Where is Web2.0 Going?

A visit to the blog of my friend, Sharon Greenberg, took me to a demo clip of a new hot Microsoft technology - Photosynth. The Photosynth preview site tells us:

"The Photosynth Technology Preview is a taste of the newest - and, we hope, most exciting - way to view photos on a computer. Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.
In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor."

This technology utilizes tagging and collaboration to create integrated extremely rich three-d models of places around the globe allowing access to any point on the data set from any angle and at any desired resolution. This creates unbelievable horizons for viewing huge image sets of any point on the globe from any point on the globe. Every image uploaded and added to the image set adds to the details on the set. All the tagged and shared images help create one huge image which is far greater than the sum of all of its components.

The Microsoft photosynth development team is only beginning to explore the possibilities enabled by this technology and have provided a public preview on the Photosynth site to encourage input for development ideas.

Sharon comments that this is a great move ahead towards realizing the Semantic Web.

See the Photosynth demo uploaded on mr Classroom2.0 page or at Youtube