AdaptiveBluemakers of the popular Firefox plugin, BlueOrganizer, has launched a new version of their SmartLinks product that makes it easy for blog and web site publishers to include the links automatically within their pages. Previously, SmartLinks were only accessible via the BlueOrganizer. Now, web site publishers can add SmartLinks to their page and the service will parse them automatically.SmartLinks are browser popups, similar to the Snap Shotsproduct that we use on this blog, that add additional contextual information to certain types of links, including links to books, movies, music, stocks, and wine. AdaptiveBlue supports a large list of top web sites, automatically recognizing and augmenting links to those properties.Though the comparison to Snap's product is inevitable, SmartLinks are fairly dissimilar. While Snap's product adds popups to every link on the page and offers just content previews, SmartLinks are added only to the links it understands and for which is has additional information it can add. The info contained in the contextual popups generally includes links to additional sources and basic information on the everyday item being linked to. For example, a music SmartLink will contain links to the album on iTunes, Last.fm, and Amazon, links to sources for lyrics, reviews, videos, and photos as well as a brief profile of the artist.SmartLinks also include ways to share the item being linked to on popular social sites. All the big sites, and most of the small sites, are represented, but these links are also contextual. A SmartLink popup for a book, for example, will include links to save the book on Shelfari and LibraryThing, while a SmartLink for a music artist will include links for creating stations on Last.fm or Pandora. The list of which sites are supported both within and by SmartLinks is currently controlled by AdaptiveBlue, who say they will respond to community feedback when deciding when and if to add new ones. Founder and CEO Alex Iskold told me today that the idea is not to overwhelm users, so rather than support every site under the sun, the company plans to hopefully pick and choose from among the best.Installing SmartLinks is just a matter of copying a single line of Javascript. The company has also created 1-click installs for Blogger and TypePad, and a plugin for Wordpress.What's in it for site owners? Beyond the added value that SmartLinks provides for users by wrapping certain links with additional contextual information, site owners can monetize the links in the popups by providing affiliate IDs (affiliate links are how AdaptiveBlue currently monetizes the service). Further, users of the BlueOrganizer addon for Firefox will benefit from added integration that makes it easier to save links to their organizer. AdaptiveBlue has a "try before you buy" preview on their web sitethat allows publishers to see what their sites would look like with SmartLinks enabled.In the title I mentioned the Top-Down Semantic Web, which is something that Alex Iskold has written about on this blog. Alex is eating his own dog food, so to speak, by releasing a product that buys directly into the concept. AdaptiveBlue's SmartLinks essentially works in the way that Alex described the Top-Down Semantic Web, by understanding specific types of information (in this case links) and wrapping them with additional data. SmartLinks takes unstructured information and turns it into structured information by understanding a basic item on the web and adding semantics to it.Full disclosure: AdaptiveBlue Founder and CEO Alex Iskoldis a regular contributor to Read/WriteWeb.

  VoiceThreadis the kind of application that your parents or grandparents might like. It's an interesting annotation system for photos and video. The company behind it recommends you use it to discuss your memories. I wouldn't recommend using it for much yet, though.The gist of VoiceThread is this: you can upload photos and videos, leave voice or text comments on individual items in a slideshow and draw on the images. It's all in Flash. It's very simple, but the interface looks nice and I'm sure there's market demand for this kind of application. I don't know how many companies have started building something like this, but VoiceThread should finish the job - it's not done yet, in this case at least.The ProblemsHere comes the bad news. Upload took me forever, long enough that I was pretty sure the site was broken. Long enough that I will never use it again and I was soured on the whole experience - but maybe it will work for you. That was for photos, I didn't have the patience to try uploading videos. Hopefully the developers will be able to fix it. Eventually it seems my images did upload but it took probably 15 minutes.There's no embeddable player, the line drawings fade too fast to do anything with, it's awkward to use. The link for people to pay $29.95 a year for a pro-account should be taken down right away. Despite the problems, VoiceThread could be a nice little application. One of the problems with things like this is that all the work you put into it - or all the work your poor grandma puts into learning how to use it and then narrating over all the old photos you uploaded for her, can't be exported to the desktop and saved. Given the longevity issues of some startups like this, VoiceThread might not even end up being around longer than...well, let's not make any more grandma jokes.In the end, VoiceThread looks like a half-baked, "light-weight" web app with a good designer and some potential. That's more than can be said about a lot of things these days; if your family doesn't want to use something more powerful, for which all of this is just a feature - then VoiceThread could be just what you're looking for, once it works better.

