Web 2.0, Mashups & Future

We had been covering in this blog, Web 2.0 Mashups transcending new frontiers, & the potential for its transformative abilities and how this could be triggering the Next Generational shift. Mark Sigal quite insightfully writes Web 2.0 at the core, as an applied web service model blurs the line between software and service. It can do this because:
1) it is optimized for the 60 million broadband connections in place;
2) it can count upon an installed base of 300 million video-ready mobile and PC devices; and
3) Thanks to the AJAX meme, it can reliably assume the ubiquity of a really good browser experience.
He elaborates that the emergence of the blogosphere & the mainstreaming of RSS is enabling syndication and subscription systems that can intelligently process context-aware messages are influencing the web 2.0 landscape significantly. These systems will become adept at handling rich content "payloads," enabling further innovation. Custom content and sharing it on a broad scale is getting more and more mainstream. In the near future, the process of creating all sorts of application functions that run seamlessly between PC and mobile environments become more straightforward and require less heavy lifting on the part of the developer, but the tools for managing and sharing the output of these environments will improve markedly. The mash-up - the creation of integrated, yet highly derivative application hybrids by third parties, shall be enabled by providing rich public APIs to their user base. The "gorillas" of Web 1.0 - Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon and eBay - all see it in their self-interest to expose broad swaths of their capabilities to developers for the creation of composite web services. By de-coupling their secret sauce from the web site and enabling it to be propagated throughout the web they can cast a bigger aggregate footprint and more importantly, capture a greater percentage of consumer mindshare during the day. Beyond unleashing ever-richer API availability, growing libraries of widgets shall be made available. The key shift to note is that the consumer is now at the center of the equation, the process by which consumers write reviews or summaries to be published on a vendor's site will change. Core comparison, customization, communication and spend/transaction functions, including "handoffs" between PC and mobile spaces will become embedded and invisible to the point that the notion of an on-demand computing model is a given.