Operator for Microformats

I've put microformats in the stuff I've built before. And to be honest, I wasn't sure if they were going to take off. The formats were there, but none of the tools to actually use them were around. For a long time, I just used the tails export add-on in firefox. You couldn't really do anything with it, but you could at least see microformats.

The Operator takes it one step further, and adds actions to microformats. In a way, it's a god-send, and now I'm wondering why I didn't write it. I HATE having to cut and paste addresses into google maps. Now, if there's a microformat of an address on a page now, all I have to do is use Operator--two clicks and I'm there. (As an aside, Humanized Enzo makes it even easier to include maps.)

Microformats have been gaining momentum for a year now, and I think it will be important in the web to come. Not because it's one-more-thing to have to know, but because the guys over at social network portability are using it as part of their solution to open up the walled gardens of the social network stovepipes in effect today.

Given how we're all use to using web applications today, it's as if we're always 'reborn' every time we sign up for a new service. It's an odd idea to be able to "take your network with you". If you can do this, especially as mobile devices get more powerful, there can be more and more web applications that can act as mediators in social contexts of the users as they go about the world.

One nice little app would be a name-recaller. At a conference or a party, my mobile phone would detect which other mobile phones are around. It could then query the web application whether I've met any of these people before, and what their names are. So when I actually go to shake their hand, I can address them by name. And as we all know, the sweetest sound to a person's ears is his/her own name.

But that's still a long ways from now. Probably not in another 4 or 5 years, if not more. However, I'd keep an eye on this area. I'm sure you'd hear more about it soon.

Using Firefox 3 as a XUL runtime environment

Using Firefox 3 as a XUL runtime environment

Some other post about it

This tidbit is actually rather exciting. Firefox uses a rendering engine that reads XML to determin how its user interface is laid out. And now that they're going to release it as a runtime environment, it should be possible to create desktop clients like one develops for the web. So instead of an API like Swing, or the like, you have a declarative language for rendering layout for desktop applications.

In addition, it should also be possible to transmit user interfaces from application to application and platform to platform more easily with such a declarative language for layout. I imagine being able to drag and drop interfaces from your desktop to your mobile device as a metaphor for "taking things with you."

I'm sure other people that have been paying attention in this field saw this coming for a while. Adobe's AIR (Adobe Integrate Runtime) is aiming specifically in this field. We'll see how this plays out, but likely, developers will choose one or the other for a specific strength, and each will have their own niche. You can try out Firefox 3's current alpha. It's been much more stable in the last couple of weeks.

Review of Facebook app building experience and where things might go

I've been missing in action for a while, because during the first week of August, I finally got around to figuring out how to build a facebook app. I'm involved with a non-profit organization that wished to create an alumni database. I had written a prototype for them the year before in a week, but I never put it up. I didn't get the help or traction that I had hoped for, so I delayed working on it until this past summer, when they had another summer conference.

It's a good thing too, because facebook didn't release their full API until around May. The app is a good fit for what it needed to do, since it allows alumni to find each other. I hacked it out in 4 days, which was both good and bad. I had to bypass a lot of the discipline and good habits I cultivated on my own projects in order to whip it up.

The hardest thing about facebook apps is simply figuring out how the whole thing hangs together. When you don't know the thing is put together, filling out the long form to setup your facebook app, becomes difficult as nothing makes sense.

There are two major parts to a facebook app. One is a profile box, which is the draggable box you see in people's profiles. And the second is the canvas page, which is a kind of "home page" for your app, if you will. You application is hosted somewhere else outside of facebook. The API just lets you create an interface in facebook. It's my recommendation that you read this page on architecture in the facebook wiki before getting started on any of the "Getting Started" pages.

As you can see from the ASCII diagrams in the architecture page, your application's canvas page is called by proxy through facebook servers. That means every time someone visits your canvas page through facebook, facebook will pull your application's canvas page and display it. Conversely, the profile box is data that is pushed to the facebook servers. This makes sense in two faces of the same coin. Facebook has a LOT of users, and chances are, you can't scale as facebook has. Having lots of people bang on your server out the door would wreck havoc on you. Secondly, facebook doesn't want its profile load times to depend on 3rd party servers. If it has all the information pushed to it, facebook can quickly serve profile pages without having to rely on the latency of its 3rd party applications.

