I am constantly hearing from executives and leaders, “Okay, I get Facebook and Twitter…what’s next?” Even though most companies haven’t fully embraced the second growth of web development, smart managers are deploying Web 2.0 technologies with an eye on how to scale based on what might come next.

The easiest way to impress your manager is to answer, “The Semantic Web”.  Here’s an explanation from “Where is the web going?

Twitter Adds Semantic Human Meaning To Web Documents

Think of how your Tweets add to the description of documents you link.  People are posting pithy descriptions of web links specifically designed to attract others to the content.

What could possibly be better for the development of the semantic web than humans describing web pages?  Current semantic technologies ask the author of the document to describe it or try to derive meaning from existing descriptive data in the document.  With Twitter, we have a concise user description of a web page that means something to others.

Improve Twitter – Replace URL Shorteners With a “Link” Field

My favorite URL Shortener, bit.ly, uses 19 of 140 characters before you can add a description to the tweet.  However, if there were a “Link” field that follows the Tweet, we could increase the description (or meaning) by 15.7%.   Here’s an example:

Old Tweet -

New Tweet -

More characters = More Meaning

By adding the LINK field, we can free up 19 extra characters for me to add “co-workers, & family”.  This provides a better description of the document AND removes all the crazy looking characters that can intimidate novice users.