This week an open cloud manifesto has got published with intent of beginning a conversation in the direction of formulating principles for open cloud computing. The companies behind drafting this open cloud manifesto are of an opinion that innovations happening in cloud computing area in terms of standards, interoperability, integration and portability should be guided by the principles of openness.

The manifesto has covered topics like importance and need of cloud computing today and challenges and barriers for its adoption. The cloud computing manifesto has identified goals like availability of choices, flexibility in cloud computing usage, speed and agility to respond quickly to changes and open cloud computing skills. This all should help building a foundation for open standards and architecture for cloud computing.

The initiative is criticized by Microsoft calling it as a secret cloud manifesto. A blog attributed to Steven Martin, senior director of platform product management, has said in its post that the document was asked to sign 'as is' without modification or additional input. Though Microsoft admits that there should be standardization, it feels that it is too early to do that. Amazon supported the initiative and Google is yet to comment on it.

The responses from Microsoft, Amazon and Google will be helpful in guiding the future path for this open cloud manifesto.

IT services companies can relax a bit with news coming from Gartner managing vice president, Joanne Correia. US sub-prime crisis has haunted software services company higher authorities with a fear of diminishing IT spending. But prediction from Gartner that worldwide IT spending should top $3.4 trillion in 2008, up 8 percent from 2007, will give them a restful night’s sleep. Much of this growth is due to the decline in the U.S. dollar.

Software spending and IT services are expected to see the biggest gain, up 10 percent and 9.4 percent respectively in 2008. "Software as a service/cloud computing, service-oriented architecture/Web 2.0, and open-source software are causing huge changes to the software market," wrote Joanne Correia in a research note. "Many of these factors are impacting market growth as enterprises replace assets with per-use services."

With internet proliferation on-demand services are on high. Even desktop bully Microsoft is trying to taste waters in web world with software as a service offerings lined up. Coming few years will be most happening and we may witness desktop losing major chunk of pie to cloud computing. But whatever may be the scenario IT spending will grow up at least in 2008.

Today while a post by Phil Wainewright who is very well known technology writer at ZDNet I came across a very convincing definition of Web 3.0. According to him Web 3.0 is technology that brings Web 2.0 and on-demand applications into the enterprise.

Enterprise Mashups is helping world achieve Web 3.0 objective. Some call it composite web application. These mashups will help combine information from enterprise search engines, web services, messaging systems, business intelligence engines and data integration solutions and combine that information from external services from all stakeholders, partners and suppliers and emerging external data sources to deliver the information at one place.

The open Web services and SOAs philosophy for application development is lowering the integration impedances and now applications are able to readily combine all web services into rich new applications. This can be a precursor for the long-awaited arrival of true software reuse.

The development language would not be as important as architecture and future thinking for development of such web applications. The key is to create virtual humanized web applications that will talk, hear and share with each other to provide true electronic communication across the supply chain. The flow towards Web 3.0 development will soon increase.

I am sure that Web 2.0 is a jargon that is living its own place and fame for now. It is no more mere marketing gimmick that web entrepreneurs were selling to its investors and venture capitalists.

In the first place some small players came with their own creative applications for Web 2.0. I will call this Web 2.0A age or rather Web 2.0.1 beta. Such applications then got popularity among users and created a news in web world. That was public version of Web 2.0.1. Some big players of web ignored what was happening around then and some took serious note and started building Web 2.0 applications. Very few intelligently bought the potential competition and started working on integration activities. This was version Web 2.0.2.

With some biggies participating in this with user base increasing day by day everybody jumped on creating and integrating web applications. Seamless movement from one application to other with single login was the mantra with 'unified user experience' tag. This was version Web 2.0.3.

So far every activity happening was limited to coding or development part of the web game. Recently IBM lauched new blade servers that are specially designed for Web 2.0 kind of web applications where traffic is heavy and computing power requirement is high. This I call a version Web 2.0.4. And I suppose the world is now ready for upgraded version of web i.e. Web 3.0.

Yesterday night Microsoft launched its highly awaited 'tech preview' version of Live Mesh which is its latest platform. This new platform will link devices to the internet through Windows software. By the end of the year Microsoft Live will support Mac systems and mobile phones for connecting to internet.

Microsoft Live Mesh will enable variety of devices to be connected such as game consoles, set-top boxes, auto PCs, and more. With this newer platform Microsoft perceives the web as "the Hub of our social mesh and our device mesh." The web has spread its wings but still people consider desktop or laptop as their personal asset. The thought has not grown beyond that. With Live Mesh Microsoft is trying to create mesh as a personal asset that will have your devices, desktop, laptop, gaming consoles all interconnected. Once your mesh recognizes device connected to it as your personal then its configuration and personalization settings, its applications and their own settings, and the data it carries will be seamlessly available and synchronized across your mesh of devices.

The URL for Windows Live Mesh is https://www.mesh.com/Welcome/Welcome.aspx. Sign in to experience what it has to offer.

Let's keep our finger crossed to hear more on this integration platform from Microsoft.