow."

The report identifies the W3C's proposed Open Web Platform as one solution for application development, in that it "gives designers cross-platform interoperability."

The platform would offer standardized ways to handle issues that are currently proprietary and platform specific. Issues with Digital Rights Management (DRM), for example, prohibits Android users from getting Netflix - a benefit their iPhone-wielding brethren have enjoyed for nearly quite a while. Proposals for metadata and Semantic Web solutions, for example, could make interoperable solutions between different software solutions possible. Imagine if every audio program treated MP3s completely different - that's where we currently are with Television content.

In all, that's the current state of Internet TV. It's fragmented, walled-in and proprietary. DRM technology works on one platform and not another, while one service identifies content in one way, while another identifies in a completely different and incompatible manner. Content streams more smoothly on one device than another and is available on one set-top box but not the other. The W3C's proposal would work to centralize some of these issues and have services and devices compete directly on the quality of the service provided, the functionality and interaction, rather than the basic experience.

What does that mean? "Web linking is the most fundamental web building block," says Yahoo! standards wonk Eran Hammer-Lahav. "Typed links - links with a clear semantic meaning - existed on the web since the very beginning, but for the most part lacked any generally acceptable definition... Agreeing on what a link type means across formats is critical for a semantically rich web, in which links are used to provide a richer user experience, as well as better search and automation features."

IETF RFC 5988 is the document authored by Yahoo's Mark Nottingham for the IETF that explains the standard and this is the registry where you can find the 42 relations that have been accepted so far.

Hammer-Lahav continues:

"What the new RFC does is establish a registry and a simple process for defining new link relation types across formats (HTML5, XRD, Microformats, HTTP headers, ATOM, etc.).

"What is important about the new registry is its lightweight approach, allowing most stable documents to be used as reference specifications for new relation types. The process is used as a sanity check, and not as another bureaucracy slowing down innovation."

Hammer-Lahav says the HTML5 community has been particularly active in submitting Rels for inclusion in the registry. See also the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group's HTML5 rel directory. (Details)

Rich links, expressed across multiple languages, in a standardized semantic format, promise to act as a platform where programatic analysis can be performed on scale - making it far easier than ever before to bring together diverse resources from all around the web to create new experiences for application users.

The rel="me" link, for example, has enabled services like the Google Social Graph API to string together semantically marked-up profile pages owned by a single person across multiple different sites and social networks. That makes it easy to draw a picture of who a person is across different services they use, because their profile pages link out to their blogs or Twitter accounts, for example, using the rel="me" link relation.

That kind of cross-site functionality could be built for everything from bookmarks to content licenses to payments and more if the IETF's new web link relations markup proliferates.

Unfortunately, there's not one standard way to easily code these notifications across platforms and there's very little support for web apps seeking to send notifications to users. It's been one of the advantages that desktop apps have had over the web. That could be about to change.

The Group has published an Editor's Draft for the specification and it's a good read. The possible implementations accounted for today could be the foundation of vital new features the web apps we use and build tomorrow.

Want a web-based Twitter client with popup desktop messages? A web-based banking app with push alerts to mobile devices? There are a whole lot of possibilities when you imagine combining the advantages of the web with a cross-platform standard for notification APIs.

What's Included

Alerts like this are generally only possible for desktop apps. Michael Richardson, engineer at Urban Airship, a company that pushes rich media mobile notifications as a service for developers, put it like this:

"Anybody familiar with OS X and Growl has been using things like this for a while. One thing modern desktop notification systems are missing is a standard that allows better communication between web apps and users in front of their computer. Previously, the only method has been email, which sucks. This will be a good step towards promoting web applications as first class citizens."

The W3C draft spec discusses a snooze button for alerts, external device notifications and "simultaneous execution contexts (like a multi-tab email application) to show notifications without creating duplicate notifications." For web apps!

Behind the Scenes

The Working Group is slated to work until the end of January 2012 and is chaired by a 23 year old Dutch engineer from Opera named Anne van Kesteren (@annevk). The draft spec was edited by John Gregg, a Microsoft-turned-Google software engineer who led development of the Webkit desktop notifications API that Chrome recently made accessible to extension developers. Discussion of the web notifications standard will occur over a public email list that appears not to have been initiated yet.

This should be one to watch; this could be a key group in building a foundation for the real-time web user interfaces of the future.

Thanks to Palm's Dion Almaer for being the first within our circle to mention this.

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?

Bruno Uzzan - Standards Pave the Way

By far the most frequent topic of discussion at ARE 2010 was the idea that standards need to be set to help AR break-out of its emerging-tech shell and blossom into a fully functioning industry. In his opening keynote at the conference, AR evangelist Bruce Sterling suggested the industry is at "9 a.m.", a play on his earlier speech a year ago - "At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry." As he then added, perhaps AR "needs some caffeine."

