Mobiles are unique - if you want to miss out on the opportunity they represent, you could choose to see them as just slow computers with tiny interfaces and dodgy Internet connections. Then try to squeeze in your traditional applications; try squeezing the office desktop metaphor with its sedentary documents into a device the size of a mouse!

Alternatively, see them as the most personal, social and dynamic of devices that are becoming connected to the Internet. Now a multi-billion-scale global opportunity opens up to you. That's customers and dollars! In trying to grasp this, some are calling it 'Mobile 2.0', by analogy with its sibling, Web 2.0.

In that light, the Killer App for Mobile 2.0 is the sharer, masher and updater of People, Things, Times and Places... The key to getting Mobile 2.0 right is for it to merge seamlessly into our lives. That means the handling of dynamic and shared data becomes the top priority, even above the handling of applications.

This article describes a Mobile 2.0 platform that makes people and their stuff first class - not applications.   ...

Web 2.0's definition includes seeing the Web as an application platform. Which means it is in competition with Java and .Net, and with SOA, for both local and widely distributed applications.

If the Web is going to be a platform, the skills you need to learn to program it are the core Web 2.0 technologies such as Ajax, JSON, Atom, Microformats and OpenID.

And Ruby. This language, that's capturing the hearts of many Web 2.0 programmers, is ideal for easing the transition from the Java and .Net platforms to the Web platform, as I will show.

Even if you're part of a big company that is generally immune to the latest trends, the marriage of Ruby and the Web-as-platform may be something to prepare for. It could even displace your SOA agenda...   ...

What do all the MAJOR Web 2.0 technologies of 2007 have in common?

Let me list them first:

    M.icroformats (including tags)
    A.jax (including Comet)
    J.SON (plus YAML)
    O.penID (plus SXIP, LID, Yadis)
    R.EST (including Atom, APP)

What these technologies have in common is that they're all lighter than their competitors:

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Distributing an application over a network isn't just a case of splitting it down a natural line and putting a network in-between. What works in-process simply doesn't work so well across the wire.

And just calling such an Internet version of application and process interfaces 'Web' Services doesn't mean it has anything at all to do with the Web, or that it in any way shares the Web's scalability, flexibility and robustness.

Indeed, I claim that you cannot distribute without also 'inverting'; you have to face what I call the 'Imperative-to-Declarative Inversion', if you really want a successful, scalable, distributed application.

Declarative Architectures such as REST (i.e. the Web, and now 'Web 2.0') dominate the broader Internet.   ...