  Inside Facebook reportsthat Facebook has added new metrics for app developers to track the spread of their application. The new "Application Adds by Facebook Referrer" displays how many application ads were a result of the app directory, the profile box, the news feed, the mini feed, Facebook search, or requests.These stats will certainly be helpful for app developers to gauge the best way to market and promote their apps, and whether their marketing campaigns on Facebook ad networks like Social Mediaare worth their time and money. But just how most Facebook apps spread is likely to remain hazy until more data can be gathered from multiple app developers.Justin Smith has data from a friend's application, which shows that the profile box is far and away the most popular channel for attracting new users to an application. Surprisingly, given the amount of press about how ingenious the news feed and mini feed are for spreading things virally, they do not factor nearly as much into the overall spread of this particular application. That said, Inside Facebook's example is a very small sample size for one (undisclosed) application. As Smith notes in his post, "the relative importance of viral channels will depend on your application."The Zombiesapp probably benefits more from requests, for example, because of the way it encourages people to invite users, while the Where I've Beenapp probably gets many installs from the profile box, and the Moviesapp likely does well in the product directory as a result of its prominence there.Would any app developers out there care to share some of their data? It would be great if Facebook would release data across the entire network in aggregate, but until that happens, if you want to share trends you've notice for your application. please do so in the comments.

  Denver, Colorado-based ManiaTVwas launched in 2004 as a video destination based around quality, professionally produced content. When YouTube exploded onto the scene, though, ManiaTV tried to jump on the bandwagon by launching over 3000 channels of user generated content (UGC). Curiously, however, even while YouTube thrived and eventually grew to a $1.65 billion acquisition by Google, ManiaTV saw 80% of their visitors -- and 100% of their advertisers -- tune in for their professional content, reports BusinessWeek. The site will relaunch later today sans the UGC.Even Google has so far conceded that it is not easy to monetize UCG. YouTube began placing overlay adson select videos in August, but so far has not yet started advertising on user generated videos, instead opting to begin their ad program with professionally created content, which is a far easier sell to advertisers who have to worry less about offensive material being associated with their products.We've reported beforeabout Hollywood's move toward web video, and today MySpace will get in on the actwith the release of their first, professionally produced scripted web series, Roommates. This is a trend that we'll likely see continue.While UGC can drive a lot of traffic for some sites, it is clear that advertisers are still uncomfortable with it. This is nothing new. Many display ad networks do not allow publisher sites to show advertising on user generated content pages. For example, ValueClick's publish agreement prohibits web sites that "contain forums, discussion boards, chat rooms, or any content area that is open to public updates without regulation." As a result, we may begin to see many of the smaller UGC video players start to shift back toward produced content as a way attract advertisers. With the cost of production falling, and the cost of hosting UGC on the rise (as a result of it being a tougher sell to advertisers), creating origin content is a no-brainer.