If Bruno Uzzan has anything to say about it (and he certainly does), the caffeine the industry needs is standardization. During his keynote at the event, Uzzan introduced what he calls "a good first step" towards the introduction and adoption of industry-wide standards - a standardized black-and-white packaging logo that communicates to customers if devices or experiences are "AR ready."

But as Uzzan said, a logo is just a solid first-step on the road to standardization. The other steps he pictures helping the industry reach this point include interoperability and quality control. While most AR vendors are working on their own proprietary platforms, they are all pretty similar, so Uzzan suggests the various vendors sit down together and talk about better communication between these platforms.

Some have suggested the introduction of a standard augmented reality markup language (ARML), which would make platform compatibility as simple as browser compatibility. Uzzan believes this to be a lofty goal, however, since these platforms have been under development for some time now and getting everyone to switch to a new language would be difficult.

Instead, says Uzzan, quality control should emerge as the result of standardizing the various technologies embedded into AR experiences. From image recognition technology, to marker and markerless tracking, and to computer vision, user experience and product quality will benefit from the standardization of these technologies. AR is mature enough, says Uzzan, and the time for standards is now if these small firms want to survive against larger players when they inevitably enter the game.

Peter Meier - Reaching Consumers is Key

Peter Meier largely agrees with Uzzan on the issues surrounding standardization, and says his company, metaio, will participate in helping to establish these standards. But Meier has a bit of a different approach beyond standards to how AR can continue to succeed in the future. He compares AR to the invention of the motion picture and says the industry is at the point right now where the novelty of simply showing anything is wearing off.

"The first movies that ran could show anything, like an elephant in the zoo," Meier said. "100 years ago it wasn't about the elephant, it was 'that thing is moving!' Eventually it became more about the content, and AR is headed the same way. AR is successful when you start creating great content and making content that is special."

One way Meier and metaio are attempting to create special content for consumers is by focusing on current customer habits and aiming their products to be used where people are already spending their time. At the start of the conference, metaio launched a new initiative that it calls Glue, which introduced the first image-tracking technology to a mobile AR browser. Now when a user accesses special channels on the company's junaio browser, pointing their device at special real-world triggers will launch 3D interactive experiences that are "glued" to the trigger.

The interesting part about Glue is not the technology itself - experiences like these have existed on desktop platforms and on mobile devices in the past. What makes Glue unique is that it's a mobile experience meant to be used indoors. Meier says this is a deliberate attempt to reach users where they spend the majority of their time.

"AR is super cool but not enough to change peoples habits - people aren't gonna go outdoors more," says Meier. "Brand experiences are where the money is - sitting on a couch in a warm living room where no one is watching you hold your phone up."

Meier says he hopes one day kids eating breakfast will beg their moms to let them use the phone to see that day's interactive cartoon message from the colorful characters on their favorite box of cereal. Why cereal? Because people sit down to eat breakfast every single day, and they don't have to go out of their way and break with routine in order to enjoy a fun AR experience. Reaching the customer where they already spend their time is a main goal of metaio going forward, says Meier.

What to Watch For

As AR matures into its young-adulthood, users should expect to see more practical applications of the technology and less eye-grabbing gimmicky experiences. The tone around the sessions at ARE 2010 was one that seemed highly in favor of weeding out the gimmicks and finding the truly unique and innovative uses of augmented reality. We have highlighted some of them recently, and plan to talk about more in the near future.

I would also expect to see much more competition heat up in the mobile AR browser space as large players like Layar, junaio and Wikitude battle for features. Meier says junaio will soon launch its own store for buying and selling AR experiences, much like the one launched recently by Layar. Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald, co-founder of Layar, says the company is preparing another large announcement at their anniversary event later this month.

Uzzan's keynote this morning focused on the creation of standards within the AR community - a popular topic at the conference so far. Uzzan says the time is now for standardization for augmented reality because major technology players are considering AR experiences, and a lack of standards may temporarily keep them from adopting the technology. He believes standards are what the community needs to breakthrough into the mainstream.

"With the new AR+ logo, the industry can give consumers, developers, brands, and others a consistent framework for encountering and understanding augmented reality solutions," said Uzzan in a press release Thursday. "There's a sense that the AR industry has grown up too fast, that it has at times felt like the 'Wild West.' Today, the industry consists of multiple players, multiple platforms and easier access to AR. The new AR+ logo affirms that we're working with a new human interface, now going mainstream."

The benefits of standardization, Uzzan said, include stability and compatibility across platforms for AR experiences. Large downloads and poor quality have deterred users from using augmented reality in the past, and standardization will streamline development, providing higher quality to the user experience. The AR+ logo, he says, is a suggestion open for discussion, and a first step toward standards for AR.

