Technology Article #2

http://www.bbcfocusmagazine.com/feature/tech/nets-next-big-thing

This article focuses on the internets next big thing! At the moment, sites Google, Facebook and Twitter are the most popular on the internet. But what will be the most popular in the future? What will these sites have to offer? How will they differ from the popular sites of today?

Many factors must be taken into account to determine whether a website will be a success or not. But Google, Facebook and Twitter all have one thing in common, that is, they offer the right thing at the right time. They were not the first sites to offer the services that they offer, but they just happened to be there right when everyone started wanting their service. Right place, right time.

The following three web-services are the sites that Focus predicts we'll all be using in the next year or so. Each incorporates the 'semantics web', which is the next stage in the evolution of the internet! 'Semantics web' relates to the meaning of words and the next step on the ladder of internet evolution is websites that will be able to recognise and respond to language in the same way a person would.

The next Google ... WOLFRAM ALPHA!
Wolfram Alpha is an answer engine as opposed to a search engine.
"A search tool that returns facts and figures instead of a long list of results. Unlike conventional search engines, which equate importance with popularity (Google ranks a site according to how many other web pages link to it), Wolfram Alpha looks for information in a database of carefully curated knowledge. It then tries to compute a sensible answer, which is why it's billed as a 'computational knowledge engine'."
(I urge everyone to check this out! Wolframalpha.com. I got extremely excited when I tried it, it's amazing! I'm sure non-nerds will love it too!)

Rather than giving you links on your desired topic, it gives you information straight away. So the down side to this site right now is that it doesn't have a massive wealth of knowledge yet. But give it time! It's only a baby, it's growing.

The next Firefox ... UBIQUITY!
"Ubiquity lets you take shortcuts while using the web. Instead of going to a separate site to use a service, it brings that site's features to you." This will be a huge time-saver because you don't have to navigate through several sites if you want to do some emailing with copy and paste and sending links and whatnot!

The next Facebook ... GOOGLE WAVE!
"Google Wave is a tool for communicating in real-time. Think of it as instant messaging for the 21st century." Although instant messaging is mainly just in text form, Google Wave lets you insert photos, videos, games, Facebook comments, Twitter messages, loads of different types of media from many sources! It also has a semantic spellchecker, so for example, it would replace ' principle' with 'principal' in the sentence "the principle of the school", because it recognises other words in the sentence! Exciting! :)

All this hard work and research was done by JV Chamary, reviews editor of Focus.