  The founder and some staff of a directory site called TV Links was arrested this weekend and the site was shut down by British police. Tv-links.co.uk listed links to other sites where visitors could find television content, often posted without permission of copyright holders.It's one of those cases in which it's hard not to think both "I can't believe this happened" and "I can't believe it took so long" in the same mental breath. Crazed, uncontrolled linking has long been one of the biggest points of contention between people who use the internet and people who have no idea how it works.Critics of the legal move argue that if linking to illegal content is itself illegal, much of the internet, including Google and YouTube, would be much more reasonable targets than this little British site (correction, as commenters have pointed out - TV Link was not really a little site). Kieron Sharp, the Director of FACT, the British legal department that carried out the raid (who could argue with them?) said the followingabout TV Links."Sites such as TV-Links contribute to and profit from copyright infringement by identifying, posting, organising, and indexing links to infringing content found on the internet that users can then view on demand by visiting these illegal sites." Sharp says this is only the beginning and many more sites will go down in the near future.If Mr. Sharp will forgive me for linking to it, I will point out that the Internet Archive has preserved copies of the wretched TV Links site through the past 12 months. I want to emphasize that I'm only linking to a site that's cached a site that's linking to other sites that may include content that could have been uploaded without the copyright holder's consent. I hope that's ok; if it's not I'm going to take the rest of the day off of the internet.

  John Pacchetti, an early innovator in the RSS space, has finally succeeded in selling his company RSSCalendar. Pacchetti put the company up for sale on for $50k on eBay this summerand didn't get any bids. This morning it was announced that the company has been acquired by Dallas, Texas based Lookout Software. Lookout Software provides a means for Outlook content to be shared without the purchase of Microsoft's Exchange.At this point in the game, the most interesting thing about RSSCalendar may be Pacchetti's provisional patent application, which presumably covers the delivery of calendar items to a calendar by RSS. LookOut said this morning that Pacchetti would not be joining the company. By now the product's functionality seems common enough that the IP could pay off well as a gamble. When asked about the status of the provisional patent, which will expire one year from filing date, the company said no one was available to comment about it yet this morning. If a return phone call does come in, I don't expect it to be very forthcoming.Lookout Software was also the name of another company that was founded by Netscape CTO and Zimbra backer Eric Hahn and which was acquired by Microsoft in 2004. Thus this does not appear to be a story of an undercover Microsoft acquisition to launch an IP attack on Google and Yahoo calendaring products. It could instead be a legitimate small purchase of one man's software by a larger, related company seeking to add functionality. In that case, lookout Lookout customers - here comes sharing by RSS!

  A little over a month ago, Facebook launched their updated "Flyers Pro" system that added per click bidding, and better ad targeting to their self-serve ad service. Today, Valleywag postedan analysis concluding that the Flyers Pro "system poses a direct threat to Google's AdWords and Microsoft's AdCenter." In their comments and on other blogs, people questioned Valleywag's conclusion, arguing that Google has nothing to fear because their ads are targeted based on searches -- for which the searchers already have the intent to find something.Facebook Flyers Pro ads, on the other hand, are targeted by country, age, sex, keywords, relationship status, education, or workplace. "Google ads are part and parcel of Google SERPs!," writes Donna Bogatinthis morning. "Facebook Flyers are part and parcel of Facebook 'social graph' [sic] ... In the simplest terms, Facebook Flyers 'target people' in their hghly [sic] personal space while Google AdWords fulfill people’s needs in their anonymous information space."Bogatin seems to be forgetting, though, that Google's AdSense program -- which targets ads on third-party sites by keywords found in content, not searches -- accounted for 34% of the company's revenuelast quarter, or $1.45 billion. It could be argued that Facebook's Flyers Pro is very similar to Google's AdSense program -- but with moreprecise targeting tools (and existing only on one site).A couple of weeks ago, Charlene Li ran an experimentdemonstrating a very respectable 2.76% response rate (that's response, not click-thru) on her $5, untargeted Facebook Flyer buy. Granted, Li's flyer wasn't selling anything and a response cost only time, but with proper targeting and ad design, it seems entirely possible that advertisers might find success using Facebook's internal ad network.Bogatin asserts that ads targeted too closely to your interests on Facebook are likely to be deemed "creepy." Maybe so, but are they any more creepy than ads targeted to the search you did for a medical condition? Or the ads Google's Gmail runs based on your email contents? Probably not -- if people are creeped out now, the feeling probably won't last. The concept of a robot reading what we say and do and delivering ads is not a foreign one to Internet users.So are Facebook Flyer Pro ads a Google killer? In general, no, but on Facebook, possibly. Valleywag is right to guess that Facebook "wants to gain more control over its U.S. [ad] inventory." Facebook's expansion of their internal ad network shows that the company wants to go it alone rather than use a third-party to sell its ad space (it already has a display advertising deal in place with Microsoft). With better campaign management tools, they probably could have success with small advertisers the way Google has with AdWords and AdSense.

