a) semantic web – making the web machine-readable. This’ll supply the meta data to power the largest expert system in the world. Imagine a "google" type engine with a brain. A web that can rationalize and reason. The whole exceeding the sum of the parts horizon: 5-10 years.

b) Second life – Self-governed virtual environments. Imagine MySpace in 3D on steroids legitimized by corporate involvement and a functioning economy. ** Side note: I never "got" MySpace, seems just like geocities all over again. Horizon: NOW!!!

c) Digital Identity – High(er) assurance as to who’s who on the web. Federated identity. No more registering per site. You are who you are and reputation grows over time. Online code of conduct becomes important. Horizon: 1-2 years.

d) Windows Presentation Foundation: aka XBAP and Microsoft SilverLight [LINK], richer experience on the web. Flash on steroids. Blurs the line between a web application and desktop application. Lowers the cost of developing rich browser experiences. Resulting experiences are better and more interesting.  Horizon: NOW.

e) Amazon web services: On demand storage, queuing and computational power. Pay for what you use model.

f) New computing form factors. E.g. Microsoft Surface[LINK] and multi-touch. Announced this week, Microsoft have made a computer out of a coffee table. It’s sensitive to what you put on it. This is nice, but I think HP had something similar not too long ago. Microsoft is renowned for taking disparate technologies and converging them into new business models so they can likely make this work. Horizon: 2-5 years.

Take one from c) and mix with any of the others and you’ve got new business model.

Here’s an excerpt:
"Mashups are becoming ever more important to Web 2.0 applications. (A mashup refers to a combination of various third part data feeds into a new harmonious feed or presentation.) If you are not yet excited about Web 2.0, you will be after reading this book!"

Here’s probably the most critical commentary:

"The book is a bit of a jarring experience for the reader. Much of it reads like someone’s lecture notes or a PowerPoint presentation. Transitions are abrupt. But, partly, this is the price of bringing to market such a topical book so quickly."

You know I can’t fault them there. The book was cobbled together over many long nights last year and I can absolutely see how the result might be a bit "jarring". As first-time author I take this criticism to heart as valid and hopefully can improve in the next one.

The "Bottom Line":
"Amazon.com Mashups is a great overview of mashups and introduction to integrating Amazon Web services with other mashable services using a variety of Web 2.0 techniques."

4 out of 5 stars? Not bad, I’ll take it.

In related news I got the following email from Alex in the UK over the weekend. This really brightened my day:

"Just wanted to send an email of appreciation. I have purchased your book and am thoroughly enjoying it. It is nice to read a book that is technical but not at all boring and very, very useful. Hopefully, you are considering writing new titles that maybe go even further. These new range of books that inspire the imagination as well as go into technical detail are great and so much better than reading manuals all the time. I’m sure you have had many similar emails, but I just wanted to add my bit."

This chapter covers the Amazon S3 platform and shows you how to build a generic interface into it. For those of you on the fence as to whether to buy the book this might push you over the edge and for those who’ve already bought it, thank you, this might be a useful online reference for you.

Jeff Barr has blogged it here [LINK]. The Wrox Newsletter cites it also.

Still no reviews posted on Amazon. If you’ve bought the book, liked it or hated it, I’d appreciate it if you could post a review on Amazon’s product page. The feedback is invaluable in improving future writing endeavours.

The Yahoo Develop Network also mentions the book today: [LINK] along with some of the other titles in the series: "Yahoo Maps Mashups" by Charles Freedman, "Flickr Mashups" by David Wilkinson and "Del.icio.us Mashups" by Brett O’Connor.

"Additionally, "Amazon.com Mashups" by Francis Shanahan features mashups with Yahoo! Maps. All books carry on the fine tradition Wrox has of delivering quality technical books to real programmers. As I learned last year at many conferences, our developer community deserves and expects nothing less."

They’ve also launched the following site as a central location for the entire series: http://www.mashupexperts.com

Enjoy.

I incorporated some zuggestions (groan) which folks emailed so the overall UI is a little nicer. I’m definitely HTML impaired. I’ve also improved caching on my server so Amazon doesn’t get such a big whack. Still tweaking things but have definitely learned a lot over the last few days.

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UPDATE: Jeff Barr of Amazon has posted a link to Zuggest on the Amazon Web Services Blog. Thanks Jeff!

I’ve also upgraded to the latest Amazon web service WSDL. Tonnes more information available such as list, new and used prices, even inventory levels on used items! Great stuff.

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You’ve got to make life interesting and I just couldn’t resist! After hearing all the buzz about XMLHttp (eh, it’s been out for 2 years already) I figured I’d take a look at it. This is my take on “Google Suggest” only with Amazon so I’ve called it “Amazon Zuggest” – TAKE A LOOK AT IT HERE.

This is a technology experiment in creation of Rich Internet User Interfaces using asynchronous communication from a browser to the server to gather data while the user’s doing something else.

While you type, the page gets results without a page refresh and without having to hit “submit” all the time.

HOW IT WORKS The technology involved is Javascript, Web Services, SOAP, XMLHttp, XML, C# and ASP.NET.
The Javascript runs in the browser and fires once you’re done typing. It looks for something to search on. If it finds something, it shoots a request using XMLHttp to my webserver.

The webserver constructs a SOAP request and sends it to the Amazon Web Services server (AWS ECM 4.0). Amazon sends back a SOAP response to my server, this response is then parsed into HTML. I think this is where Zuggest differs from Google Maps.

I think Maps is sending back XML to the browser and that gets XSLT’d into HTML on the browser. I do that part on the web server and stream HTML to the browser.

Lastly, I cache all the results on my side and check the cache before I query anything. I also cache the results on the browser side, so if you’ve searched for something you can just mouseover the history to bring it straight back, instantly. All in the blink of an eye.

So you might say well why not just issue the Web Service request or a REST request directly from the browser to the AWS server, eliminating the extra hop through my server. The main reason for this convoluted Web Service approach through my server is the security constraints around the client-side javascript blending content from other sources.

You can’t issue XMLHttp requests from the browser back to a domain other than the one the original page was served from. Otherwise this would be REALLY fast, as in Google Suggest. Google Maps works the same way.

I’ve tested it in Firefox and IE6 without too many problems. Again, this is an experiment so it’s a little rough around the edges. It would be a little nicer if I wasn’t restricted to 1 request every second max to Amazon.

UPDATES:
Question from Jonathan Sambrook:
Does the Amazon API allow you to use amazon.co.uk ? Answer: Yes. There are WSDLs available for the US, UK, DE, JP, FR and CA Locales although Zuggest only searches the US right now.

Question from Roshawn Dawson: You said that you are using Soap. Are you using a code-behind file? Answer: Yes. The XMLHttpRequest is sent to my ASP.NET page from the browser. The code-behind constructs the SOAP message, etc. etc.

What do you think? Would love to hear your thoughts or happy to link to other experiments like this.