Web 2.0 and 3.0 : More Interactive & Intelligent Than Before

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.

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.

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.