  Sponsor:Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feedor by email.Web NewsMySpace Evolves - Developer Platform Details, Partnerships, Growth FiguresThis week News Corp chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, and MySpace CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe, were the featured speakers at the Web 2.0 Summit. It is the two year anniversary of the News Corp acquisition of MySpace, so there was some discussion on the growth of MySpace and how it is evolving. The pair also discussed, in a roundabout way, aspects of the upcoming MySpace Platform. It was revealed that MySpace will formalize relationships with the developer community and "roll out a new platform in the coming months".• The steps to MySpace's developer platform strategy will include:1) In the coming weeks MySpace is launching a catalogue of all widgets and tools available on MySpace;2) In "several months" they will make industry standard APIs available through a new platform where developers can try new things in a sandbox environment;3) MySpace users will have the opportunity to participate in an opt-in beta test program, to determine usability;4) Users will vote and ultimately determine which of the third party widgets get tightly integrated into MySpace;5) MySpace will formally introduce the best widgets into the community, with what they term "highly developed integration".Microsoft Partners with Atlassian &NewsGator - SharePoint Goes Web 2.0This week Microsoft announced two strategic partnerships, with enterprise software company Atlassianand RSS solutions vendor NewsGator. The partnerships link togther Microsoft's SharePointproduct with Atlassian's wiki collaboration product Confluenceand a new offering from Newsgatorcalled 'NewsGator Social Sites', a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware for SharePoint. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a key product for Microsoft - it has collaboration, business intelligence, content management, search and "social computing" capabilities (Microsoft's term for 'web 2.0', according to this pageon Microsoft's website).The aim of the partnerships is to add more "social computing platform" capabilities to SharePoint, which up till now has mainly been promoted as an "enterprise productivity platform". In other words, Microsoft is adding more web 2.0 functionality (e.g. collaboration, personal publishing) to SharePoint, using best of breed web products from Atlassian and Newsgator. Other NewsTelephony News Abounds: iPhone SDK, Google Docs Mobile, Skype on MySpaceAdobe Partners with BBC on Streaming VideoNapster Relaunches - Take 57Web ProductsTwine: The First Mainstream Semantic Web App?On Friday Radar Networksannounced a new Semantic Web application called Twine. Founder Nova Spivack showed us a demo of the new app, which he described as a "knowledge networking" application. It has aspects of social networking, wikis, blogging, knowledge management systems - but its defining feature is that it's built with Semantic Web technologies. Spivack told us that Twine aims to bring a usable and scalable interface to the long-promised dream of the Semantic Web.Vimeo Offering HD Video OptionVimeo, one of the classiest players in the online video world, is now offering High Definition transcodingfor user uploaded video. At 4 times the industry standard bitrate, the new videos look really nice. Unfortunately, the HD quality videos can only be viewed on the Vimeo site and cannot be embedded in HD elsewhere. We hope that will change.You can find many other product reviews and startup profiles in our Startups category.AnalysisThe Future of Software DevelopmentIn 1975, Frederick Brooks wrote a classic book on software project management called The Mythical Man-Month. In the book, he famously argued that adding more people to a development project will hinder rather than help to get things done faster. The reason is that having more people working on the project introduces a non-linear overhead in communication. [...] We have come a long way since