The Emergent Web: the elevator pitch

Okay, for those of you who had trouble focussing long enough to read my last post, here's the executive summary.

• Everybody wants to know what's coming next for the web.
• Lots of people think it's going to be the semantic web, but I disagree.
• The semantic web will never happen because there is no economic incentive to create it.
• The web is not about semantic documents, the web is about processing data into information.
• The software that does the processing is the important part: these are web APIs.
• APIs are soon going to hit critical mass, and begin to feed off of each other, multiplying exponentially.
• A critical component will be meta APIs that capture and transform other APIs
• The value created will be largely unexpected, because the interaction of services is hard to predict.
• This explosion of new services and data will be the emergent web.
• It is going to be a game-changing event, comparable to the birth of the web itself.
• The emergent web will happen because web services will make tons of money
• The people who will make the most money are the ones who build the right meta-APIs
• The way to get on board is to start building APIs, especially meta-APIs.

Still pretty long, but hopefully you could get to the end of that one. If you want to learn more about my reasoning, then read the original post.