Where Now?
So where does the Web go from here? We can certainly expect that governments and noncommercial institutions will expand the data they provide online. But what about the big names on the Web—the Googles, the Microsofts, the Yahoo!s, and the Amazons? They're looking for ways to make money. How do you monetize something like Yahoo! Pipes?
Up to now, they did it with advertising. But how do you inject advertising into something like Yahoo! Pipes? You could inject advertising items into the output feeds, but would users sit still for that? What are the legal implications of inserting advertising into content from other—potentially many other—sources?
And does a system like Yahoo! Pipes, which by its nature creates programs that are arbitrarily complex, scale?
I don't have answers to these questions, but history does tell us: technology never marches backward[2].
[2] With the possible exception of the Dark Ages.
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