then and learned a lot about making software. In the real world, software projects have ill-defined and constantly evolving requirements, making it impossible to think everything through at once. Instead, the best software today is created and evolved using agile methods. These techniques allow engineers to continuously re-align software with business and customer needs.Adobe Preparing Full Shift to Web AppsAt the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen said that the company is working toward shifting all of their apps online, but that it would probably take about 10 years for a complete shift. While the web as the computing platform of the future is currently a popular idea, and while prognostication 10 years out is rarely a good idea, we're skeptical that Adobe could pull off a full shift of its software catalog to Internet apps.You can find more R/WW analysis posts here.ConferencesWeb 2.0 SummitRichard's post-summit wrapup will be coming soon (after he recovers from jet lag). For now here are his posts from the conference:- Web 2.0 Summit 2007: Mark Zuckerberg- Web 2.0 Summit 2007: Mary Meeker and Internet Trends- Web 2.0 Summit Video- The New Era of Semantic AppsMobile 2.0Richard was also at he Mobile 2.0 event this weekin San Francisco. Here were his posts:- Mobile 2.0 - The 7th Mass Media &Business Opportunities- Mobile 2.0 Launch Pad Part 1- Mobile 2.0 Launch Pad Part 2- Taptu Launches New Type of Mobile SearchR/WW Network Blogslast100Check out a wrapof the week's Digital Lifestyle news on last100. Lots of mobile news this week, the biggest of which was probably Apple’s decision to finally open the iPhone to third-party developers. At the Symbian Show in London, Nokia also showed off the new version of the mobile OS S60, which offers an optional iPhone-like touch interface— watch the mobile Internet space heat up.In Internet TV-related news, the BBC has partnered with Adobe to add an iPlayer streaming option with Mac and Linux support; and Sony — which just launched a cheaper PS3 — talked up its forthcoming online video networkfor the PS3 / PSP.Alt Search EnginesAltSearchEnginesthis week was at the Search Marketing Expo: Social Mediaconference in New York City. Here is some of their coverage:Session 1: Social Media Marketing FundamentalsSession 2: Linkbait - Chumming for Traffic on Social Media SitesSession 3: Extra! Extra! The Social News SitesSession 4: A Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking &TaggingSession 5: Keynote Q &A with Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us &Garrett Camp of StumbleUponSession 6: Effectively Leveraging Social NetworkingSession 7: Evangelist - The Marketer’s Role in SMMSession 8: Micro CommunitiesSession 9: Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, and Answer SharingSession 10: Final Session - Wikipedia ClinicRead/WriteTalkSean Ammirati of Read/WriteTalk- our new podcast show sat down with Jeff Clavier, Founder & Managing Partner SoftTechVC. They talked a little about the types of deals Jeff is most interested in and how he makes decisions. Jeff ended the interview talking about the most critical success factor in every deal - hint it isn’t the technology or the market.That's a wrap for another week!

  Google News releasedits own official Facebook apptoday. Users can view the feeds of major topics by default and keyword searches for news in a full canvas page. News stories can be shared with friends easily, notes can be added, and there's tabs to view stories shared by and with friends. There's no profile page component, it's all just canvas page display.It's not bad at all, though I still believe the real gold in Facebook is in the user's home page and minifeed - where never an outside app is seen. Profile pages just aren't where you interact with your apps and a dedicated canvas page seems likely to receive even less attention.Despite my grouchiness, I was impressed with this app. See also FeedHeads, a newly-updated and fairly sophisticated Facebook app that works in conjunction with Google Reader and Newsgator.