I won't go through how to make a facebook app. Plenty of places already do that well, especially this one for Ruby. However, to give my review, I will say that I give it 3 out of 5 stars. "A" for effort, but there's more improvement to be had down the line.

While the API is a step in the right direction, coding for it has felt clunky at best. This is mostly due to documentation being a bit all over the place, but especially the lack of a test environment. There is no way to set a production, test, or development environment for the same application. The only way is to simply create another application as a "test", and point it to your development machine. Then in your code, it has to switch between the development API key and the production API key. In Rails, you'd use the RAILS_ENV global variable to determine which environment you were in. As a result, there's quite a bit of setup to do before you can start hacking away.

Facebook also provides FBML, a reduced HTML, specific for facebook elements. Some of them are quite handy, such as a friend finder, and it gives you an immediate look and feel that blend in with the rest of facebook. However, debugging it isn't much fun at all. Since you can't set environments, facebook assumes all apps are production, and therefore will not show errors and stack traces. Therefore, one has to tread softly, or cut and paste back and forth to their tools.

That's right. Tools. Facebook does provide tools to test out your FBML and API calls. But it would be much nicer if it were integrated in a development environment for the application.

All, in all, it's not been too bad of an experience, outside of wrestling with the setup and FBML, but there's a lot of improvement to be had. While many have said that Facebook is a walled garden like AOL was in the 1990's, I currently don't see much of a decentralized social network solution that addresses privacy that is popular amongst developers.

The only thing that is a remotely good candidate is the combination of OpenID with Microformats like XFN. But I think it's going to take a demonstration from another successful startup to get more developers on this bandwagon. OpenID is also not yet ubiquitous as a concept in the minds of developers, let alone the common web user. Once this happens, it will be much much easier for social applications to personalize a user's experience right out of the box.

And this isn't personalization based on where your stats, but personalization based on what your other friends have done in the very same application. The web app won't know anything about where you live, or where your friends live, but if it's a book store, it will know everything about what books you like, and what books your friends like, and be able to draw conclusions to better serve your experience based on that.

I hope that is an indication of the things to come. Apps will know more about a user's habits as related to their function, and yet not know who this user is to protect privacy. This will be especially useful with mobile devices, since we carry them with us. Any mobile application that knows if you come into contact with your friends in real time will have a tremendous utility value in producing information useful in a social context. We still have to wait, however. The mobile industry is still not as open as we'd like for open development on mobile devices as a platform.

As an aside, I imagine that the reams of data (anonymous, of course) would be a great boon to social scientists. We might see a revolution in that field, especially if it's combined with decentralized computing concepts.

Nerd time, issue 7

Hi all,

There's more interesting things lately than usual. Here's another set of stuff to discover. I've put the more easily digestible stuff up top. This time, it's a lot geekier. The lower you go, the nerdier it gets.

Humanized Endo--CLI + GUI
The Humanized interface combines GUI and CLI, which really reminds me of emac's interface...but tons prettier. You can eval text as commands on the page in emacs, as well as executing commands. They basically want to do away with the desktop metaphor. The second link is a presentation. The guy presenting, Asa Raskin, is Jef Raskin's son...Jef is the guy that started the Macintosh before Steve Jobs took over.
http://www.humanized.com/
http://www.humanized.com/weblog/2007/05/18/die_desktop_die/

Multi-touch interfaces
More demo eye candy from Jeff Han.
http://www.thelastminuteblog.com/2007/03/19/new-jeff-han-video-multi-touch-ui/

How google earth works.
It explains some of the MIP-mapping techniques that GE uses, to get good filtering characteristics on its texture maps, so that things look crisp and clear, even at sharp angles.
http://www.realityprime.com/articles/how-google-earth-really-works

Distributed version control.
The second link is a talk given by Linus talking up distributed version control and his own version of it called Git. He also spends time ragging on SVN and how much it sucks. Ian's the only other person I know that's been using distributed version control with darcs. I've tried it, and it's not too bad. It took some time to understand some of the implications of DVC.
http://ianclatworthy.wordpress.com/2007/06/21/version-control-the-future-is-adaptive/
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

