A conference of Web and Internet visionaries and experts, including inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim-Berners Lee, will be held at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. At “Tetherless World Research Constellation,” the questions will be determined by Internet submissions and voting. The entire event, scheduled for June 11th, will be streamed over the Internet.

First, enterprise IT teams may notice a slight spike in traffic on June 11th from people interested in the future of the Web.

Second, enterprise IT teams should be some of those people interested in the future of the Web.

One of the many good things that Web 2.0 has brought with it is the idea of reusable APIs and mashups - applications which combine data from multiple sources. The result is greater flexability in presenting information to the end-user. For example, Craigslist's housing ads can be plotted and tracked on a Google Map - thus "Housingmaps.com".

Application developers are using these APIs in order to give their own products new capabilities. However, combining data from multiple sources into a single integrated tool means that you're pinging an external source for every one of those sources - each one of which might have its own delay. These services in turn might be pinging multiple data centers or other mashups.

These are the changes to the Web already affecting the network; some foreknowledge of what happens next with the Web and how it will affect enterprise networking would be very useful.

In general there isn't enough communication between application developers and network engineers - the result is "chatty apps" and bandwidth heavy applications that might work on a LAN but don't work over the WAN. Anything to increase that communication and get both sides on the same page should be encouraged.