When the World Wide Web appeared in our lives, it was as if a seed crystal had been dropped into a super-saturated solution. In just a few years a whole new structure came into place, linking up our desktop computers and the world of information into a new level of order. The computers were all there; what was needed was a simple, uniform way to link them. Suddenly everything was possible, as millions of people began to communicate with information servers everywhere. We are now at a similar threshold: the re-organisation of all our ' smart ' things as they join the connected world. This will be a qualitative change that is much more than the words ' pervasive computing ' or ' ubiquitous computing' suggest, because it will not feel like today's computing any more than driving a modern car with fifty embedded microprocessors does. The technology world uses terms such as 'ambient intelligence 'and the ' internet of things', to signal this shift, but ' ambient web 'is my preferred term. This focuses on the way that smart things are joining us in an evolutionary web of new capabilities that will become part of the ambience of our lives.
The World Wide Web was built for people to access information. The technical community is now busy building open standards under the headings of Web Services and Semantic Web that will allow the exploding population of smart devices, information services and applications to interact directly with each other over the web in dynamic and flexible ways.