OneBigWeb

Published On: November 17th, 2005  

Dion Hinchcliffe recently wrote about the need for online content stores. He sees it as a killer app. I coundn’t agree more!

There are three big and very obvious opportunites emerging in the Web 2.0 space. They have been well understood for a long time and we are already beginning to see the first concrete offerings appearing in the market.

1. Structured Content Store : Secure, reliable, identity based access to information using web services. The information could be documents and media as well as structured micro information like basic personal information, a resume or details required to ship an order. This was what Microsoft’s Hailstorm was all about.

2. Structured Content Aggregator : Aggregate structured information from multiple content stores to provide a single point for accessing/querying and perhaps even writing to all these stores. We have several niche aggregators(Bloglines, Froogle, Indeed, Oodle) and not all of them offer API’s. What is needed is a truly generic technology which is independent of any particular structure.

3. Structured Content Client : A generic application platform for navigating, visualizing and interacting with structured micro content. Perhaps the most exciting application in this space is Haystack, the prototype built at MIT.

Each of these products will be at the centre of the three distinct layers that will be part of the Web2.0 landscape. They epitomize the core concept of decoupling content from applications.