There is a shift in the model of how the web is built and used. The web is becoming more like the computer desktop every day. This shift is being driven by these trends:

1. applications that traditionally ran on the local host are being developed for to run remotely through the web (like Google Docs and spreadsheets),
2. Unifying ‘desktop’ sites like iGoogle, Ripl, Facebook Platform (also see my personal home page to see a desktop-like website) that provide APIs to hook web based applications into the desktop environment,
3. mashup sites like Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft’s mashup engine (the name escapes me at the moment), and
4. mashable sites like Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr, Google Maps, and any site with an RSS feed.

Sites will are becoming less site-like and tend to have one or more of the above characteristics. There are some types of sites that don’t neatly fit into one of the above categories (e-commerce, tech support, wikis), but these can be thought of as applications.

If this analysis is correct, there are deep implications to the internet as we know it. Figuring out the implications will be left as an exercise to the reader…it could lead to your first (or next) $1.6 billion dollar company.