Recently, spongecell.com (the popular event scheduling and calendar oriented startup) launched a shareable "widgetized" version of their calendar, where you can essentially add the calendar and its events to your existing calendar, as well as automatically create it as an event on Facebook. I love it!

These sort of ideas, to me, are what Web 2.0 is all about. There's been a lot of negativity in the blogosphere with bloggers pretty much saying that there is no innovation and blogs are just re-hashing the same crap, etc. They're wrong, and they're not seeing what's really going on here.

While I do expect big technological changes to lead to a 3rd bubble eventually, I definitely think right now it's all about attacking different verticals in unique ways, but with the same concepts. I'm ok with that. Share a widget, share a calendar, share whatever. I personally know for a fact that there are many industries that still need a sort of "bring up to speed." There is plenty of room for innovation still. I think it's going to take some serious semantic & data portability precendents to really lead to another major break through (i.e. after social networking & ajax). And I also think that there probably lies some very unique ideas and startups that can be build as a catalyst to that whole movement--i.e. it doesn't have to be pioneered by a startup that gets bought by Microsoft for $100 million before they even release their core product (e.g. Powerset) or other guys like Twine, etc...Well, I maybe wrong about that. It's going to be companies like that who lead to a whole new technology breakthrough that gets everyone's head spinning again, just to come up with a bunch of new ideas and attack the same infinite number of verticals again.

I'm just blabbering/brainstorming here, but my points are two fold:

1) there are plenty of industries/markets/verticals that can take advantage of current Web 2.0 technology

2) there still lies some diamonds in the rough in Web 2.5 that still need to be made and popularized before the Web 3.0 bubble can begin

3) The Web 3.0 bubble will see the same thing happen again where the same technology is applied over and over again, but different verticals (as well as probably over and over again to the same vertical lol!)

Lastly, Open Social is trying to be that unbiased universal API, but I don't think it will be. Or, rather, I think someone else can take that job on correctly and beat them to it. They've been extremely slow-goingw ith it, and I don't think they even have the right end-vision in mind. I think they're just providing us with pseud-portable solutions now as their programmers come up with the ideas. Guys think guys like Adam Ostrow and Mark Hopkins have alluded to the "universal API" several times, and I've been really inspired by that idea--just those 2 words. Imagine a day, when a company buidling a site hires xhtml developers, LAMP and Ajax developers, UAPI developers, and designers. I think there's a way to "web" the whole web together with a non-centralized API (i.e. kind of like Bit Torrent) in order to get access to (i.e. get and send) data from anywhere on the web in a complete sort of way. And I think accomplishing this goal will take looking at the big picture, not building little pseudo protability solutions like being able show a list of your friends on some blog you commented on and send a notification out to them wherever they are. That's microscopic--very feature centric. Maybe google's plan is to pave the way or whatever, but I really don't think that someone in that company has the optimum Data Portability solution in their head. I think very few people are seeing it clearly. To me, there should have been a well-funded startup that has launched already with extremely clear goals in their mission state of how they plan to build the Universal API. I don't htink companies like Friend Feed have that as their master secret plan, and they're just not letting the cat out of the bag--and if they do, I doubt they have the ultimate iteration of it in their heads.

That being said, who wants to start a startup?

p.s. (let's let the semantic guys pioneer that route, and we'll reap the benefits once sites come around and start semantifying their content. I don't think we need to get into complex algorithms like they're building in order to build the UAPI. I think there is something genius we can build and a lot less complex--i.e: the perfect value ratio in complexity for a startup)