
Seven Computer Science Game-Changers from the 2000’s, and Seven More to Come  - mad44
http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2009/12/24/exponentials-r-us-seven-computer-science-game-changers-from-the-2000%E2%80%99s-and-seven-more-to-come/?single_page=true
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ahlatimer
I'd say another big game changer is going to be APIs becoming ubiquitous. A
lot of sites are already doing this, but in the next few years, expect even
more open APIs from even more sites. Screen scraping should become largely a
thing of the past. I expect the Internet to take on a Unix philosophy with web
apps becoming very well suited at individual tasks instead of kitchen-sink
type applications. Information will be passed in XML (plain text or gzipped),
apps will be strung together fairly easily if we keep pushing for RESTful
APIs, and the winners will be the people that build on other sites in useful
and ingenious ways.

You can already see this with Twitter. A social networking site that is
basically just the status field from Facebook being utilized for all sorts of
other tasks because they have an open API. Expect to see more sites take
individual features from other sites (or create completely new features) and
build really great services with just _that_ feature.

For this to happen, a ubiquitous login is going to have to really take hold,
but I already see that happening with Facebook Connect. It's proprietary, but
they've already reached critical mass and it doesn't break the
username/password paradigm that people are used to. OpenID, while great in
concept, is going to lose because people aren't used to having a URL represent
them.

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joshu
s/Computer Science/Technology/ perhaps?

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nollidge
Agreed. "E-commerce" is not computer science, it's an application thereof.

