Internet to ask, 'How may I serve you?'

A good friend pointed out to me this article in USAToday What's put the whoopee back in the Internet industry? To borrow a buzzword coined by Cisco CEO John Chambers: It's the arrival, after years of expectation, of the "interactions Web." This is the Web of flying through cities on Google Earth; of viewers helping produce segments on Current TV; of applications that run on a server far away but seem to be right on your computer. The interactions Web is the next rung up from the familiar point-and-click Internet, industry executives say. For the past decade on the Net, you'd click and get a Web page. If you wanted more information, or to order something, you'd click again. The user has had to do a lot to navigate around. But now comes an Internet that works on your behalf — finding or doing things in the background, with no intervention. At the same time, the borders between the computer and the Web are dissolving, so you can hardly tell if you're using something that's running on your processor or on a server thousands of miles away. Often, it's both.

I urge you to read the entire article, and decide for yourself. Personally I don't see Web-based applications suceeding any more now than they did a number of years ago when it was first tried, but I agree that XML and its offspring, RSS (really simple syndication), offer some exciting new opportunities.