The web loves lists: the ten best this, or the top-100-that features.  Every blogger or podcast pundit worth his salt, chips in periodically with round-ups of trends to watch or rankings of businesses, sites and applications. Finally, we’ve joined the fray:  this time with a small, but representative pick of the web; sites offering services we think life- or work-enhancing. 

To put the list in context, we’ve identified some broad trends that dominate the new crop and which are in tune with the next generation of the web – web 3.0.  To recap, Web 3.0 is all about recommendations, free services, intelligent (semantic) searches, and information that’s no longer random data, but tailored, highly intuitive and delivered in real time.

• Mobile applications have long been aimed at giving subscribers information specific to their whereabouts, but now we’re seeing even more intelligent ideas.  Loopt.com is a new one this year that blends our love of social networking with location-based services.  It’s has been described as a ‘social compass’ as it detects not only where you are on the map, but also pinpoints your mobile friends in the vicinity. Loopt.com is US-centric at present, but the company says it working on looping up Europe.  Ideal for Maltese social animals when it does.
  
  
• Maps: Google street map hit the news early this year with its controversial drive-by views of people’s front doors and people themselves.  But, Google doesn’t have a monopoly on innovative mapping. Openstreetmap.org is about people mapping everything from great hiking routes to off-piste ski runs or and wine tours, and it’s mapping the world. It’s a kind of wiki of special interest maps.  
  
  
• Personal organisers:  There’s no shortage of web services aimed at helping us organize our lives.  But however digital our way of living, a lot of us still print out paper when we travel, particularly on business.  Tripit.com solves your travel paper trail by being your ‘personal, full-service travel assistant’.  It compiles your itinerary, from transport modes to dinner dates, and adds in weather reports, suggested local attractions and more.   It’s worth a glance if you travel and have a busy agenda; useful too for family holiday plans.

• Collaboration:  Slideshare.net is a useful resource for anyone in business seeking latest thinking on an area of interest and reading it in succinct, generally well-put-together PowerPoint slideshows that are rated and commented on by users. 280slides.com operates in the same field, but is a ‘Cloud’ computing application at its best.  It lets you create, collaborate on, share and store a slidedeck on the Cloud (their remote server), so you can access it anywhere in the world. You’ll never be caught short again on a business trip without your slidedeck to hand.

• Audio:  We love audio-visual on the web, so it’s little wonder that this area is seeing new applications each day.  Two that seem to fill a market gap are Songkick.com and Blip.fm.  Songkick tells you where your favourite group’s next gig is based on your music library.  It’s called the world’s biggest concert database, and let you ‘never miss a gig again’.  Meanwhile, Blip.fm is billed as a kind of ‘twitter for music’ as it lets you create a social network based on your music choices and recommendations. 
  
  
• Social media Intermediaries:  There’s now an ever-growing range of tools to help us make sense of, filter and manage our Twitter world. We focus on Tweetag.com, which is billed as a search engine for ‘tweets’.  With millions of people adding content  each day, the Twittersphere is a morass of information and comment, some useful and some useless.  Tweetag helps you search tweets for trends.  It also edges towards Web 3.0 semantic search by offering up a tweetag cloud and organising search results according to whether other Twitterers have ‘re-tweeted’  - in a sense seconded  - an idea.

About the author Dr. Gege Gatt is a founder and director of ICON (www.icon.com.mt), a world-class software applications product company specialising in the development of web solutions and electronic marketing materials. ICON clients are drawn from a broad range of sectors, including corporate, government, health, media & publishing, telecommunications, retail and travel.  Dr. Gatt heads ICON’s strategy & business development unit. Contact: feedback@icon.com.mt Adapted from Economic Update - December Issue

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