The first phase of development on the internet is complete. Everything is pretty much stagnant now. Web sites have standardized, and the tools used by people have standardized. So whats the next step? Is there one?

Lets call the next step, the second phase. While most companies would at the moment be working on securing the applications they have created and try to increase thier stability, Research Companies, Universities and Open source programmers will be working on building something that will form the second phase of the internet. And I'm not talking about Internet II. I'm talking about more intelligent clients, news aggregators and blogging tools. Part of the first phase was about creating a read only web. The second would be making it writable. For the masses.

The internet is an evolving animal. The first phase of evolution is complete. The base for the second is building, on top of the first. While some work on the second phase, others will be working to get everything working securely and reliably on the first.