AR developers can download the AR+ logo by visiting Total Immersion's site where they can also find guidelines for the logo's use.

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.)

• First generation: was done on a single processor, usually for process control in military systems.

• Second generation: within a Local Area Network, usually for a financial trading room.

• Third generation: applied across the whole Web/Internet, what we call the real-time Web.

In each generation a stack has emerged, and secure messaging has been key to that stack. The names change and the scale of the prize and challenges certainly changes, but the basic issue remains the same: delivering messages reliably and quickly. In this post, we trace the steps from the second generation to the third generation to see how the real-time Web might play out.

Generation 2's Winner: The Teknekron Information Bus Story

I worked with the technology's second generation. My company took on the challenge of delivering market prices from multiple sources to hundreds of traders in a trading room, enabling new apps based on real-time calculation. The solution had to scale to maybe 2,000 traders, which is laughably small by the standards of the real-time Web. But you did not want to face a roomful of furious traders if your system was down for three minutes or delayed prices by 15 seconds. The reliability and latency requirements were very stringent.

The company that emerged as leader, Teknekron, coined the term "Information Bus." It did very well by coining the term, because it established Teknekron as a market leader; it followed the "get mindshare first, and then go for market share" strategy. Vivek Ranadive, the visionary founder and CEO, describes in his 1999 book "The Power Of Now" how the term came to him. He was schooled as a hardware engineer and was appalled by how much more chaotic (i.e. error- and delay-prone) software projects were compared to hardware projects. Looking at why, he realized that the concept of a "bus," which is the device that all hardware components connect to, could be applied to software.

Ranadive understood that real-time, event-driven systems would not be limited to financial trading, and he executed brilliantly on that insight. He sold Teknekron to Reuters, the company's main rival in trading systems, but retained the right to use the technology outside of financial markets. That offshoot became TIBCO (The Information Bus Company), which at the time of writing is a publicly traded company valued at $1.6 billion, with annual revenue of over $600 million.

But TIBCO did not leverage its position to dominate the third generation. Another company tried that and blew a lot of money in the attempt.

KnowNow: Lessons of a Blow-Out

KnowNow worked through $50 million in funding before throwing in the towel in July 2008. It was going to update the message bus to the Web using RSS. It was still an enterprise play.

It had a strong management team, top-tier VC (Kleiner Perkins), and strong technology. Why did it fail? Three big reasons stand out:

• Generation 3 is a tougher technical challenge. Generation 2's state of technology was perfect for local area networks using Ethernet, where the user device was always connected and where we measured users by the thousands. With generation 3, we are dealing with millions of users who are offline some of the time, and the network bandwidth available for messages is not under their control. In other words, it is one big bear of a technical challenge!
• Companies are reluctant to invest millions of dollars in closed software when open standards clearly always win on the Web. Companies can instead experiment very cheaply using consumer-centric RSS tools and open source.
• KnowHow was early. The hype on real-time enterprise did not last long enough, and it hit the trough of disillusionment.

Contenders for the Real-Time Web Message Bus

We have probably missed a few, so please tell us about them in the comments. These are very different types of solutions, but they are working towards a similar objective. First, we will list them and then attempt a bit of categorization:

• Gnip: an independent venture whose monetization model relies on it being a hub that different sites can connect to.
• Tornado (FriendFeed's Python-based Web server technology, which was open sourced by Facebook): this uses PubSubHubbub.
• RSS Cloud: promoted by Dave Winer, with WordPress as a marquee partner.
• PubSubHubbub: promoted by Google (and FriendFeed/Facebook), with SixApart as a marquee partner.
• XMPP The technology with which IM clients interoperate. Being used by Yammer, Present.ly, and Drop.io.
• Twitter.
• Facebook.
• TIB: an enterprise solution from TIBCO.
• MQ: an enterprise solution from IBM.
• Sonic: an enterprise solution from Progress Software.

