web

=== Originally published at: The Agile Approach ===

In the ’90s romantic comedy that we borrowed the title from, a chain of dramatic events take place, while the main character (played by Peter Gallagher) is in a post-accident coma.

Comatose sleep is a little too dramatic for this, but just in case you spent the last couple of years on a beautiful island, away from the daily strains of the everyday life in the 21st century, let us list some of the major, latest technical advancements for you. For the less-fortunate rest of us, who did not get to lounge on an island, this is a chance to look back and identify new technologies that have changed the way we live and operate, but were not around just couple of years ago.

Twitter

Twitter took off during 2007 SXSW festival. This 140-character-limit social messaging service revolutionized the Internet landscape by inventing, and at the same time monopolizing, a completely new phenomena: Micro-Blogging. The invention was so successful that it went far beyond the initial idea and became the most effective way to share ideas on the Web.

Linked Data

King is dead, long live the King!

The trademark of the Web: "Content is king" is dying away. In the end, Web is business and business needs to make money. With the emergence of so many, high-quality, free-content resources, few people want to pay for content on the Net; even if they do - it's for niche and limited content. By large, the money on the Net is in advertising, exclusively. To get any advertising money you obviously need users and the size of the audience you can reach directly resonates with the ad revenue.

It is not about content, anymore!

The mind-bobbling success of online services with limited original content such as micro-blogging (Twitter) and social rating (Digg) prove that it's not about content. Content is not #1 even on Facebook - it's the interaction that brings people to Facebook, not some magic content they are looking for. Let's face it: most of the content on Facebook is pretty goofy.

Speaking in grossly generalized terms, successful sites on the Web become popular for two main reasons: either they are very useful and fill some need, or there're way too many people on the site to avoid it. Large user base creates a social power: just because there are so many people on the website, and somebody can contact them (either textually or through applications as in case of Facebook) - it instantly becomes a marketplace.

One, less explored characteristic of the Social Web is that - once you have a large user-base, it becomes less important what brought these users together. You need to open proper channels between them and the crowd can mold itself into many interesting things, some of which may have little to do with the original idea.

Nice and funny "analysis" of the Internet community on CreateDebate