I’ve always been a huge believer that someday a big revolution will happen with the Internet when the vision of the semantic web is realized. The prospects are very exciting but it still seems far off.
Nonetheless, every so often - and certainly more often than just a few years ago - you hear about this thing or that, which indicates change is afoot.
I hadn’t heard of this until just today, though I probably should have: The Implicit Web. There is an OK description of it started on Wikipedia. Essentially, it describes software which tries to organize data from different sources together to create value, either by discovering things only discoverable when data is combined or by making it more efficient to use software by streamlining data entry.
The first part is obvious. You signup for whatever.com music site, and you should be able to click a button to have it gain access to data about all the music you’ve ever bought or listened to (iTunes, pandora, internet radio). Boom! Suddenly it becomes about the quality of software and less about who’s the biggest and who has the most lock-in. As for the second, how rad would it be if you could goto whatever.com and click “JOIN” and suddenly it has every bit of relevant info it needs about you. Universal one-click signup!
Redeye VC has a good article on the subject and suggests that they are actively investing in companies today that are trying to solve issues related to the implicit web.
