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Twitter's Open Platform Advantage
This week on Read/WriteTalk I had the opportunity to talk to Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter. One of the more interesting topics in the podcast was the open platform that Twitter has developed. We also discussed how the team came up with the idea for Twitter, different catalysts over the past year for user growth, and even how they came up with the name. Click here to read a transcript or listen to the full interview.One of the 10 Future Web Trends mentioned in Richard MacManus' post earlier today was 'Web Sites Becoming Web Services'. This theory was originally proposed on R/WW by Alex Iskold back in March. In his post Alex examined both Amazon and Delicious, as case studies of companies using open web services to create competitive advantages. He concluded: "The old perception is that closed data is a competitive advantage. The new reality is that open data is a competitive advantage." Excerpt from Interview with Biz Stone Similar to Alex's theory, I asked Biz how much...

10 Future Web Trends
We're well into the current era of the Web, commonly referred to as Web 2.0. Features of this phase of the Web include search, social networks, online media (music, video, etc), content aggregation and syndication (RSS), mashups (APIs), and much more. Currently the Web is still mostly accessed via a PC, but we're starting to see more Web excitement from mobile devices (e.g. iPhone) and television sets (e.g. XBox Live 360). What then can we expect from the next 10 or so years on the Web? As NatC commented in this week's poll, the biggest impact of the Web in 10 years time won't necessarily be via a computer screen - "your online activity will be mixed with your presence, travels, objects you buy or act with." Also a lot of crossover will occur among the 10 trends below (and more) and there will be Web technologies that become enormously popular that we can't predict now.Bearing all that in mind, here are 10 Web trends to look out for over the next 10 years...1....

With the iPod Touch, iPhone-Specific Sites Suddenly Seem Smarter
When Apple released the iPhone in June there was a flurry of development from web 2.0 startups as developers worked to create iPhone-specific versions of their applications. There was some question about whether or not creating mobile sites specifically for a single handset -- one which was unlikely to have more than a couple of percentage points of the world cell phone market any time soon -- was a wise way to spend time and money. When I reviewed the iPhone-only social network iRovr, I remarked that the biggest question facing the startup was "whether an iPhone specific social network can gain critical mass."Today it seems like a lot of developers may have made the right move. At a press even this morning in San Francisco, Apple announced the iPod Touch, which is essentially an iPhone without the phone.The iPod Touch is an 8/16GB iPod with the huge screen and multi-touch technology that made the iPhone so wowing. But what makes the Touch important for web developers is...

MindTouch Adds Dozens of Extensions to Deki Wiki
In July, Phil Butler called the Deki Wiki enterprise wiki software from MindTouch "the most extendable Wiki tool available today." He wrote that the company was "transforming the Wiki, from the Webs best collaborative authoring tool into an open source service platform with a Wiki heart."While it seems that Google will imminently be joining the wiki market, Deki Wiki has been busy beefing up their already mature offering.The crown jewel of the Deki Wiki platform is their web-services extension model, which lets people create application mashups in their wiki. "For example, users can compose applications from Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft in a wiki page with content they author or aggregate from databases, other applications, or from across the Web," wrote co-founder Aaron Fulkerson in a blog post yesterday.Since we wrote about the Deki Wiki product in July, MindTouch has added dozens of new extensions amounting to over 100 new features, according to the company. These include...