Here are the categories they fall into:

1. Enterprise
   TIB, MQ, and Sonic all fall into this category, and there are more. They will find it hard to make the transition to the real-time Web for two reasons. The first is technical. Connecting millions of users over a low bandwidth network via HTTP is very different from connecting a few thousand users over a corporate network. The second is commercial: they monetize by selling licensing fees to enterprises. But that is not the primary way in which the real-time Web will be monetized. Still, these are big profitable companies with the right tech chops, so they cannot be dismissed.
2. Open source and open standards
   Tornado, RSS Cloud, PubSubHubbub, and XMPP fall into this category. They have differing purposes but also a lot of overlap. XMPP is low level and not affiliated with any big company. RSS Cloud and PubSubHubbub are most similar to each other. Tornado is a Web server. But they all face the issue that an open standard takes a long time to evolve and consolidate into a winner. Before that happens, we will likely see more entrants, making the choice even more confusing for developers. So, developers may hedge their bets and go for commercial/de facto standards.
3. Commercial hub
   Gnip is the purest example of this. It aims to get traction by being simpler to implement than the open-source/open-standards offerings. It is a bold strategy from a strong team of entrepreneurs and investors. For something as big as this - basic plumbing for the Web - it feels like a bit too much reliance on one company.
4. Traffic plays
   Twitter and Facebook are the major players here. They might become de facto standards because the biggest issue is traffic. Developers will build where there is traffic as long as two conditions are met:
   • It works technically (i.e. latency at scale). Twitter has some credibility issues here.
   • It is open and transparent - i.e. anyone can connect without fear of the game changing on them. Facebook has some credibility issues here.

The Technical Challenges

First, we have to address the question of "What does real time mean?"

In each generation, the gurus of the previous generation get sniffy about the definition of real time ("What do you mean one second is real time? We measure in micro-seconds!").

It depends on the usage case and technical possibilities. Real time within a single processor is obviously faster than real time over a LAN, which is faster than real time over HTTP for the whole Web.

Real time, practically speaking, means "orders of magnitude faster than how data has been delivered in the past, and faster than most people think they need today." So, RSS Cloud is faster than RSS, and Twitter search is faster than Google search, and IM is faster than email.

In generation 2, the thinking evolved through three approaches:

1. Polling. It soon became obvious that this would not scale.
2. Broadcast, which put too much load on the client.
3. Multicast, which became PubSub.

Most current Web HTTP-based real-time systems are still in the polling phase (i.e. subscribers poll publishers to see if they have an update), which clearly won't scale. The newer approaches fundamentally enable a publisher to say, "I will tell you, the subscriber, when I have an update, so you don't need to poll me." It's a geek's way of saying "Don't call us. We'll call you."

For a good technical primer on how this works and a discussion of the differences between RSS Cloud and PubSubHubbub (mercifully shortened to PuSH), check out this post.

Sticking My Neck Out to Guess the Winner

Twitter. Why? It has the traffic and is open and transparent enough to win confidence. But two big problems remain:

1. It has to reveal its business model. Only then will partners feel confident that they understand its strategic direction.
2. It has to prove it can get good latency at scale. Its early history of fail whales makes people justifiably skeptical.

The winner will likely be the platform that hosts the killer app. Most platforms get traction through a killer app. In the second generation of real time, that killer app was market data for financial traders. What will it be in the third generation? We will explore this in a future post.

What to Name This Generation?

"Message/Information Bus" worked for generation 2. It took a key concept from generation 1 - the hardware bus - and applied it to a local area network.

That does not work so well for generation 3, the real-time Web. For now, we talk about a Web-wide real-time message bus because there is no better alternative.

The new term may have something to do with "status," because the status update is a central concept in social media. Perhaps something like "StatusFabric" or "StatusNet" or "StatusWeb" will emerge.

Called Portable Contacts, the technical spec offers a standard, interoperable way for social networks to serve up your friends lists to anyone you give permission to access them. This should allow application developers to innovate on top of your social connections much more efficiently.

we're seeing major Internet companies making contacts APIs available, such as Google's GData Contacts API, Yahoo's Address Book API, and Microsoft's Live Contacts API (with more to come). Not surprisingly though, each of these APIs is unique and proprietary. We believe this creates the ideal conditions for developing a common, open spec that everyone can benefit from.

Why is This Important?

The social web works best when it's truly social. New applications that use social sharing can be much more useful when new users can port in their existing network of friends and see who they know is already using a site. That's much better than starting cold.

These types of standardized approaches to passing that data are secure (that's good) and allow developers to write code once to use all the supporting sources of data. You've heard the old illustration about railroads? When all the railroads in the US accepted a standard size of rail, all the trains were able to travel much farther than ever before. That's where we're headed with all this information on the web. When we give it standard methods of transport, it can go further and do more than ever before.

That's a pretty big deal and it's fantastic that Google has moved to support the Portable Contacts standard. Hopefully sometime soon everyone will and then we'll wonder what took the web so long to enable social interoperability.

Though Dreamweaver catches a lot of flack from cynics, many people still use it and the design software is said to be much improved in recent years. Zeldman's new tool is worth checking out.

You can read all about the software and wish Zeldman a happy birthday in his blog post from this morning.

Zeldman is the author of the internationally celebrated book Designing With Web Standards. We love standards based development and design here at ReadWriteWeb because increased machine readability creates a playing field more favorable for innovation.