Over the past several months a new trend has been emerging. The technology changed more than a year ago and the way that we use the web has been catching up. I’m just getting my head around it now, and holy cow is it cool. I’m still grappling with these concepts so please forgive me if this post is a bit janky. I’ll cover some broad trends and then give a couple of concrete examples.

For the past couple of years sites have been displaying data from a number of sources through RSS, that isn’t really new. There is an increasing number of sites that allow users (and other sites) to submit data remotely as well, through API’s. What this means is that you don’t even have to visit a site to take advantage of its services. In some cases the sites, or web applications, don’t offer anything on their own site other than an administration panel. Gravatar is a site that offers a centralized avatar storage and distribution for the rest of the web, all you can do on their site is update your email address and picture. But, once that’s done every website that takes advantage of that service displays your avatar. Similarly, create an account at OpenID and you can access dozens of sites with those credentials. Last.fm keeps track of the music you play on your computer or iPod and gives you tools to display that list on any site you wish, your blog, Facebook, MySpace, wherever. Twitter, Flickr and Delicious also make it a snap to share information on any other site you choose.

There is a shift toward decentralized content, the information that you view on one page could be pulled from a dozen or more places. These mashups are fun and useful, but its not just content that is being shared between sites, now applications are, too. I can think of a few examples for WordPress. Disqus is a blog plugin that replaces, and adds functionality to, your blog engine’s commenting feature. Comments display as threaded, and they extend across similar sites. I have already reviewed Zemanta, which is a tool to help add links, images and related articles to your blog posts.

There are several Firefox add-ons that extend the functionality of Gmail, making it a great alternative to Outlook. RememberTheMilk has an add-on that allows you to see and manage your task list from within Gmail (that’s actually one of my favorites). Xoopit indexes your email and gives you quick access to images and videos that have been sent to you.

Some people are referring to this as the semantic web. The way I understand the semantic web, this is incorrect, though I’m certainly no expert so I don’t necessarily claim to be right. My understanding is that semantic is a way of categorizing the information contained within a web page so that computers can make sense of and utilize that content. I guess maybe this fits within semantic in a general way, though I consider this to be more along the lines of content/application distribution.

This is a pretty exciting trend within web development. As each of these sites/tools develops more ways of interacting with them, the functionality of the web increases. Distributing content across a number of sites increases the chances that someone interested in your words will see them, increasing the value that those pages bring to readers. And, transferring applications to the web opens up a myriad of opportunities as well. I’m excited to be working in this industry right now.

Bill was the primary speaker, and he was probably the more confident speaker between the two. He raised a few great points about Google’s shift to including news, videos and social media items in search results, indexing flash content and search within search. He also made a personal comment about flash content that I happen to agree with, that flash developers make sites that are annoying to everyone but the person that developed it. I completely agree that the medium (flash vs html vs ajax vs …) needs to be chosen based on the message and the content, not the other way around. I would have loved it if he had taken this line of thought further, but this probably wasn’t the proper forum for that conversation.

Brian was also great. He didn’t speak as much, which is unfortunate because I appreciated his thoughts as well. While discussing the use of social media he made the point that each site (Digg, Twitter, Facebook, etc) becomes its own community, and if someone is going to use that medium then all efforts really need to be tailored to that specific site. Digg users respond differently to a story than Facebook or Sphinn or Reddit users would. Very insiteful. To claim that you’re an expert in all social media is too broad to be meaningful.

I also met a few folks from other agencies around town. I particularly enjoyed visiting with the event host, Paul Bradshaw of Full Orange Films. All in all, I really enjoyed it, and am looking forward to attending future events.

Twitter and Facebook Status exploded the use of these tools. You only have 140 characters to fit a link and the thought that goes with it, so the shorter URL the better. It was through Twitter that I found out about Snurl, and I started using it right away. Hey, two digits is two digits. I don’t get why they need three different URLs to accomplish this (Snipr, SnipURL and Snurl), but whatever.

Last month I found out about two more on the same day, bit.ly and is.gd (short for “is good”). What on earth? Can there really be enough of a market to justify the existence of all of these? I mean, a short URL is a short URL, right? I decided to take a closer look at each of these, and there are some minor differences.

Each of these has their own API for developers, a bookmarklet that you can drag to your browser toolbar, and they copy the shortened URL to you clipboard automatically (if you have Flash enabled). So in terms of service offered, they’re on equal footing. Bit.ly seems to have the most white space (read, simplest layout). Snurl and Bit.ly are both ad free. When Snurl copies the URL to your clipboard it also copies the domain that it is linking to, which is a little annoying but if you create an account you can disable this in your profile settings.

Some of them allow you to create links to other short URL tools, which bugs me but I can’t say exactly why. I did some experimenting with this, and it looks like when you create a link to another URL shortening tool only one gives you a warning screen before forwarding you on, is.gd.

I don’t see all four of these sites surviving in the long run. And developers, if you just thought of the coolest domain to use for this, either stop now or come up with something awesome that takes the concept further, because this market is already kind of tapped.

The two that I personally like the most are bit.ly and is.gd. I like the simple layout of bit.ly, and their blowfish logo is kind of cool, too. I think is.gd is the one I’ll be using from now on. The main reason is that its the shortest. I mean, if you really want a short URL then this is IT, right? I also like that you don’t have to create an account or edit the string that gets copied to the clipboard, and if someone tries to point you to another URL site you get a warning note. Nice.

Before these tools came along, people searched the web using their own vernacular. Differences in language made it possible for thousands of websites in a given industry to coexist, and even thrive together, by carefully choosing niche phrases. Start making suggestions to users and you change their search habits. Over time this has the potential to reduce the selection of search phrases for a given industry, making it more difficult to rank well for your given field.

Its tough to say how organic search will be affected, but it will be affected. Niche keywords will be more difficult to find, but will probably still be available. The long tail of SEO will likely be clipped, since users wil be more likely to follow along with Google’s suggestions, which presumably will be changing based on the most popular searches. Paid search prices will probably go through the roof because every Tom Dick and Harry will want to own the words that Google is suggesting.

This tool definitely shakes things up. Ultimately I think it probably is good for the end user. Search engines always have, and probably always will struggle with determining user intent, precisely because there are six billion ways of asking a question. Any steps to improve that process will be good. It will also keep my job interesting.