Everyone is so busy upgrading to Web 3.0 that they missed the Web 4.0 release. But internet versions aside, here are some cool cutting edge projects along with my comments on why I think this is the future of the interwebs...

Fire Eagle
Public launch this week. It is what I would call a location broker in the sense that it acts as the middle man between websites and applications which might know your whereabouts and relays the info to other sites and applications based on your settings.

So in theory my Dopplr travel plan could update a Facebook application to notify my friends that I’m back in Iceland. Neat huh?

Fire Eagle is hatched by the Yahoo Brick house innovation initiative and I have been testing it for a couple of months while it was in closed Beta. The reason I like it is that there is no clear revenue model as such, rather you could compare this to the councils which provide infrastructure like roads and water pipes to facilitate growth. Fire Eagle is essentially the pipes upon which geeks can build cool location aware services to enhance the lives of the less technically able population (like this). The key to success here is that I trust this site because I have full control over the information flow and Fire Eagle does not store my location history (the Big brother tactics are left to 3rd party sites).
What got my brain ticking was the idea of expanding this concept for a wider range of content relative to my profile to simplify my life.
An example would be me in New York feeling thirsty. I would be happy to share my location from Dopplr and my taste in beer from my the RateBeer Facebook application with Beer Menus to get a list of bars serving my favourite pint. This could be a one off query where I would not share my profile with the 3rd party sites. Just my attention profile information (APML).

Wua.la
Another closed beta which opened the doors to the public this week. With a simple setup and slick desktop integration, Wuala has every potential for bringing cloud computing to the masses with it’s online social storage application. In 5 minutes I was up and running with my 1GB of storage and was collaborating with two mates on shared documents. Essentially you can drag a file from your desktop to the Wuala interface and share it with people, engage in a dialogue and do all sorts. Your data is encrypted and you can get more space by sharing some of your hard drive space in true peer to peer spirit. You can also buy extra space online.
It is so simple that I would be comfortable sharing image libraries with my Mother using this.
Cloud computing is all about thin clients (again) and being able to do your work and collaborate with others online rather than being stuck in the daily rut of MS Office documents and stuff.

Freebase
This site is actually what some people would refer to as the materialisation of Web 3.0 so it is a bit outdated right?
Freebase is like Wikipedia built by Metadata freaks and should perhaps be referred to as a Structured Wiki. To explain, we stick to the beer example and look at this list of beers you can see how it differs from Wikipedia. You can actually filter the data set based on a range of beer specific attributes. When editing the entries, you are actually working to a structure rather than the blob we have for each Wikipedia entry. This is pure semantic web heaven and the guys at Metaweb have come up with this great wiki way of managing domains, types and properties. This site should overtake Wikipedia if the world is fair because it will bring us smarter search engines like Parallax and an overall better quality of life through cool semantic web mashups :p