Think about this: Ten years ago, a group of technology experts
sat down and envisioned the future of the internet. They imagined
the ubiquity of e-mail, that the web would be home to a giant
auction house, and that phones would be able to access tiny
versions of the online world.
Actually, nobody ever predicted what the internet has become
today. We were all too busy learning basic HTML tags and trying to
remember how to check our e-mail. But that won't stop us from
looking ahead now to the future of the web and what role
entrepreneurs will have in it. An exciting world is developing, and
growing businesses will be riding the waves as both users and
innovators.
Who's in Charge?
Sometimes the best way to understand the big picture is to take a
look at the smaller brush strokes that make it what it is.
Here's a big trend: decentralization of control. It's a
move toward web users having more power to control their own online
experiences. Here are some of the brush strokes: wikis, blogs,
podcasts, RSS and mash-ups. You've probably heard of most of
those, and if you haven't, you'll probably hear of them
soon.
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Joe Kraus, co-founder with Graham Spencer of wiki startup
JotSpot, has a
strong sense of web history. He was one of the original founders of
early search engine Excite and is an active angel investor involved
with tech companies. His passion these days is wikis-collaborative
websites that can be edited by multiple users. "Wikis felt
like a useful tool [back in 1993], but for a limited crowd. They
were trapped in the land of the nerd. [They're] more powerful
because [they] tap everybody's knowledge instead of restricting
it to a single individual," says Kraus, 34. Palo Alto,
California-based JotSpot, jumping on the larger trend toward
decentralized control, has set out to bring wikis into the
mainstream.
That trend, in fact, has entrepreneurs blogging to their
customers, sending out podcasts and gathering news through RSS
feeds. These are all relatively new trends that will magnify as the
web moves forward. Says Kraus, "I'm a huge believer that
the most powerful revolutions in computing are do-it-yourself
revolutions."
Web: The Next Generation
Trying to guess where Google is heading is like listening to the
sounds of a circus setting up from outside the big-top tent: You
know something exciting is going to happen; you just don't know
what. Blogs are burning with speculation, many connecting the dots
to the concept of the web as a computing platform. All that
guesswork underlines another fundamental shift in the web: the move
away from static web pages to a more interactive, real-time
environment. It's the next generation. It's the Web 2.0.
And it's already underway.
Steven Minton, 47, co-founder of web intelligence and search
company Fetch
Technologies in El Segundo, California, is an entrepreneur
working in the thick of the Web 2.0 evolution. "The web is not
made for computers; it's made for people," says Minton.
"The vision of Fetch Technologies is [to make] the web a more
productive place for computers to collect information."
That's also a strong underpinning of the Semantic Web--an
intriguing project from web creator Tim Berners-Lee that is aligned
with many of the concepts of Web 2.0.
What this all means for entrepreneurs is that the way you use
the web is shifting. Search engines will be one noticeable area of
improvement. Minton looks ahead to what we can expect to see over
the next five years: "[You'll] be able to do a better job
of searching because you'll tell them the type of thing
you're interested in. There will be more automated assistants
to help you shop, travel and so forth, and more sophisticated
decision-making aids."
Another sign of the changing web environment is AJAX. No, not
the cleanser. AJAX--Asynchronous JavaScript and XML--is a web
development technique for building interactive web applications so
they behave more like regular software that resides on your PC.
Some examples of AJAX in use include Google Maps and
photo-sharing site Flickr.
Says Minton, "One of the most interesting things happening
right now is that the leaders--Google, Yahoo! and a few others--are
really breaking new ground in a hurry. It's one of those rare
times in history where some of the biggest companies are making the
biggest inroads."
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