Haskell Faster than C on Great Language shootout benchmark.
I didn't read into detail, but what I gleamed is that lazy evaluation has its advantages. Read into it what you will. Overall, if haskell has to do work, it is slower than C. But if it can 'cheat', it will be faster in some cases.
http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2007/07/making-haskell-faster-than-c.html
http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell/2006-June/018127.html

More on functional style programming.
I've been using more functional style programming lately. I like being able to chain things together, though sometimes, it doesn't make it necessarily easier to read. That's still dependent on the coder. Functional style programming has its advantages, but it's not made obvious here.
http://gensym.org/2007/4/7/enumerate-map-filter-accumulate

Lock-free hash tables.
This is kinda neat, actually. It's a talk on a concurrent hash table algorithm, where it doesn't use any locks (but it does use fencing during table resizes), and scales to 4000 processors. What I found neat is that the table resizing can be stacked, so that if you have 700 threads writing to a hash table all at once, it'll exponentially resize as it's reading and writing, where the reading and writing threads do some of the work copying table entries from the old table to the new table during the resize. More than one resize can be happening at the same time too.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2139967204534450862

Nerd time - Issue 6

Hey all,

Hope you had a good July 4th. It's more nerd time--bringing the curiosities of the net at your doorstep. This time is more techcrunchy stuff. So if you read that, you can skip it.

Video's taken off ever since Youtube, facilitated by the ability of flash to play video. Slap Vid is notable because it's the bittorrent of flash video clients. It's a P2P client for video. This is a ycombinator company.
http://www.slapvid.com

The idea to make a clickable world has been around for a while. The idea is to be able to print up URLs as 2D barcodes, so people with camera phones can take a picture of it, and it takes them to the URL. If you're old enough to remember the CueCat, you remember what a spectacular failure that was. But the market was different back then.
http://www.smartpox.com

This is an article on mapping. Google Maps is old news, but the implications of being able to overlay virtual information on top of the real world while you're in it is pretty exciting. The ability to create your own maps has been available for a while now, but discovery of those maps hasn't been easy. And there currently is no mobile earth browser, like there is for the desktop. This in conjunction with the clickable world is worth a thought. Smells like market opportunity to me. Mobile platforms aren't quite mature yet, but they're getting there.
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/15-07/ff_maps

This is a talk on the implications of OpenID. OpenID is a distributed authentication mechanism, aimed to eliminate the need for multiple logins for multiple websites. OpenID in combination with semantic technologies like microformats seems like a neat idea. It's gaining some momentum, as both Sun and AOL have implemented it.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2288395847791059857

And just for emacs fans:
http://robrohan.com/projects/9ne/
Emacs-like editor on the web!

BumpTop 3D Desktop can't beat the search box.

This is a video where the desktop metaphor is taken literally for computers. You have move documents around on the desk as if they were real things, using a physics engine. While, neat, I don't think it's entirely the right way to go. This method is only good if you can see a preview of what the document is at a glance. Therefore, for something like photos, it makes sense. But for documents, you often can't distinguish between documents just from a preview. So unless there is also a smooth zoomable interface, I don't think it would be too useful for documents.

The only reason we sort or organize anything on our desk (or otherwise) is so that we can perform search later on. There is no need to sort if there is a default search box as an interface. Therefore, I think what would really be neat is if the documents sort themselves into rankings, or into groups based on what you typed in a floating search text field.

That said, I can see definitely see applications for this technology for augmented reality though. Being bombarded by virtual screens and documents would make anyone feel overwhelmed. Bumptop physics can help lower the information overload for future augmented reality interfaces.

TED | Talks | Jeff Bezos: After the gold rush, there's innovation ahead (video)

TED | Talks | Jeff Bezos: After the gold rush, there's innovation ahead (video)

Jeff Bezos, the guy that came up with Amazon, is probably on spot with how it's the beginning of the innovation on the Internet. But if history is any indication, people that come after this won't be remembered until a new paradigm or market is built on top of the Internet.

I can't exactly imagine what's possible with the rising technologies. Human-centered interfaces (or the complete disappearance of interfaces), tools that predict your behavior using AI techniques, an emerging theory of the brain, nanotechnology for intelligent materials, materials that change shape, programming genetic materials of living cells, personal fabrication, wireless power, open source hardware, social management agents, and instant information anywhere in the world at any time.

Sometimes, when I look at what I'm working on, it gets me a little depressed to see how rudimentary (by today's standards) is. But I get excited when I see where it is going, and how it carries the future with it.

