IBM has added two new Web services to its alphaWorks Web site, which provides "sneak previews" of the kind of technologies that are being contemplated at IBM research and development labs. The new Web services include IBM Sharable Code, a platform for managing Web 2.0-type mashup applications, and IBM Web Highlights. IBM Web Highlights is social networking-type of Web service that lets users highlight documents found on the Web for certain passages that they wish to share. The process starts when a user posts an article to the Web Highlights Web page and marks a section of text. Readers sharing the abstracted text can then comment on parts of it. The service works at the client level using an extension to the Firefox browser. At the server level, there's an option for a local server installation, if wanted.
