Last week, Eric E Schmidt, CEO of Google, gave a speech in California where he mapped out the future of the internet. Gazing into his crystal ball, he proclaimed that the days of single websites dominating were numbered. In the future, he said, the focus would be on "lightweight" applications that were spread through word-of-mouth "viral" networks.
In some ways this brave new world is already with us - and being played out in the travel sector. Anyone who uses social networking sites such as Facebook may already be familiar with the sort of lightweight applications that Schmidt was talking about. These are the third-party applications that you "bolt on" to your Facebook profile and find out about from your networks of friends. Or, to use the semi-technical term, many of you may be starting to use your first travel "widgets".
When you sign up to, say, the new Carpool widget on Facebook (which allows you to share journeys with friends and/or strangers) you are not visiting a separate website, you are delving deeper into your Facebook profile. Carpool is not a website, it's a widget, an add-on. In Schmidt's vision for the internet, we will see a lot more of these.
And it is not just on Facebook that widgets are starting to hold sway. That student stalwart, STA Travel, announced this week that it was launching a whole toolbox of travel widgets (statraveltools.com/). These allow you to embed simple bits of information in a third-party site, so things such as a travel to-do list or a weather comparison application can be reached without visiting STA's own website. Instead you can attach them to your own blog or social networking site or, in STA's case, an existing Yahoo! account.
If you don't have a Yahoo! or Facebook account and want to participate in the "widgetisation" of the web, with specialist sites such as widgetbox.com you can read and assemble bundles of specialist travel material, ranging from the Lonely Planet's world dining blog to feeds from specialist travel photographers.
No one is suggesting that websites created from a single source are about to disappear, but the web changes as quickly as the weather, and the sudden influx of widgets means that we are about to see yet another seasonal change.
