The great thing about the web is that it provides the opportunity for anyone to make just about any kind of site they want. The downside, of course, is that they aren't truly connected in any meaningful way. Things are hyperlinked but not truly connected. Its all just words. I believe that's one of the ideas behind Semantic Web - representation structures that do a better job than words of conveying meaning. The words are there too, but there's something more basic and hopefully universal so you know two things are identical or connected. The atoms are more conceptual, as opposed to just strings of letters. There's a meta- level for all those letters, and its words and ideas.
In this day and age of social networking bonanza... del.icio.us, facebook, mySpace, last.fm, etc... Let's face it, its a pain to re-enter the same information OVER and OVER and OVER again, and try to find what friends are already using the site and who needs to be invited and how am I going to update all of it, etc. Each is an interesting web site, but I'm looking for a web place (to steal a phrase from Raph) to tie it all together. I like music and I like the web. Why can't I go to ONE place to share it all?
The atoms of today's web sites are too low-level: I, finkyhead, am an entity in a social net. My connections to friends are (ought to be, anyway) a persistent property OF ME, and I shouldn't have to recreate it everywhere I go. I know there's no perfect solution, and yeah, we all need a Google account AND a Yahoo account AND a LiveID to get what we want from the web... but why do I need 140 other ones too?
If anyone knows of a good Meta-site-kind-of-thingy, I'd be interested to see what's available out there.
<lumbergh>
Or, if you could, you know, go ahead and encourage MS or G or Y to just buy them all up and integrate the logins for me. That'd be grrreat.
</lumbergh>
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