One alliance does not a movement make, granted. Even so, the new joint initiative by Hewlett-Packard Co. and Macromedia Inc. is worth looking at as a hint about the future of the Internet.

On Tuesday, HP and Macromedia announced an agreement to provide tools based on Flash and HP's SDP (Service Development Platform) that will allow developers to deploy various collaborative and telecommunications services. While other software providers have made such tools available before, the fact that this one's based on Flash means that the door for remote services just got a lot wider for a whole lot of developers.

The Web services approach taken by the alliance means that developers will now be able to create new applications that bridge across networks and platforms such as the Web, set-top boxes and wireless devices. Because they're based on Flash, these services will be a lot richer and more interactive (and easier to create) than services based on older technology and will be potentially a lot easier to create than other proprietary technology. (Check out Macromedia's site for some interesting demos.)

Macromedia announces a new streaming media server. Click here to read more.

Whether or not this vision of multiplatform, multinetwork, cross-media applications comes to fruition remains to be seen, and only time will tell whether or not business, carriers and consumers will be able to utilize this particular technology to its largest extent. But what this alliance really means is that industry leaders are now taking the first steps into what Kevin Ashton called an "Internet of Things."

When Ashton coined the term back in the late 1990s he was referring to the promise of RFID as an inventory control and information-gathering tool. Since then, however, as more and more IP-connected devices and services come online (RFID in some cases being one of them), the term has spun out beyond its original narrow application to commerce and has come to signify in many people's minds a future world where everything is online, always on, always connected, always available and always able to provide (and receive) information.

In some ways we're talking about the dream of "convergence" that's been bandied about for decades now, but in other ways we're talking about something bigger. As Alex Soojung-Kim Pang recently pointed out on the Future Now blog, the real promise might not necessarily be an "Internet of Things," but rather an "Internet of Verbs," one which "revolves around interactions, events and experiences, not virtual places or even real things."

Adobe and Macromedia shareholders approve Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia. Click here to read more.

"This is a profound difference from what we're used to, an Internet based largely around the model of senders (us developers or our clients) and receivers (our target audiences). For all the new technology and development that's been applied to the Web over the past decade or so, most folks have continued to think of using the Internet to "publish information" rather than a place to create "interactions, events and experiences," Pang said. Ironically if you're reading this, you're probably doing so on Publish.com…a fact that hasn't escaped me as I write this.

There's no doubt that there's a lot of the Web now that does allow users to interact with data, experience new things or attend "events" in the largest sense. But the fact remains that much of the activity of Web developers still revolves around creating containers for information to be published onto people's computer screens. And while there have been experiments (some good and some bad) in the past with cross-platform/cross-network publishing (remember the mobile boom of the late '90s?), the technology and consumer acceptance hasn't really been in place until fairly recently. While the pundits have bandied about terms such as "continuous computing" and "ubiquitous computing," the promise has skipped far ahead of the reality of how consumers use the Web.

Macromedia launches Studio 8. Click here to read more.

But that might be changing. Macromedia and HP's alliance is one step that'll help put tools in the hands of developers and capabilities in the devices used by consumers. Consumers who have become used to camera phones, BlackBerrys and now the Apple iTunes phone as part of their mobile lives and increasingly sophisticated set-top experiences in their home lives may now be primed and ready to start to navigate a world that continues to give them access to information no matter where they are.

And as consumers and businesses become more used to ubiquitous information access, the bar is going to continue to be raised on what developers are going to be called to do and what information architects, designers and creatives are required to take into account when working with their clients and customers.

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