The Web: It Be Changing

William Grosso @ June 20, 2006

Over the weekend, I had something of an aha moment. I've been wandering around a lot lately, and thinking more than usual about the industry and what's going on.

I think the panel discussion last Friday on Emerging Technologies was also a catalyst. As a result of preparing for it, I've been wondering about 2009 more than usual.

Anyway, I realized that the enormous rate of change on the web has a direction. Or, at least, will turn out to have had a direction in retrospect.

Here's where we are:

• We've got all the infrastructure to easily build web apps. (Rails, Django, Jotspot etcetera).
• We've got the SOAP stuff and the REST stuff ironed out and we're all starting to agree on when to use what.
• We're seeing the emergence of companies that are providing authentication and directory services (Strikeiron, WSFinder, Tanooma, AppExchange).
• We've got software specifications for things like portlets.
• We've got iFrames and Ajax and several other clumsy ways to do browser-side integration.
• We've got the idea of mashups; think of them as artifacts of an integration process– explicitly integrating together several sites in order to provide a new service.
• We've got the right way to encode metadata (as Microformats).
• We've got RSS. In this case, think of it as a universal infrastructure for event and caching notifications between applications.
• We've got a growing number of small startup businesses whose product is an OEMable web application.

I really didn't understand these at first. Many of the applications are fairly simple. But the value is in the data they gather, and the data center that runs them. E.g. you could rebuild many of these almost as easily as you rebrand and integrate them. But then you'd have to run them. And you wouldn't have as much data, and therefore as much community knowledge, as they do.

• We've got a growing number of desktop applications being rebuilt as web applications with less functionality. Here I mean the web-based word processors and spreadsheets and whatnots that have been emerging.
• We've got a growing number of people focused on identity (Netmesh among others. I'd love to get a complete list of the companies working on identity.)
• We've got a growing number of people focused on reputation (RapLeaf among others. I'd love to get a complete list of the companies working on reputation).

When you put it all back-to-back, what we've got is an emerging component model for the web.

Think "VBX on the Web Scale." The money involved is either going to be zero or enormous (bigger than Google by an order of magnitude, or nothing at all).

Of course, as is usual when I realize something, I immediately realized it was probably obvious (once you start taking the idea of the web as a platform seriously, where else could it wind up?), and that other people got there a while ago. In this case, I'm pretty sure Peter Rip realized all this a while ago.

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