The major search players are trying to use the semantic web angle to improve search. Google had introduced secondary search earlier this month to facilitate users deep searching but looks like retailers do not like users to bypass the website’s search box.

Yahoo is now planning to support semantic web initiatives. Yahoo is reportedly feeling that the benefits of a data web have not reached the mainstream consumer, despite the remarkable progress in understanding the semantics of web content. Yahoo! Search intends to support semantic web standards by supporting a number of microformats including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Perhaps Yahoo’s perspective is that semantic web technology can make searches more fruitful if the search results go beyond containing the keywords and actually mean what users are looking for.

Interesting new development is of Sequoia-backed visual search engine SearchMe, which is just starting to send invitations to their private beta launched last week. More players means more innovation and with the growing internet content clutter, semantic web might be the answer for some organizations.

I wish I had this exceptional ability to forecast the future. Every time I try to do, I end up with egg on my face. When blogging first came to the scene, I said too much work for people to do and here I am today- blogging hard . Then micro-blogging came and I thought, now, we have to micro-manage time! Looking at the number of players in this space, I am beginning to wonder whether this has come of age. Here are some of the active players:

Twitter: the first on the scene which allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific.

Jaiku was the first competitor to emerge & the acquisition by Google made it even stronger. Jaiku’s put in special effort to create Jaiku Mobile, a live phonebook that displays the activity streams, availability, and location of one’s Jaiku contacts right in their phone contact list.

Pownce, another competitor sends just about anything: music, photos, messages, links, events, and more. Of all the Twitter competitors Hictu added features that separate them from the rest, they’ve given users more networking options & also ways to control content from within their account.

Utterz lets users create rich media micro posts with text, audio, or video and have it automatically updated on their blog, web site, or Facebook account directly from their cell phone! It’s a microblogging tool that lets users call audio in from their cell phone, making it easy to post updates when a data connection is not available.

Loopnote calls itself -Notifications 2.0, it is about management of all notifications/messages in a central place.

So who is going to forecast the winner in this space or evolution in this space, not me

Google has the largest market share and continues to do innovation by bringing new web products to the market but does that signify that searchers are content with Google & search results? Here is one line of thinking- Rich Skrenta, an entrepreneur, programmer and author of the world’s first microcomputer virus says Google is out of date- designed for the web of the 1990s, and not working as well with the modern internet.

Skrenta has invested in a new search engine that he calls Blekko (expected to launch by 2009). Google in the 1990’s astounded people with its accurate search results. Talking of today, how satisfied have you been? Skrenta believes the problem began when Google introduced the PageRank. Prior to PageRank the search engines tried to match users to keywords. Then they designed an algorithm looking for links between sites & based on the quality of the incoming links, the sites’ PageRank just goes higher. Link-building, link-exchanges, link-swapping have turned all so common that it no more is an ideal measure for site quality. Search Engine Optimization techniques to trick the search engine just got more refined. So let’s wait to see if Blekko is one of the new innovations in the search space.

We are getting close to the launch of our first product- BuzzForce1. We feel this is our contribution to take search to the next level in terms of gathering, classifying, attributing buzz and creating actionable data from raw buzz.

I came across an interesting news in Techcrunch- Digg Users Are Doing Their Best To Kill An Acquisition. It made me wonder the strong emotions people have with the user generated web 2.0 sites. Why not, it is their content; it’s their time & effort which made the site what it is. They have enjoyed contributing and do not want to change that in any sense.

Take any large social communities; the content is all user-generated. Just exclude the community content from a site like Digg, Flickr, Twitter or Facebook and there’s little left that makes them interesting. So who’s controlling these startups the community?

Startups need to be extra cautious if it’s the community that keeps them going. One wrong move that makes your community not happy and you’ve turned your asset into a liability. With the community driving the market value, you cannot separate the community from the website. Our community optimization services are designed to help companies in this direction- keeping community happy.