  I'm here at the Semantic Edge panel at the Summit, moderated by Tim O'Reilly and featuring W. Daniel Hillis (Co-Chairman and CTO, Applied Minds), Barney Pell (Founder and CEO of Powerset), Nova Spivack (Twine - see our review here). The panel starts with demos from each of the three speakers. FreebaseDaniel Hillis starts with a demo of Freebase, which aims to "open up the silos of data and the connections between them". Freebase is a database that has all kinds of data in it and an API. He shows a wagon wheel like UI of VCs, centered around John Doerr. He says it is basically objects and relationships between them. Because it's an open database, anyone can enter new data in Freebase. An example page in the Freebase db looks pretty similar to a Wikipedia page (or a Twine page). When you enter new data, the app can make suggestions about content. The topics in Freebase are organized by type, and you can connect pages with links, semantic tagging. So in summary, Freebase is all about shared data and what you can do with it.PowersetBarney Pell is up next. Powerset(see our coverage hereand here) is a natural language search engine. He says the system relies on semantic technologies that have only become available in the last few years. He says that Powerset has imported Freebase, to improve the database. He says the system can make "semantic connections", which helps make the semantic database. He uses the example of Hulk Hogan and the list of wrestlers he's defeated (Ric Flair, Randy Savage, et al). He says these connections comes from "the way the language is expressed". He says that meaning and knowledge gets extracted automatically from Powerset.TwineNova Spivack is up next, regarding Twine. Our review yesterdaycovers this. Nova Spivack notes today that Twine automatically learns about you and your interests as you populate it with content - the "Semantic Graph". When you put in new data, Twine picks out and tags certain content with semantic tags - e.g. the name of a person. He says that an important point is that Twine creates new semantic and rich data. But it's not all user-generated. They've also done machine learning against Wikipedia to 'learn' about new concepts. And they will eventually tie into services like Freebase. Finally he compares Twine to Google, saying it is a "bottom-up, user generated crawl of the Web".Panel TalkTim O'Reilly starts by asking whether all of these Semantic Web apps are available now? Hillis firstly notes that some of this technology is not necessarily Semantic Web. But to Tim's question, Hillis says Freebase is "solid alpha". Powerset has about 16,000 people already signed up, and you can sign up now. Twine "is usable today", but it's still in learning and testing phase. Spivack says it's now an "invite beta".Tim then says that what ties these apps together is "semantics" (not necessarily Semantic Web, as Hillis noted). O'Reilly brings up Google, Flickr interestingness and how users can influence results (collective intelligence etc), but that it's usually passive and hidden behind silos. But these new semantic apps are more open and they're platform players. Hillis says that O'Reilly is on track, and eventually "there will be one Web of data". He says Web 1.0 was a "web of documents", and that it will be the same with semantic apps - it doesn't make sense to have silos of data.Nova said this is the value of open standards and the WC3. He says the Semantic Web is a certain set of standards, and that it where you get the (open) network effect. Barney says the real value is "making explicit what was once implicit" (in terms of data). Tim asks: where is the interoperability within the 3 platforms (3 apps above). Hillis said Freebase is a platform because it's specifically designed to be used by other apps. In summary, Spivack notes that data portability and connectibility is the key to these new semantic apps - the Web is the platform and they're just different services within the platform. Hillis though disagrees - he said Freebase isa platform! So the web is the platform of platforms (!).On that overly semantic note, the panel ended.Related:Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services, by Alex Iskold, which is a great overview of this new era of Semantic apps.

