Category: web 2.0

Steve Rubel (Micro Persuasion) has been thinking a lot about the future of the web, and web widgets in particular. He writes that these widgets — chunks of code that can be easily installed on a web page — make it “possible to add so many collapsible modules to your tabs/pages, that you rarely need to go anywhere else.” Thus, with apps like the Google Reader widget, anything and everything you need — from news briefs to meeting notices — will be accessible from your start page.

Rubel shares screen shots of a couple of widgets that “are indicative of what the widgetized web will look like in the years ahead” and adds, “You can see a future where these pages become as essential as a Swiss Army Knife is to a camper.” He concludes that “The future of the web (dare I say Web 3.0?) will look just like a Swiss Army Knife and it’s going to be extremely disruptive.”

I just hope web 3.0 comes with a corkscrew and bottle opener.

If you’re thinking about creating a MySpace presence for your university, you may want to think twice. Sunday’s Washington Post reported that MySpace’s biggest user group, teens, seem to be losing interest. Some are spending less time on the site; others are deleting their profiles altogether.

Says one high schooler: “I think it’s definitely going down — a lot of my friends have deleted their MySpaces and are more into Facebook now.”

Adds a classmate: “I’ve grown out of it.”

Concludes the Post: “Such is the social life of teens on the Internet: Powerful but fickle.”

The Chronicle’s Wired Campus bloggers note that “adolescent caprice may actually be less of a problem for MySpace than technology’s forward march: More attractive, less public sites like Facebook are are cutting into the social network’s market share.”

Which leads to the question: When will Facebook peak?