Google could be mulling a move which would allow outside developers to play around with the firm’s development stack, according to comments by Google exec, Dave Girouard at a Web 2.0 Summit panel in San Francisco.

"We want to open up the Google stack, the Google platform in many, many ways, and in the end if we do it right, you will have the same access to Google that our own developers do” said Girouard.

Girouard’s comments could be taken to mean that outside developers will soon be able to try their hands at building their own Google apps, or adding bits and pieces to existing Google apps.

During browsing, the user's attention (and their money) is up for grabs. By showing the user something compelling, a web site maximizes the likelihood of a transaction. So if a web site can increase the chances of giving users good recommendations, it makes more money. Obviously this is a difficult problem, but the incentive to solve it is very big. The main approaches fall into the following categories: Personalized recommendation - recommend things based on the individual's past behavior Social recommendation - recommend things based on the past behavior of similar users Item recommendation - recommend things based on the thing itself A combination of the three approaches above

In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example: Web 1.0   Web 2.0 DoubleClick --> Google AdSense Ofoto --> Flickr Akamai --> BitTorrent mp3.com --> Napster Britannica Online --> Wikipedia personal websites --> blogging evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB domain name speculation --> search engine optimization page views --> cost per click screen scraping --> web services publishing --> participation content management systems --> wikis directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy") stickiness --> syndication