  The now-EBay property StubHubhas lost a battle in court and handing over the names of 13,000 of its users to the New England Patriots American football team. The suit was filed last November - two months before the acquisition of the site was announced, so it probably didn't go down like some of the YouTube suits.It's never a good day when almost any website is forced to disclose the names of its users.The Patriots alleged, and the court agreed, that all participants in auctions for game tickets between 2003 and 2007 violated company policy and state law. StubHub says that the majority of the names belonged to buyers, not sellers. Season ticket holders on the list of names may have their tickets cancled and the team may hand the list over "to the authorities," the team told the Boston Globe, whose in-depth coverage is also worth a read.Who's a Bad Actor Here?Judging by the description of the case, I presume that many of the names handed over to the team were of people who didn't win auctions for tickets at all. If that's the case it sounds like all the more a privacy violation.The Patriots say that problems arose after the team canceled season tickets from ticket holders caught selling game passes in other settings. Some fans then sold their canceled tickets on StubHub, which lead to buyers "causing disturbances" at the stadium upon learning their purchased tickets were not good. Selling canceled tickets on StubHub sounds like the real low-blow in this situation.But Stealing is Wrong, Right?The above is an explanation of the team's perspective that anyone could sympathize with, but it may not tell the whole story, either. The Globe coverage also said that several teams in other leagues have struck deals with StubHub to be the official outlet for resale of tickets. The Patriots themselves are still dealing with a tarnished reputation for getting caught spying on opponents earlier this season. It's safe to assume they are hardly the only team in sports doing so, though.So the game on the field is full of cheating, people all over the country are buying and selling scalped tickets, some that get busted are reselling worthless tickets and some of those buyers are being rude at the gate into the stadium. Who'se the bad guy here? I feel least happy with the court who would demand that everyone's names be handed over to the authorities - but I suppose unlike everyone else in this mess of a situation, they're just doing their job.

  There are, by some accounts, about 3 billion mobile phone users in the world. That's more thanthe number of automobiles, more than the number of personal computers, more than the number of landline phones, more than the number of TVs, and more than the number of credit cards. The mobile Internet, however, has largely been a rather uninspiring experience. While many people, mostly in the developing world, use their mobile phone as their primary Internet or computing device, the mobile web is often looked at as a jungle of slow loading pages, poor design, and unoptimized content that is a pain to use on a tiny screen.In the US there are 237 million wireless subscribers, but only 32 million accessed the Internetin September -- a tiny fraction of the 210 million total Internet users. Compared to Japan, where just 100,000 less people accessed the mobile webthan did people log on from a personal computer, it is clear that in the US using a mobile phone for web access is not yet a mainstream activity.This year, a few potentially game changing devices have been released in the United States and elsewhere that could help push the mobile web (and the concept of accessing the web as a whole from your mobile) into the mainstream. The first, of course,is the iPhone (and iPod Touch). In August, Forrester Research talked about the iPhone as a mobile web killer, because of its large screen, fast wifi access, and ability to elegantly display the full Internet without having to bother with mobile optimized sites -- which not every web site offers. We were skeptical, saying that iPhone has more going for it than the mobile web, but "isn't quite a Mobile Web killer just yet."Even so, we've already sung the praises of the iPhone, listing its strong, full web access as one of our favorite features. Perhaps even more importantly for the adoption of mobile web usage, the iPhone also introduced affordable data plans for users. The cheapest iPhone plan (AT&T), which includes unlimited data, is $59.99/month in the US. Verizon Wireless, meanwhile, has plans (in my area) starting at $79.99 and data usage usually counts against your monthly minutes. Clearly, the iPhone lowers the barrier of entry for many users by making access cheaper.But, even though the first three months of sales for the iPhone have been good -- estimates range up to 1 million units sold since its late June launch -- the iPhone still only accounts for a very tiny percentage of the mobile market.Another important pair of devices launched this year were the Nokia N95 8GB and the Nokia N810, the latter being perhaps more compelling. The N810, like Apple's iPod Touch, is not a phone, but rather a smartphone-sized Internet device. Running an OS based on Linux, and with support for Flash (something Apple's devices can't boast), the N810, which will be sold starting next month, is built to be a portable Internet device.With a Mozilla based browser, Flash support, and a slide out keyboard, it can be looked at as a palm-sized computer (it's a bit bigger than most phones) that can be used to access the platform that is the web via a wireless connection. Some early reviewers are skeptical, however, wondering who would pay $500 for a palm-sized Internet device that isn'ta cell phone.ConclusionIt's true that the N810 and the iPod Touch and similar devices may fail on the first go around, but they're indicative of a trend toward mobile computing and acceptance of using mobile devices to access the web and the growing catalog of web applications to get things done. As wifi access becomes more ubiquitous and relying on cellular networks to get online via mobile devices becomes less important, I think we'll see a lot of growth in this market. As applications move online and access is everywhere, full-sized computers will be needed less, and will be less desirable, for many of our daily tasks. The mobile phone (or mobile Internet device) as your primary computer may become a less foreign idea over the next few years in developed nations.What do you think? Is the mobile web (or, rather, using mobile devices to access the web) finally coming of age? Are we set to see more of these devices flooding the marketplace in the future or will the idea never take off? At the end of last year, only 15% of R/WW prognosticated that the mobile web would be the biggest web trend of this year. Could the results for next year's predictions be different?

