When I saw this article, Today’s Web 3.0 Nonsense Blogstorm, my immediate reaction was: ‘Web 3.0 already?’.
That’s right, just when most of us are finally comfortable with all the buzz about Web 2.0 such as ajax, user-generated content, citizen journalism, social networking, just to name a few, a new one is coming to town. But personally, I am overjoyed at the arrival of Web 3.0; the World Wide Web is evolving rapidly and erratically and that is what makes it so exciting.
The term Web 3.0 was coined by John Markoff (The New York Times) in 2006 and many have tried to define Web 3.0 since then. Google CEO Eric Schmidt defined Web 3.0 as “applications that are pieced together” (Ref), Jason McCabe Calacanis, the CEO and co-founder of Weblogs Inc., “official” definition is “Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.” (Ref), Robert O’Brien’s award-winning definition of Web 3.0 which is “Web 3.0 – a decentralized asynchronous me”, granted him an free pass to Web 2.0 Expo (Ref), Steve Spalding published a fascinating post on How To Define Web 3.0, Sramana Mitra has submitted an interesting formula for the future Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS) and I am sure there are many more interesting ideas and discussions about Web 3.0 out there.
All the hype about Web 3.0 got me thinking and while I will not try to define it, I envision… (*pause for thought*) Web 3.0 as:
A borderless web
The ability to access and browse the web from just about anywhere using many devices. You don’t need to be at your workstation to be able to read news; you can just do so from the train, from the comfort of your bed or anywhere else using for example, a mobile phone. iPhone, anyone?
A single identity web
You can see this already shaping up with the introduction of OpenID. An OpenID provides an open (Duh!) and decentralized identity system which eliminates the need of multiple user accounts and can be used for any website.
A super-fast web
This is really a given and Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix, has already stated that “Web 1.0 was dial-up, 50K average bandwidth, Web 2.0 is an average 1 megabit of bandwidth and Web 3.0 will be 10 megabits of bandwidth all the time”. While I am not sure of the exact number, I am sure it will be fast – very fast!
An intelligent web
Naturally, people like it better when they are given suggestions when trying to achieve something. Google has implemented this concept into Google Suggest and Yahoo! has also done the same. An intelligent web will attempt to predict what the end-user is trying to achieve, and provide recommendations based on the prediction. Or better yet, it will try to decipher natural language.
A multimedia web
Multimedia, according to Wikipedia, is a combination of content forms: Text, Audio, Still Images, Animation, Video and Interactivity. Although it is arguable that the web is already multimedia-friendly, I don’t think we are seeing many forms of multimedia on the web just yet. But with a super-fast, borderless and intelligent web, a multimedia web sounds like the future of the next version of the web.
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