Twittering as a platform

Amazon is posting their deals on twitter. I'm not quite sure that people would want deal ads on their cell phones all the time...

I'm kind of amazed, as are other people in the naysayer category have been, that Twitter had taken off as it has. At its basic form, it's just passing back and forth messages, a problem seemingly solved by email decades ago. However, twitter obvious is not a question of the underlying technology, but rather, how it is presented to and used by people. It's gotten people use to the idea of instant self-expression, no matter how inane--for better or worse. I would have chalked it up for sensors to monitor and log ourselves, but twitter demonstrated that people will report or say anything if there's an audience. Perhaps trolls have already paved the way in this regard.

That said, I think it's easy to write Twitter off as a fad, since the world's largest collection of quips doesn't quite seem to make the world a better place. My guess is that there's probably value in Twitter, but only when it's married with other sorts of data or text processing. Just off the top of my head, geospatial data and emotion detection algorithm on twitter data could generate a heat map of how people are feeling place to place, or time to time. I imagine advertisers would find this information valuable, since they can set up targeted advertising when people are statistically most vulnerable to impulse buying at a certain time or place.

If twitter can manage an API or platform to support this sort of thing, they'll be around for a while, I think. If not, well, at least we'd have the largest collection of quips for the archaeologists of the 22nd century.

Photosynth: stitching photos in 3D

Photosynth presentation | Venture Itch

I think this is a bit of old news, since I wasn't running windows XP in order to view the demo at their website. For the last 10 years or so, I've always thought that computer vision has been still trapped in the realm of research labs. But things are starting to bear fruit. Image registration (lining up images) isn't an easy task, since lighting, shape, perspective all have to be taken into account. It becomes especially from difficult if you have to do it from 3 space, as is done in the demo. However, it seems like everything's preprocessed, so it looks fast.

I don't think it's a far stretch to say that you can also register people's faces, so you can find all the images with your face in it, taken from different perspectives.

I also wouldn't be surprised that all the tagging of people going on in facebook photos is training a classifier to recognize and register people's faces.

The ones that push innovation and create new markets are the ones that open up possibilities, and show others what was previously thought impossible.

Google Gears Lets Developers Take Apps Offline

Google Gears Lets Developers Take Apps Offline

This is certainly newsworthy. Google announced Gears, which is something that you install on your desktop to be able to operate online applications offline. I remember about 3 to 5 years ago when Google said, no, we're not interested in desktop, because it's not what we're good at. We're doing search.

If anything I think they learned from Netscape's mistake in the past. Marc Andersen, the founder of Netscape, announced that, as a startup, they were taking on Microsoft, and was going to beat it to the ground. Of course, when you use strong words like that, you're going to get Bill Gate's attention, and it's always dangerous to wake a sleeping dragon, when you're not bigger yourself.

Despite the ever growing ubiquity of wireless connections and connectivity all around, I think there's still a place for offline applications. This sort of thing to me, isn't really about being able to do your work on planes, though it's certainly useful for that. To me, this is about caching results that the user might possibly want to see/do next, so that the user experience is fast and responsive without possible network latency. While AJAX is fast, and tolerable for most things, I imagine that there will be some applications that can make good use of this type of offline caching mechanism, so that what was impossible before is now possible.

Of course, caching is irrelevant when the bandwidth is high, but you will either find yourself 1) in places where bandwidth is lower or 2) the bandwidth requirement for your dataset is higher than what you currently have. Mapping applications come to mind as benefiting a lot from caching mechanisms. And if bandwidth jumps up, that makes caching in mapping applications obsolete, there will be other datasets that will be too large to stream in the future. I can only imagine classifiers or their training data sets being one example, as well as a record of the user's digital life.

Update: I didn't mention this, but I think it makes even more sense for mobile devices, per this opengardens post on it.

Exploring: reCAPTCHA: A new way to fight spam

Exploring: reCAPTCHA: A new way to fight spam

This particular piece of news has been floating around lately. It's a CAPTCHA service that also uses the CAPTCHA information entered by users to teach computers how to digitize books.

