The current day Internet is the global network that connects people from all over the world and enables them to meet to work and have fun together.
At the center of the enormous growth of Internet use in 1990s was a new application: the World Wide Web. The Web leveraged the existing Internet infrastructure and protocols TCP/IP and and provided a simple and elegant abstraction: "Everything is a resource; Any resource can link to other resources".
The Web has evolved from its origins. We can summarize the evolution in three stages: the web of documents, the web of applications, and the web of users.
The web of documents was the original hypertext document system, built from HTML pages linking to other pages. The pages were initially static, but soon there were many ways technologies to generate dynamic pages.
The web of applications came next, leveraging the dynamic web page technologies. Some successful web applications examples are: e-commerce (e.g. Amazon.com), web mail (e.g. Hotmail), and customized portals (e.g. Yahoo!). Soon, the application providers realized that the user inputs were very useful to improve the web applications and its capabilities.
The web of users is the current stage in the Web development. It is also known by the moniker Web 2.0. The user inputs became central in the provided applications. Amazon's recommendations are an early example of this. More notably, the Google search engine took advantage of user clicks on results to create a PageRank. More recently, the user contributions are even more explicit, with social networking applications, like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Delicious, among many others.
So, what is next for the Web? It is about to become even more world wide.
There are three technology trends that will shape the next stage of the Web: mobile Internet access, geographic information systems, and automatic identification and sensing.
Mobile access to the Internet, using hand-held devices and wireless networks is on the rise.
People are starting to use the Web in new places and situations where a desktop or laptop computer would not be possible or convenient. As a result, there are new user needs and requirements.
Geographical information systems, like Google Maps, allow users to access map data with several information layers, to locate points of interest and provide directions. The current user location can be determined using a GPS enabling location-aware applications.
Automatic identification and sensing technologies, like RFID identifiers and sensors, are making their way to supply chains in retail, pharmaceutical, and other industries. Soon it will be possible to tag any valuable or interesting physical object, enabling item level track & trace. In addition, the object identity can be used as a search parameter, to retrieve data from the Web.
When these three technologies are combined, an Internet of Things emerges, a Web of Things, where people and the physical world can interact in novel ways.
As an example scenario consider the following. A person walks into a bookstore and finds an interesting book. However the only available copy has a torn page. Using the mobile phone camera, the user scans the book's bar-code and queries if the book is available in any other nearby bookstore. It isn't, so the user goes to a on-line shop and orders one copy to be delivered the next day at his home.
Can you imagine it? If you can, and would like to work on it, leave a comment here on the blog or email me.
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