People used the web in radically different ways after a critical mass of people shifted to unlimited plans.

The same could be true of cell phones– unlimited voice plans could enable valuable new voice services that were previously infeasible.

For example, imagine being able to use your car speakerphone to play any audiobook you wanted, on demand.

All the technology has been in place for years– somebody just needs to license all the audiobook content, add a voice recognition interface for selecting the content I want to hear, figure out a pricing model (a la Netflix), and market it.

The only thing that has changed is that now, for $99, I can listen as long as I want. (The carrier might hate it, but it’s certainly compelling to me as a user!)

This is just one fairly obvious example of the sorts of services enabled by the new economics; there will hopefully be a flood of innovation in this direction.

YouTube just added a rich YouTube API for developers, including a Javascript API for the player.

This is exciting because it enables some of the scenarios I discussed in hyperlinking to the good stuff in a web video:

People who embed videos on the web frequently tell their readers to fast forward to a specific point to get to the “good stuff”, for example here.

It’s dumb that readers have to do that manually. If Flash video players were slightly smarter, the author could create an easy-to-type hyperlink that would cause the embedded video to skip to a specific section of the video and start playing.

Power users ought to be able to create their own “virtual edit” of a video by specifying a sequence of time segments to play back. A blogger might create their selection of highlights from the presidential debate to accompany their post, for example, without having to actually re-encode the video.