It's so freakin' obvious, I slapped myself on the forehead. I even advocated and watched Luis Von Ahn's videos on human computation, and didn't think about it. Anyway, it seems a little bit odd, though, using a technique that computers can't solve to teach computers how to read--hence solve CAPTCHAs. Not knowing enough details--I wonder if the success of reCAPTCHA will call for the demise of the CAPTCHA.

The usual concerns of cheating were rampant on reddit comments. "What if people just put in random stuff? Then you'll have a computer that spew out crap when digitizing books." If his lecture on the ESP game was any indication, he has a number of ways to fight it (not to mention he specializes in online cheating also). In the ESP game, he counteracts cheating by giving the player a couple ones he knows the answers to and sees how much they're off. Also, he keeps track of the statistics for each image as well as throwing away results randomly. It's a little hard to see how he'll track individual users--other than through their IP--but otherwise, one can feasibly use the same methods for reCAPTCHA.

I have hope for Facebook being the new Google

Facebook just released facebook marketplace, where its members can sell things, like housing, jobs, or textbooks. Strategically, this makes a lot of sense, since it's something that's actually useful to its members, especially if it ties your social network information into what you want to buy and sell. From the looks of it though, it doesn't do that. But I'm sure someone at Facebook is thinking about it.

Facebook is social networking done right--at least better than any competitors that I've seen. On the surface they might all seem the same; there's a personal profile page, there's a list of friends, and you can send messages back and forth with each other. However, I think there's some critical differences.

MySpace has a larger user base, but it is largely seen by its owners as a platform for media advertising. It's an unsupported assertion, but given its mishmash feature set and large ads, it's hard to think otherwise.

Friendster was the leader for quite some time, but has since lost the attention of the under 25 demographic (anecdotal evidence). Their mistake was adding things that were technically neat, but ultimately made the site too slow to use. It's a lot better now, and people are still using it. But based on the features they've put out it seems like they are interested in helping people publishing media to a user's personal network--using blogs, videos, etc. However, no news trickles of them attracting otaku developers, and I'm sure firing the now founder of Renkoo didn't help win over the hearts and minds of otaku developers.

On the other hand, Facebook is seen by its owners as a platform for technology driven innovation to help keep up social interactions between individuals. I'm not sure when the transition happened, but it was more evident to me after news feeds were released. Now, most people were vehemently opposed to it, but I saw it as two things.

First, it was a feedback mechanism to open up sharing. The more you share about yourself to your friends, the more you appear on their radar, and the more interaction you'll interact/message them. This seems to be inline with the goal of keeping people talking with each other.

Secondly, it was the basis of publishing personal news without even having to push a button. We all gather news about the world, but beyond CNN, there's also another type of news we're interested in--information about what our trusted friends are doing. Blogs lets you publish just by pushing a button. Facebook Mini-feeds lets you publish just by doing what you normally do on Facebook. It's not inconceivable that in the future, you can also publish from your mobile that you have free time to chill out, and people can just join you to hang out because they saw that you were available in their mini-feed on their mobiles.

Facebook is pulling ahead in terms of their feature offerings because they seem to be able to attract developers that are the otaku of programmers that are willing to innovate something that's actually useful to their users. Which other social network puts programming puzzles in their mini-feeds? Which other social network has an API? The alacrity in which they deploy features is stunning as well. They implemented twitter pretty easily by listing their status updates. It is in this way that I see them being a 'new Google'--they are setting themselves up as a hacker's paradise and attracting otaku programmers that way.

When Zuckerberg held out against getting brought out, he was either being greedy or he had future plans on what he would be able to do with a social network. Most of the press criticized him for being the former, but it's looking like it's the latter. As long as Facebook is useful for their users, there's value in the social network data that can be used by future applications. If they can establish themselves as the standard platform from which all social information about an individual is gathered through their API, this world would be a changed place, just as Google changed the world with its technology.

Comments on the death of computing

This article is starts off as a complaint or a lament in the area of edge CS, and probably serves as a warning, though the conclusion is probably not as hopeful or optimistic as it could be. Or it could possibly be the lack of imagination. To start:

There was excitement at making the computer do anything at all. Manipulating the code of information technology was the realm of experts: the complexities of hardware, the construction of compliers and the logic of programming were the basis of university degrees.
...
However, the basics of programming have not changed. The elements of computing are the same as fifty years ago, however we dress then up as object-oriented computing or service-oriented architecture. What has changed is the need to know low-level programming or any programming at all. Who needs C when there's Ruby on Rails?

