ReadWriteWeb

Mobile technology, virtualization, the social web, cloud computing - a think tank study has all our good friends on a hit list.

The study, which shows primary security and privacy concerns of U.S. government IT leaders, is making the rounds among military and government bloggers. Policy makers are being told that the applications we know and love are dangerous and pose gaping security loopholes for cyberterrorism. Is a Big Brother overprotective meltdown? Or are our advances really causing greater risks for all users?

Five years ago I interviewed tech publisher Tim O'Reilly about a new term that his company had just coined: Web 2.0. The first Web 2.0 conference had been held the previous month, October 2004, and O'Reilly had graciously agreed to give an interview to yours truly - "an unknown blogger from New Zealand," as I put it back then. The interview ran in a 3-part series (see also part 2 and part 3) and covered Web 2.0, new business models, social software and eBooks.

I've always been a big believer in learning from history as we look to the future. So let's re-visit this interview from five years ago and see how prescient the father of Web 2.0 was.

Of all the technologies powering the social Web, few are as under-appreciated as the espresso machine.

We go gaga over great mashups, we drool over high-powered hardware, and we lust for private beta invitations to Google's latest whatever-the-hell-it-is. But none of these would be possible without machines to blast steam through finely ground coffee beans, and baristas with the skill to pull a perfect espresso shot.

Comcast sees the writing on the wall: cable-based TV will not survive the next decade. Its value is fast eroding because it can't compete with on-demand, Internet-delivered TV across all screens. Unlike their music counterparts, TV executives have pulled their heads out of the sand in time and are working hard to survive this monumental shift. To do so, however, they need to choose the right battles to fight.

Every year at the Web 2.0 Summit Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker does a fast and in-depth presentation of internet trends. The report is available here.

Once again mobile is a big trend this year, with Apple's market share expected to "Surprise on Upside Near-Term."

Overall the key message was that financial markets have rebounded now; and that technology is "relatively impressive."

We're at the 6th annual Web 2.0 conference, now known as the Web 2.0 Summit. John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly opened the event. O'Reilly spoke about being at another transition point for the Web. They have termed this "web squared", a.k.a. "web meets world." O'Reilly said that in the current era "we're starting to instrument the world." He referenced a quote from VC Fred Wilson, that we are currently in a "golden triangle of mobile, social and real-time."

O'Reilly remarked that we're seeing "what may be the next wave of internet business models." Speaking about the evolution of both the conference and the web 2.0 trend, he noted that the "revolution we're seeing today is as great as the one we saw five years ago."

At the recent Real-Time CrunchUp 2009, Khris Loux, CEO of one of the web's largest commenting services, announced the
"death of the comment". This declaration was extremely significant as Loux's JS-Kit is currently installed on over 600,000 sites. He blames the death on social media sites like Twitter and Flickr and the rise of "parallel channels away from [the] product". In essence, dialogue has moved from a singular destination to a series of parallel but separate social networking channels.

A year ago, I wrote a magnum opus three-part post that attempted to chronicle some of the underlying changes happening in the economy and how this would impact web technology ventures. "Useful, but too long" was a recurring comment. So, here is a one-year update, much shorter. And hopefully a bit clearer, seeing as we are further into this transition.

You've heard the grumblings. Web 2.0 is declining, it's so last year....no wait, maybe Web 2.0 is just dead. But is it really? Or has it just become so ubiquitous that it no longer needs a special label anymore? Former Forrester analyst and Groundswell author Charlene Li predicted that social networking would become "like air" - that is, social networks would be everywhere. And now they are. So are blogs, wikis, video-sharing sites, and everything else that comprises "Web 2.0." But does that mean the era of Web 2.0 is over because it finally hit the mainstream?

Tim O'Reilly, co-founder of the Web 2.0 Conference, gave a short address on the 5th anniversary of that event at tonight's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and offered some thoughts on what's going to come next. He discussed five applications that he believes point the way.

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

Part One of a Two-Part Series

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

In a memo from the Office of Management and Budget last week, Director Peter Orszag outlined the implementation guidelines [PDF] for the new stimulus bill, requiring all government agencies to provide a feed to disclose funds allocated, and optimize Web pages in an effort to help the public find relevant information through search engines.

"For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) agencies are required to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription."

Everyone knows how well Barack Obama's presidential campaign made use of new media to raise money and market the candidate. We also know how big a role social technology played during inauguration week, from handheld flip HD footage appearing on network TV to people reporting on Twitter about what they liked and disliked. After President Obama took office, spirited debates proliferated in the blogosphere about whether or not whitehouse.gov is Web 2.0-enabled and what the role of President Obama's CTO might be. But one striking trend has largely flown under the national radar: the rise of the goverati.

"VC-Backed Startup Is Profitable" should not be a headline worth making. But far too many Web 2.0 ventures don't bring in enough revenue, let alone profits, and some don't even have a revenue model. We see a lot of gritty entrepreneurs with profitable bootstrapped SaaS ventures. But the number of VC-backed startups less than 5 years old that are profitable is sadly low. That's why we wrote about Blurb back in October 2008.

As the world financial crisis has gotten gradually worse over the past few weeks, I've been pondering what this means for the web. ReadWriteWeb as a publication focuses on technology - web products and trends - rather than business and VC happenings. So with the exception of one of our feature writers Bernard Lunn, who has written a number of great posts on how entrepreneurs can survive this period, we've generally kept out of the Credit Crisis discussion thus far.

But we're clearly now at a point where the financial problems of the world will have a big impact on where web technology is headed. Indeed, it looks like we've arrived at one of those giant inflexion points - where one web era is usurped by another.

Over the past year, we've been inundated with social media. We've seen Twitter go mainstream, lifestreaming take over blogging, and we've tried what felt like a million different applications. We've joined then abandoned new services recklessly, leaving our accounts to wither away on platforms long forgotten. What more could we possibly do in 2009?

When Google radically changed its iGoogle homepage a little while ago, many of its users were up in arms about these changes. By updating its homepage today, AOL ran a similar risk, but instead of making radical changes to the design of the page, AOL managed to include a lot of new functionality on the new homepage without shocking its users with a completely new layout. The new features of the AOL homepage are mostly centered around adding support for third-party social networking services.

It's time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. On the trends side this week, we had a great discussion about what's next after web 2.0, celebrated the success of the newsfeed, looked at enterprise use of social media, helped Twitter find a revenue model, and more. On the product side, we looked at 5 nascent recommendation apps, checked out a new semantic web reviews API, analyzed web-based IM service Meebo's latest news, and more. We also brought you the latest from our new Enterprise Channel.

Remember when we told you that your MySpace web browser is coming? Well today it has officially arrived. In the new version of the social browser Flock, they've finally integrated their number one most-requested feature: support for MySpace. Additionally, the Flock 2.0 upgrade includes support for Media RSS, a technology which delivers real-time image and video streams in a standardized format. With this feature, Flock can support any web service as long as they offer a Media RSS feed.

Over the weekend we editorialized that the world financial crisis will have a big impact on where Web Technology is headed. Has the world arrived at one of those giant inflexion points, we asked, where one Web era is usurped by another? We asked you to leave a comment in the post telling us what you think will be next. Many of you did just that and also the post was fortunate enough to get to the digg frontpage, where it received 100 additional comments. Finally, we polled our friends on Twitter today and got many great replies.

This is an attempt to synthesize, analyze and categorize all of the responses from RWW, digg and Twitter. What is next after Web 2.0? Read on!