I feel that during the last couple of months the Web is changing fast. It looks like users, developers and enterpreneurs are much more mature on what the Web means and what it is good for.

First, we tried to move all our off-line habits, business and applications to the new, exciting on-line world of the Internet. We gave our shops, our directories, our magazines, our banks a new “web-based” front end. All these services and activities could very well exist off-line and, well, they did.

But now, we are moving on. We create services and business around things that could not even exist without the Web.

We have folksonomies and it’s not a geeky thing anymore (Yahoo! investment in Flickr and del.icio.us is a good proof of this [1])

Google maps are not just on-line maps, we stick our photos, our blogs, our ads on them, and create new and exciting applications like Frappr.

Our RSS/ATOM feeds transfer audio and video (ex. podcasts) and not just the “latest headlines” -they are getting “smarter” too (see Feedburner’s Feedflare [2] and Feed for Thought).

Our blogs are becoming more than just an electronic equivelent of a diary or newspaper, they are an electronic camvas that displays information from our del.icio.us bookmarks, pingbacks and trackbaks, and they interact with the rest of the Web, creating their own “Cosmos”.

Web APIs used to be an experimental feature to “have the developers on our
side”. Not any more. We are using them to build new business models (see Alexa Web Search).

We are also getting away from the PC client. I’m not referring to the usual “mobile phone as a web client”. iPods are connected to the internet nowdays -what’s an iPod without a fast internet connection to download music or audio/video podcasts? TiVo is turning into a web-connected device. And Cisco’s aquisition of KiSS Technologies through Linksys is a good promise we should be expecting more on internet based/enhanced home entertainment…

Oh, I’m so excited!

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[1] One step closer to sexyness
[2] What I called content enrichment a year ago…

There has been a lot of talking about whether rel=”nofollow” is good or bad, useful or usless (check
Bitflux Blog :: Why nofollow is useless )

However I think that nofollow is quite useful for a different reason than preventing spam: preventing search engine results shown on “third party” websites mislead the search engines themselves.

Here is what I mean: Take for example g-metrics.com. Most of the pages of this site display results (actually the top-10 results) returned by google for specific queries. To do this, g-metrics.com makes use of Google Web APIs. So when google indexes one of these pages, it would increase the pagerank (or whatever ranking system a search engine is using) of a URL just because it had high enough pagerank to show up in the top 10 results…

However, using rel=”nofollow” can prevent this. (I have started using nofollow in g-metrics as soon as I read about it).

Similar cases could become a big problem for search engines, as similar APIs become more popular (Google, Technorati, del.icio.us, Amazon/Alexa, etc…) The way I see it, similar services may oblige or encourage developers to use nofollow when presenting “their” results.

Everyone is using one or more search engines on a daily basis, yet few are aware that each one of them has a separate site where it presents “the things to come”. I did a quick research and here they are:

• GoogleLabs
• msn Sandbox
• YAHOO! Research Labs

Do you know of other such sites? (about alexa, looksmart, others?)

Amazon anounced Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS) together with Alexa Web Information Service (AWIS).

AWIS interests me a lot since it is quite close to the Google WEB APIs used by g-metrics.com. So, I had a look at it.

AWIS vs. Google Web APIs

First of all, AWIS seems to provide much more features than the Google Web APIs. It has 5 modes (URL Information, Browse Category, Web Search, Crawl Meta Data and Web Map) [dtls.] that allows for more flexibility (ex. links in-out, usage/traffic stats, etc.).

One more nice thing is that you have the freedom to choose between SOAP and REST to acces the services, while Google only allows for SOAP (which I prefer, but this is another thing).

Finally, by getting “a developer’s key” you are entitled for 10,000 queries/day (Google gives 1,000).

On the other hand: AWIS SOAP does not work out-of-the-box since there seems to be a problem with the wsdl file. In addition, there does not seem to be a way to make complex queries (while Google Web APIs allows a query to have “AND’, ‘OR’, “inurl:”, “allintext:”, “allinlinks:”, “site:”, etc.)

Conclusion

If for one thing, it get is becoming clear that we are going towards a Web of Services. More and more websites are turning into “web services providers”, transforming the net to a real Application Platform… I am not to say if AWIS is better than Google Web APIs, especially considering that they are both in Beta.

What’s more, Alexa.com declares to be “powered by Google”!?? (have a look at www.alexa.com). If we are talking about the same underlying database, then developers just have two alternative ways to access it -and THAT is really interesting!!!.

I will definitely add AWIS support to g-metrics.com, so stay tuned.