"People start by building communities of content and they very grudgingly provide access to it because if they don"t, people just hack their way around it," he said. Bosworth also cited Web forms as an important development, eclipsing groupware.

Web marketplaces, meanwhile, have become places for people to chat and figure out which actions to take, he said. "These marketplaces, also known as communities, are very rapidly growing," Bosworth said.

Bosworth cited health care as an area that could be improved through Web communities that organize information on specific maladies. Critical health information currently is isolated in silos, he said. The ability to diagnose illnesses would be improved if case data was accessible, Bosworth stressed.

"There is no way anyone can pull together all this information," Bosworth said. "And this is killing people."

The spiraling cost of health care mandates improving data access, Bosworth said. "The real data is going to come from the patients" as well as researchers and doctors, he said. "It"s not going to come from some medical journals," said  Bosworth.

An audience member pointed out that HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) regulations pertaining to privacy of health care information could be a roadblock. "HIPAA is undoubtedly an issue," Bosworth replied. But efforts are under way to enable data collection without making people vulnerable to privacy issues, he said.