Web 3.0 after Web 2.0?

Posted on August 30, 2007

Before we are fully able to digest the term Web 2.0, now comes up the new term: Web 3.0. Even for techno geek community, the later term is still new. And for techno dummy like me (and might be some of you), both are confusing. That’s why I make a peek of the digitalic term for the benefit of us–the techno dummy org.

First of all let’s make the definition right. According to this authoritative website, Web 2.0 means:

An umbrella term for the second wave of the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 implies an information and computing platform as well as a content storehouse. Sometimes called the “New Internet,” Web 2.0 promotes thin client computing, where everything is stored on servers (on the Web), and a user has access from any laptop or desktop computer via a Web browser. Client applications that do not require the browser can also be downloaded at any time from the Web.

The Web 2.0 era salient feature indicated by a web-centric tendency of online users i.e. they just wanna store everything on the web instead of on the hard disc:

Web 2.0 suggests a Web-centric source for just about everything: information, entertainment, news, weather, stocks, reference, podcasts, videos and streaming media. It embraces social phenomena that includes blogs, Wikis and online communities such as Friendster, MySpace and Facebook [...]

In the meanwhile, the term of Web 3.0 first introduced by John Markoff of The New York Times who wrote on yesterday’s issue (12/11/2006) of NYT on the “philosophical” blue-print of Web 3.0. Here’re the most important ones:

1. … in the future, more powerful systems could act as personal advisers in areas as diverse as financial planning, with an intelligent system mapping out a retirement plan for a couple, for instance, or educational consulting, with the Web helping a high school student identify the right college.

2. I call it the World Wide Database. We are going from a Web of connected documents to a Web of connected data. (Nova Spivack).

Here the stark differences between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0:

The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up” — for example, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.

In contrast, the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.”

Under today’s system, such a query can lead to hours of sifting — through lists of flights, hotel, car rentals — and the options are often at odds with one another. Under Web 3.0, the same search would ideally call up a complete vacation package that was planned as meticulously as if it had been assembled by a human travel agent.

Mitch Ratcliffe of ZDnet has a good analysis on this issue here for further reading.

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