Well, part of it is probably a lament by the author--presumably a scholar--on the loss of status and the general dilution in the quality of people in the field. And the other part is about how there's nowhere interesting left to explore in the field.

To address the first part, it's well known that engineers, programmers (or any other profession) likes to work with great and smart people. Usually, when a leading field explodes you're going to attract these great and smart people to the field. However, the nature of the field of technology is to make doing something cheaper, faster, or easier. And as technology matures, the more the barriers to entry in the field lowers. And as a result, you'll get more people that couldn't make it before in the field and the average quality of people dilutes. People use to do all sorts of research on file access. But now, any joe programmer doesn't think about any of that and just uses the 'open' method to access files on disk. But that's the nature of technology, and it's as it should be.

The environment within which computing operates in the 21 century is dramatically different to that of the 60s, 70s, 80s and even early 90s. Computers are an accepted part of the furniture of life, ubiquitous and commoditised.

And again, this is the expected effect of technology. Unlike other professions, in engineering one is able to make technology which gives people leverage over those that don't use it. This gives the advantage of acceleration and productivity that's scalable that you won't find in other professions. If you're a dentist, there is an upper limit to the number of patients you can see. In order to be even more productive, you'll need to create a clinic--a dentist farm--to parallelize patient treating and you need other dentists to do that. If you're an engineer, the technology that you build is a multiplier, and you don't even need other people to use the multiplier.

But at a certain point, the mass adoption of a technology makes it cheaper, and hence, your leverage over other people isn't that great, and you begin to look for other technologies to make your life easier or give you an edge over your competition. But these are all applications arguments to CS; while important in attracting new talent, it doesn't address where the field has yet left to go on the edge.

As for whether CS is really dead or not, I think there's still quite a bit of work to be done at the edges. Physics in the late 1800's claimed that there wasn't much interesting going on there until General Relativity blew up in their face. Biology has had its big paradigm shift with Darwin, but there's still a host of interesting unknown animals being discovered (like the giant squid) and I'm sure alien biology or revival of Darwin's sexual selection would help open up another shift. Engineering suffered the same thing in the early 1900's, when people with only a background in electromechanical and steam powered devices thought there wasn't much left to invent or explore, until the advent of computing spurred on by the Second World War.

In terms of near-term computing problems, there's still a lot of work to be done in AI, and all its offshoot children, such as data mining, information retrieval, and information extraction. We still can't build software systems reliably, so better programming constructs are being ever-explored. Also, since multi-core processors are starting to emerge, so better concurrent programming constructs are being developed (or rather, taken up again...Seymour Cray was doing vector processors a long while back)

But I'm guessing the author of the article is looking for something like a paradigm shift, something so grand that it'll be prestigious again, and attract some bright minds again.

In the end, he is somewhat hopeful:

The new computing discipline will really be an inter-discipline, connecting with other spheres, working with diverse scientific and artistic departments to create new ideas. Its strength and value will be in its relationships.

There is a need for innovation, for creativity, for divergent thinking which pulls in ideas from many sources and connects them in different ways.

This, I don't disagree with. I think far-term computing can draw from other disciplines as well as being applied to others. With physics, there's currently work on quantum computers. In biology, there's contribution to biology from bioinformatics and the sequencing of genes, as well as drawing from it like ant optimization algorithms and DNA computers. In social sciences, there's contribution to it using concurrent and decentralized simulation of social phenomenon, as well as drawing from it like particle swarm optimization.

One day, maybe it will be feasible to hack your own bacteria, and program them just as you would a computer. And then, a professor might lament that any 14 year old kid can hack his own lifeform when it use to be in the realm of professors. But rest assured, there will always be other horizons in the field to pursue.

Adobe open sources Flex, it'd be nice for mobile too

Now that's news. I think it's a good strategy on their part, since there's still work to be done in the adoption phase of user interfaces, both on the web and mobile devices. What is most interesting is if Adobe plans to use some version of Flex as a platform for mobile devices. Currently, it's done in JavaME, and after trying it out, it was hard, because the tools were still a bit inadequate, and the fact that it's still not easy to get applications on to phones.

