The service known as "Google Web Fonts" recently changed to "Google Fonts." It's still full of web fonts, but "Web" is no longer in the name. This may mean they're going to expand to print fonts, but more likely they've just decided it no longer needs clarification. If you're on a website browsing fonts, it's now a safe assumption they're intended for use on the web. This wasn't at all a safe assumption when Google Web Fonts launched two years ago.
Times change, and dropping qualifiers is a good way to measure the changes. Most of the web starts off with a qualifier on something from the offline world. One of the first sites I worked on (in AppleScript!) was a digital photography exhibit. At the time, digital photography was a new medium and it didn't seem ridiculous to attempt to cover the whole medium on one website. Today, you need to specify "film photography" or people will assume you're talking about digital. We all have cameras on our phones.
And the same is true for media in general. Not too long ago, we talked about online media enterprises like YouTube or Twitter as "new media" but now they're just "media" and we've added the qualifier to "traditional media" or even "old media."
The phenomenon of dropping qualifiers reaches far beyond the web. Earlier I mentioned we have cameras on our phones. A couple years ago, I might have talked about cameras on "smart phones," but now that most phones are smart, the qualifier is unnecessary. In the late 1800s, people were still talking about "horseless carriages" before it became "carriages" and then just "cars."
History is full of dropping qualifiers, and this seems to be how language naturally works. A couple years ago, the WHATWG got a lot of flack for renaming "HTML5" simply "HTML", but does anyone really expect us to keep the qualifier forever? Once everything is HTML5, it seems obvious we'll all just say "HTML."
Still, we haven't dropped all qualifiers. We mostly say "email," to distinguish from postal mail. We have "smart TVs," because not all TVs have internet connections. We still talk about "web apps" because not all apps are on the web. We still, despite the best efforts of Netflix, refer to "streaming movies."
Watching qualifiers as they drop tells us about how times have changed, and watching the qualifiers that haven't yet dropped is a good way to see where we're headed. For those of us tasked with building the future, thinking about a world without qualifiers can be really helpful as we start building it. If we assume "smart TVs" will eventually be referred to as just "TVs", that means all TVs will have internet connections, and we should be building content for them now so it's ready when the future arrives.
Used like this, qualifiers act as a pretty good crystal ball (which, of course, we'll refer to as just "ball" after all balls are made of crystal). So what other qualifiers should we expect to drop soon? And how can we start preparing for the future those drops implies?