I’m seeing an added “nofollow” attribute on links to client applications on Twitter right now, as shown in the screen-shot below. At first, the attribute seemed to come and go (it disappeared and reappeared by reloading the page), and even on the same page, sometimes it was not present on every link, as documented by this other screen-shot. Weird.

A screen-shot showing nofollowed links on Twitter

Before today, registering your own app and tweeting through that was a nice way to add a personalized, search engine-friendly “from {Your site name here}” link to your tweets and get some PageRank from Twitter. For WordPress users, the Tweetable plugin did the trick, while non-bloggers could use a PHP script or roll their own. But those efforts will be vain if Twitter decides to nofollow all outgoing links to client apps.

Experiment, glitch, or spam-prevention tactic (what else)?

Much has been said and written already about Wave, Google’s breakthrough “personal communication and collaboration tool”, since its acclaimed developer preview presentation at Google I/O on May 28.

I tried to make a list of all the stand-alone Internet services and/or tools whose functionalities Google Wave natively integrates –and which it has pretty good chances to render obsolete in the medium-to-long term:

• e-mail clients (Gmail already did that, to a certain extent);
• IM/chat/conferencing clients and services;
• blogging tools;
• discussion boards/forums (?);
• mailing list management services and tools;
• photo sharing tools and services;
• Twitter clients (Wave integrates quite nicely with Twitter, as shown during the live demo);
• Facebook (!);
• task/project management tools;
• collaborative concurrent real-time (!) editing, versioning, and knowledge management tools;
• wikis/intranets (?);
• rich text editing + spell-checking tools;
• live translation tools (does any live translation tool exist at all??)…

…and I’ve almost certainly left something out (if so, please feel free to comment in).

Add “open-source, extensible, and mobile” to all that, and you’ll start to grasp the kind of disruptive, revolutionary, paradigm-shifting, insert-your-own-techcrunchy-adjective-here thing we’re talking about: something quite closely resembling the idea, or concept, of the World Wide Web as its inventor originally intended it: a universally open and interconnected communication environment, allowing for entirely new forms of online interaction and information sharing.

Much of the success of Wave as a product will depend on how fast early-stage developers catch up with the new protocol and APIs and start churning out cool apps and extensions, Google Maps-style. But to judge from the standing ovation that the San Francisco audience gave to Lars Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon during their one and a half-hour presentation, the future of the Web appears bright.

If you haven’t done so already, watch the video –it’s long, but definitely worth it!