For the entire 2008, there has been a great push for the concept “users
generated content”, also known as Web 2.0 and the related web applications. From
consumers to enterprises, all have started to use web 2.0 tools for various
purposes ranging from collaboration to branding. Blogs are increasingly being
used for product promotion and branding. A classic example of the power of web
2.0 was the recent Presidential elections in United States, wherein many social
networking sites were used to gather supporters.
Another interesting development of the year has been the web giants like
Yahoo! and Google opening up parts of their services to developers. Yahoo! first
announced its open web strategy known as Y!OS, which largely includes three
components including Yahoo Social platform, Yahoo Query Language and Yahoo
Application platform. Yahoo is encouraging developers to use these platforms to
develop new applications which can be easily used with services provided by
Yahoo, a bit like Google code concept.
Social networking on a rise
Social networking reached new heights in 2008. It just wasn't limited to Orkut
or Myspace. There has been innovations like Yahoo! Answers, StumbleUpon, Digg
etc which has got an online user involved with social networking in one form or
another.
Semantic web is an innovative step towards making a machine capable enough so that it can do the work of finding, sharing and combining informartion on the web. |
Platforms like these not only allowed users to collaborate, meet new people
and share information on different subjects, but opened up different
possibilities of business. Now social networks are also been used for branding
purposes. Since users believe that a vendors ad will only speak good about a
product, they prefer to go by what is written in a blog, as it will be coming
from someone who has experienced a particular product or service and will give
an unbiased opinion.
Its not just that, many website owners are now using these social networking
platforms to generate traffic on their website. An independent website recently
put its results to determine which of the social networking platforms is the
best, however the part which caught my attention was that this website got about
2,500 visitors a day but only 1% of the traffic came from search engines.
That's just a small example of how rules of the web have been changed by
social networking
Video blogging & microblogging
Both of these technologies have been around for few years now, but now they are
starting to make same ways. For microblogging, the most popular application by
far has been twitter.
There have been a few websites to work on the same model as twitter but they
haven't had much of success until now. Now with web going mobile, microblogging
could the tool to drive web on mobile phones. A simple example of this was shown
by BBC sports website, to keep its visitors updated about BPL transfers on the
last day. In case you don't follow BPL(Barclays premier league), it's a football
league and on last day of its transfer window a lot business takes place i.e
bidding of players, players medical, players traveling etc.
Intel Mash Maker |
The mash maker from Intel allows a user to create mashups according to his needs very easily. It follows a very simplified approach for making personalised mashups on the fly. Besides, the traditional way of browsing through sites, one can easily browse through contexts and semantics, view information and present in the way he likes. Few features of the mashup maker are as follows:
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Now it's not practically possible to track all these movements by BBC or any
other media company for that matter. They simply asked users around UK to send
them text updates, if they saw something similar or related to BPL. Result, on
the last day, it's website were flooded with messages about related events. This
allowed them to provide most updated information as compared to other websites
that too in real time. However, the only catch was that not all messages were
accurate. Again this is a very small example of application of microblogging,
there are endless ways in which it can be used innovatively.
Coming to Video Blogging, again we expect this to catch up in 2009, but the
difference maker in coming years would likely be again mobile phones. Currently
video blogging is mainly popular with online portals like ijustine, where are
person is sort of living parts of their life through a webcam or something
similar. While ijustine and other similar sites managed to get a considerable
amount of subscribers and visitors and became Internet celebrities, number of
people video blogging is still fairly low.
But with mobile manufacturer making it easy for users to easily publish their
photos, videos etc to web, video blogging could be next rush. This can be easy
as most mobiles ship with video editors now a days and software like Nokia
LifeBlog makes it easy for them to publish them online.
Mobile Web |
Mobile based applications will be available in plenty by the end of 2009. Microsoft is planning to launch a mobile based office suite by the year end . This would be a great help for all the mobile users who have to compromise for the functionality of the office on a mobile. All the phones today are not capable enough to be compatible with content of web as compared to the desktop browser. To bring more web experience to the mobile devices, companies like Adobe and ARM have collaborated to ensure that Adobe's software runs well on mobile devices. It means that in future, users can expect to run videos that requires adobe flash players. The chips that will be available in the market will have much more processing capabilities as compared to the today's chip. Mozilla is |
Semantic web
It is an evolving concept that gives a new dimension to the search. The routine
search is based on keywords which return users with the set of links to websites
of related information.
This type of searches are quite time consuming at times. The semantic web is
an approach to integrate the content of different web pages and then provide the
user with a solution. For example, in a search engine based on semantic web, a
user can type in a complete question and the web will provide him with the
direct answer. For further reference on semantic web kindly refer to our article
on July issue of 2008 or follow the link http:// pcquest.ciol.com/content/techtrends/2008/108070501.asp.
Virtual world in enterprises
This concept of computer based virtual world is gaining attention slowly among
the enterprises. Generally, this concept is treated as only for 3-D gaming
application which is not true. Virtual world is an online simulated environment
which enables the user to interact with each other or they can themselves do
different activities. A well known example of this is Second Life, wherein a
user is represented as an 'Avatar'. Avatar can explore, buy or sell land,
socialize, perform activities and carry certain business activities. Apart from
this, the concept of virtual world has found its place in education domain. For
example, if you are an educator, then you can join second life for free and can
teach classes, interact with students in unique ways.
Renowned universities like Harvard, Texas, Stanford have set up their virtual
campuses on Second life grid platform. Under these virtual campuses, students
can meet, attend classes and create content together.
A similar application can be developed for enterprises wherein the employees
are allowed to carry out their daily routine job and can evaluate their
performance. In this way, they can look for improvement areas. This will also
provide an enterprise to save cost for additional training, and monitor the
performance of the employees more closely.
Virtual world concept has not proved to be a profit making solution as yet,
but it holds a potential to become one. Steps are being taken for the
interoperability of the virtual worlds i.e. operability between second life and
other virtual worlds.
The Open Grid Beta software from Linden labs is designed for developers to
check the interoperability between virtual worlds. This beta program will enable
users to move from Second Life test grid to other non-Linden Lab grids running
the OpenSim software. Testing of the interoperability between two virtual worlds
is yet to be realized fully. The beta version is for the developers to try it
and come up with new protocols for developing the interoperability. IBM is
experimenting with the possibility of conducting businesses inside the virtual
world and to connect it with the real world with a richer, more impressive web
environment.
Another development coming in the web would be Internet TV. In a decade or
so, it will be totally different to what it is today. Pictures of high quality,
personalization, very high streaming , sharing and many more features would be
there. It would be an great opportunity for the media to explore this
possibility and increase over their market.
Artificial Intelligence in web
AI has a lot of future in web, as it is already being used in companies like
Hakia and Powerset. Another company named Numenta is under the attempt to build
a brain like computing paradigm using AI. If this is achieved, then it would
enable computers to perform activities like remembering faces or finding music
patterns.
This would be an advantage as computers are fast at computation and would
also require much less instructions from user in accomplishing a task.
Attention economy
It comprises of a market place where the consumers agree to receive services in
lieu of their attention, for example personalized news, alerts. Consumer has the
choice and will stick around as long as there are relevant content to choose
from. This concept will become an important part of the web economy in the next
decade.
Another important trend that will catch up will be the promotion of web sites
as web services. It will lead to more structured information in a more organized
way. Two ways to achieve this would be to provide information via REST API or to
keep it proprietary. In case of proprietary, the information would be shared
using smashup.