Google + DoubleClick = GoogleClick

One consequence of Google's rather expensive acquisition of DoubleClick is that it turns the company from a search engine that sells ads into an advertising company that happens to have a search engine.

During Web 1.0, the accepted wisdom was that online advertising would never be viable as a revenue stream - the "real" money would have to come from somewhere else, such as subs or content purchased through micropayments. It will be interesting to see how things develop during Web 3.0...

Opening Up the WebOS

I realise I am a little late to this, but I have to say that YubNub really is the bee's knees:

YubNub is a command-line for the web. After setting it up on your browser, you simply type "gim porsche 911" to do a Google Image Search for pictures of Porsche 911 sports cars. Type "random 49" to return random numbers between 1 and 49, courtesy of random.org. And best of all, you can make a new command by giving YubNub an appropriate URL.

The most important bit is the last: it allows this command-line to be extended in any way; moreover, there is a wonderfully Darwinian element to which of these extensions "survives", in the sense of being used.

I can't help feeling that something really big will come out of this one day. Web 3.0? Web 4.0? I don't mind waiting....