Technologies That Will Change The Web

Some years ago, the mp3 format was invented. It was a market killer invention since there was a whole bunch of new products and hardware that came out to support it. We saw mp3 players in our rooms, cars and phones. We also saw companies distributing paid music rise and each teen has it’s mp3 player along with his/her books. Each time a killer invention comes out, there is a whole bunch of other products in the market to support it.

The Web, was another killer invension. Some new technologies that recently came out promise to re-invent the web and we will make an effort to showcase them here. We will also try to imagine some supporting products that these technologies might produce.

Select * from internet with YQL

One of the most promising technologies out there, is Yahoo’s YQL. Many people including me, believe that this platform is the next big thing. You can do thousand of diferrent things with YQL in so many diferrent areas that the moto is really “select * from internet”. The philosofy behind YQL is that anyone can make his data available for everyone in a specific way, so specific that someone who wants to access these data, should just use an SQL-syntax like language to get do it.

So YQL turns the web into a monsterous database waiting there for us to query it. How is this possible? Each web service should produce a datatable with a specific format, which then other people can use to extract, insert or update data. We see hundreds of community tables available in the YQL console.

In what way could YQL change the web? What if you used YQL to create a hotel booking site? Hotels could create datatables that would make hotels reservations, available rooms and pricing info available. Then we could do a YQL statement like this to get available rooms in San Fransisco:

SELECT * FROM hotels.rooms.sf WHERE room=open

The above example is fictional. YQL could be used in any way you would use a typical SQL database. Our article about how to use yql to manage your meme account will get you into it even faster.

Take the web back with Opera Unite

Opera Unite is able to turn your browser (Opera) into a web server. This means you can share content directly with friends without having to upload anything to a Web site. Opera Unite is a Web server running inside the Opera Web browser, allowing the user to install applications and share these applications with their friends and colleagues (or everyone, if they wish). The Opera Unite server provides a proxy between the server and its clients (found at operaunite.com) to avoid the need for any special firewall configuration.

So in other words, you run your own hosting service. You can use standard techniques like JavaScript and HTML to create applications and then publish them for the world to see right from your own browser. There are already a some applications that utilize the Opera Unite API and my favorite one is Twicli.

Most of the Opera Unite use cases could be for social networking but it could be used as a collaboration tool too.

Collaborate with Google Wave

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. With Google wave the possibilities are endless since the wave API allows you to build anything you want.

Google Wave supports robots, gadgets,extensions and embeding that makes it so powerful for online collaboration that any other tool could be. We recently posted a tutorial on how to create a feed reader extension for Google Wave too.

Recently there was a post in the ReadWriteWeb blog with a use case of Google Wave for artists and Filmmaking and everyday there are new ideas on how Wave could be used.

Re-inventing RSS with PubSubHubBub

Except it’s strange name, this protocol promises to deliver updates from feeds without polling. So it basically allows us to be informed if our favorite blog has updated news without the need to reload this blog’s feed. It uses this flow (taken from Scripting.com):

1. Any feed that wants to participate in this network must add a bit to the feed that indicates which ping server is handling notifications on its behalf. There can be more than one.
2. When a subscribing application initially parses the feed and notices this bit, it sends a notification to each server saying “I want to be notified when this feed updates”.
3. When the feed updates, it pings each of the servers it has registered with saying “I have updated”.
4. The server then pings each of the subscribers saying “He updated”.

At Scripting.com they say that this protocol could be used to create a Twitter-like service without Twitter’s limitations of 140 chars or hashtags. We thought of another use also.

What about creating a REAL real-time search engine that would update it’s index anytime a feed is updated? This way, we could have a search engine that will be able to show the latest news in seconds after the news got published.

HTML5

The new HTML specification is here and it brings marvelous new features to use. Canvas, Video, Audio and Drag n Drop are some of it’s features that will surely change the way we surf the net. One of it’s coolest features is the ability to cache web applications and use them offline. It is not weird that technologies like Google Wave depend on HTML5 to exist.

Apart from being the tool to create revolutionary applications and services, HTML5 is itself a revolution. Many browser players are contributing to the creation of the draft (Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera), each from his own point of view and interest but they all try to make this a great new era for the web.

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