  Last night we covered the announcement of Twine, which aims to be the first mainstream Semantic Web application. Twine founder Nova Spivack showed me a demo of the new app, which he described as a "knowledge networking" application. One of the things I asked Nova right at the end of the interview was his definition of "Web 3.0", a term he has been using in his blog.While people are (rightly) skeptical of another version number for the Web, I thought Nova's definition was a useful one. He told me that web 2.0 "is a decade and not a technology" - and that it's more about defining the characterof each era, rather than trying to define a Web era as a set of technologies. So in those terms, he said web 2.0 = social web and that web 3.0 will be the "intelligent web". By that he means that apps are getting smarter, because data is getting smarter. It's clear he was referring to the Semantic Web - his company is based on those technologies.As for 'web 4.0', Nova said that will be when AI (Artificial Intelligence) comes into being.I should note that Nova's definition of web 3.0 is self-serving, because his new product Twine is an "intelligent web" product that uses semantics. Also I am not a proponent of continuing the version numbers - just as 'dot com' is the term for the first era of the Web, and 'web 2.0' the second, there will be a new term that bubbles up at the right time to describe the next era (perhaps 2-3 years from now). Heck, it may even just be called the Semantic Web! However, I liked Nova's way of looking at the meta trends on the Web and I certainly see automation/intelligence coming to the fore in the next Web era - just as "collective intelligence" and socialness have come to the fore in web 2.0. What are your thoughts on this (and please don't focus on the version numbers, because it may well get called something other than web 3.0 when it actually happens).

  Microsoft has lifted the lid this week on a number of products that compete to various degrees with popular Google services. While Google fans and blogosphere cynics have derided the Microsoft offers as "me too" knock-offs, at first look Microsoft 411 and Live Workspace look really nice. Virtual Earth 6.0also has a "newly open" SDK and the Popflymashup engine also made its first appearance this week.Much of this may be following in Google's footsteps - but fact of the matter, it could end up being better than what the search giant has already brought to market.Microsoft's 411 product, 1-800-CALL411, is based on the substantial acquisition of TellMe and was just released to the public this week. With extensive SMS delivery and sharing, geo-location and other features - this product looks substantially superior to GOOG411. I've used GOOG411 and always feel like I'm doing the company a favor helping its limping technology assimilate more spoken word into its giant databases for search and advertising.Live Workspace will be Microsoft's online document collaboration service. Some have insisted that it's not a competitor to Google Docs, but in fact it will keep the Office revenue stream flowing while adding a collaboration layer that will preclude customer loss to Google. The early screenshots released by the company this weeklook a whole lot stronger than the pared down and awkward Google Docs apps. Google Docs does a lot that broke new ground a year ago - but it's completely open to challenge. Live Workspace at least appears to have a lot of promise as a stable, integrated and powerful tool. If this debate is of interest to you, make sure to check out Microsoft's all-out PR attack on Google Docs from September.With innovation underway in opening up Sharepoint, exposing the .net code to facilitate bugfixing for developers, the release of the PopFly mashup engine and maybe SilverLight's challenge to the Adobe environments - there's no reason to begrudge Microsoft's late entries into these markets. In six to eighteen months, we may look back and say slow and steady won the race. I wouldn't bet on it, but I wouldn't presume it won't happen, either.