There’s no question: web mashups are integral part of Web 2.0. Besides the social aspect of Web 2.0, mashups have been more and more prevalent in the Web 2.0 world. It is hard to imagine a Web 2.0 app not having content from other sources: a map from Google, pictures from Flicker, avatars from Gravatar,  or movies from YouTube. Many web providers now exposed proprietary content through API’s. ProgrammableWeb has the most comprehensive list of Web 2.0 API’s I could find. The list is growing every day. Instead of opening their content to outside world, many websites opened their doors and let other developers deploy applications on their sites: Facebook, LinkedIn, Salesforce and many others, all providing proprietary platforms. The users can then combine applications from various vendors and use them.

On March 14th 2006, Amazon started the Cloud Race with the release of Amazon Web Services Platform. At the end of 2006, Microsoft realizes that the Cloud is the new big thing as they start development of their own version of cloud offerings and release after two years a comprehensive suite of tools and services (Windows Azure) which makes Microsoft one of the main players in the field. Other players are trying to catch up: VMWare, EMC, Google, HP, etc.

So what’s the future of the Cloud? How it will change our lives?

Like any other software platform, the “cloud” will drive innovation, will create, transform and probably destroy industries. Programming as we know it will be gone soon, if not already gone. If you’re a programmer and don’t know what REST is, pay attention, this will be the first question you’ll be asked at your next interview. Wether you’re a web shop or you write client applications, you’ll have to deal with the cloud sooner or later.

We are in the middle of an industrial revolution, maybe the apogee of it, where the web becomes the new software  platform. If now you’re familiar with terms like S3, EC2, Azure, SQL Services etc, in a few years all the services provide today will be too far in the cloud for people to notice them. It will be like C language for the programmers of today. Cloud Mashups will take over initially, mini-platforms that will combine existing services, the white labeling of the Cloud. “Cloud Mashups of Mashups” will appear and sold to users as services, entire chains of combined services. Companies will be able to deploy highly scalable, highly available, distributed applications with ease and less expensive than today. The pay-as-you-go model will be the norm for any cloud services. 

So what will be a proper term for this future? Web 3.0? Cloud 2.0? No mater how we call it, this IS the future.

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