This relatively short (~10 mins) presentation by Kevin Kelly at the recent Web 2.0 conference is a fantastic overview of what's now a pretty widely-accepted view of what the Web will look like in 5 or so years, possibly sooner:
I agree with all of Kevin's predictions. Most sites will make the data in their underlying databases available to other sites in a form that computers can easily understand and use. Sites talking to each other means that users don't have to manually piece data together from different sites when doing research, making reservations, etc. For example, a single site could pull data from a movie showtime site, the Google Maps site and the New York Times site to show the user all the movies starting in the next hour, within 10 miles of their home, and to which the NYT gave 3 stars or more. There are already thousands of such sites and I, like Kevin and many others, think that eventually all sites will operate by passing data around in the background to make users' lives simpler and easier. (Yes, there will be a lot arguing about data standards, but ultimately the business benefits will force everyone to play nice together.)
This is starting to be known as "Web 3.0" among bleeding edge Web types. In geek terms, it can be described as the Web moving from unstructured content (Web sites that can be easily read by humans) to structured content (Web sites that can be easily read by humans AND by machines).
I believe that, in this new structured Web, ChoiceBot technology will play a pivotal role. Hear me out...
Many Web 3.0 applications are designed to combine data from various sites in order to help the user make a decision. For example, a last-minute vacation site may pull data from a travel booking site (for seat prices and availability), a weather site (for forecasts) and a resort rating site to help the user decide where to go for that last-minute weekend getaway. Using a conventional search interface, however, such a site could return 27 vacation options that match the user's price, weather and star-rating criteria (or zero matches, or 127 matches). By the time they review all the matches or tinker with their criteria until they get a reasonable number of matches, it could be Monday.
Layering ChoiceBot on top of that same application would enable users to zero in on the flight, resort and weather combination that represents the truly best overall choice for them in less than two minutes, regardless of the number of choices available (in this example, hundreds of thousands of combinations). In most cases, this represents an order of magnitude increase in efficiency.
Google works great, but in the structured Web, it's not about keywords so the best keyword search engine in the World will be of no use. What's needed is a tool that can help users wade through potentially vast sets of structured data, which is where ChoiceBot comes in.
Delusions of grandeur? You bet. What kind of entrepreneur would I be without those? <grin>
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