Kaushal pointed me to http://www.communitybar.net/ - a project by a couple of MS Research guys. The idea is a simple and powerful one - you install a IE plug-in and log on to a website (http://theworkingnetwork.com/). The plug-in opens up a explorer bar in IE that pulls in contextual info from this site for any page that you visit. The info is pulled in by diff CB plug-ins. The ones already available are Tags, Inlinks (links into the page you are visiting), Rating and Notes. Who creates the info? You do! So you visit a page and have CB open on the side? Simple - rate it! Or add some notes .. or whatever else, depending on the CB plug-ins you have installed.

The good thing about the project is that they are trying to create a platform of sorts - people can write their own plug-ins. The API is already published. What this leads to is a kind of social networking where you contribute info and get info back ... really cool stuff and the extensibility makes it even more cooler!! Now only if there was deeper integration between Onfolio, CB, Live and some of the other services ... And not just MS ones, think integration with Blogger, Orkut, Flickr, del.ici.ous ... now if each of these services could start exposing APIs, there would be a huge market for clients that would give an aggregated experience across these services.

And that day is not far off - consolidation in this world of services is far away .. it is hardly a mature market today - so heavy duty consoidation would not be happening any time soon. And it would be a very costly affair for most of the service providers to build complete stacks with a portfolio of services where each service competes with the best-of-the-breed in that category. And end-users would go for best-of-breed. So what is the way out? I believe that sooner or later, this war for building more services would get over, and providers would start focussing on provinding more integrated experiences, even with competitors. Consolidation - which is bound to happen in a market as fragmented as this one - would start happening only after this as vendors look for economy of scale.

Wow .. I have gone way off-topic and downloaded a truck-load of BS! Anyway, Community Bar is cool .. check it out!!!