With an open sourced language for rich/heavy front-ends, I wouldn't be surprised if this gains quick adoption, as I see just OpenLaszlo and Microsoft's Silverlight as being the alternative. AJAX will have to come up with other tricks up its sleeve, like faster javascript engines...This whole scene will be something to keep an eye on, as it'll be interesting how it plays out.

"Web 3.0" and "Killer App" sound like "Crystal Ball" to me

Ahh, web 3.0.

Indeed, as nanobeeper's asks and puts into perspective, What's up with the web 2.0 angst?, there doesn't seem to be a need to get bent all out of shape over the term. And yet, I usually don't use the term myself and am pretty reluctant to, for fear of being someone-who-doesn't-know-what-they're-talking-about, like the braying butthole in Jeffery Zeldman's famous post. It's what happens when marketers get out of control, and generally, it applies when someone that knows just enough to be dangerous. Fanboys of Japan is a good example. If you meet someone that LOVES Japan, they've either only watched anime (or been to Japan once or twice), or they've lived there for at least a decade. Usually the former.

But what I want to post here today isn't want I think is or isn't web 3.0, but more about the usage of the term. Why do people use it?

Killer app 3.0

It's an interesting parallel that ever since Visicalc came out and the term "killer app" was termed, people since then has been talking about the "killer app" on this platform or that. "The killer app of the web is..." "The killer app of the mobile phones is..." It's certainly reminds me of the way people talked about web 2.0. "Web 2.0 is...." "Web 3.0 is..."

The similarity between talking about web 3.0 and talking about killer apps is that when people talk about them, they're using those terms to try to communicate what they see, predict, or would like to be the future. Technologists are, if anything, always looking for the Next Big Thing. We're use to change, and in fact, we thrive on it. We're all interested in the future of change because if we're right about it, that kind of information is an advantage over whatever our goals are. But as we all know, predicting the future is well, inaccurate at best.

I'd trade intelligence for hindsight

Often times, we have limited scope, experience, and knowledge. That certainly will affect what we think to be in the realm of the possible and what will be in the realm of the impossible. If you look back on quotes about technology predictions, some of them might stun you at how stupid they are. But then again, you have the gift of hindsight. Keep in mind what technology was available at the time for them to relate to the new tech, as well as the fact that first iterations of any product sucks--as Guy Kawasaki so famously points out. (If you want to read more, they're from wikipedia)

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." -- Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, president of the British Royal Society, 1895

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk? The music — that's the big plus about this." Warner Bros. was investing in sound technology though Henry Warner was more excited about the potential of scoring over dialogue. [3]

"Caterpillar landships are idiotic and useless. Those officers and men are wasting their time and are not pulling their proper weight in the war." -- Fourth Lord of the British Admiralty, 1915

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to no one in particular?" -- Associates of David Sarnoff responding to the latter's call for investment in the radio in 1921.

"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming." -- Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, 1926

The last two quotes are notable. Lee DeForest, who had enough foresight and innovation to see that a radio had value, couldn't see beyond that to see how a television would have value just five years later. We all have limited breadth and imagination, but some people are worse than others. It would do you well to ignore those people. Sometimes you can recognize them if they counter with "Why would I ever do [insert whatever idea you just told them]"

And even if we had perfect scope, perfect breadth, it would still be hard. Predicting the future is computationally intensive.

As for myself, I didn't immediately see the value of social networks apps until Facebook showed up, even though I read research papers on social networks. And currently, I don't really get Twitter and Scribd, but the fact that people are using it, well, there's value somewhere in there.

So what's the chorus in all the noise?

So where does that leave us with Web 3.0? If you look at it as people merely trying to say what their predictions about the future of the web, it doesn't conjure up as much anger, because you know they may very well be wrong. But collectively, what everyone predicts to be web 3.0 will have some value because part of it might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we all say it's true, you can be sure that some of us will work to make it true.

Based on that flash in the pan, I was curious. What was the collective consensus on what web 3.0 is? I looked in two places. Wikipedia and del.icio.us. Just from eyeballing it, it seems to be that people are in consensus, at least about the semantic web. This would be the type of thing that Inkling Markets would be good for. I created a market for it, if you're so inclined to buy stock on web 3.0.

So take what any individual says to be the future with open mind and a grain of salt, but really pay attention to where the global trend is moving. As Joe Kraus says, you want to see what the trend is, take it out of geek land, and ride that wave.