The World Wide Web 3.0

In the beginning, there was the Web. And it was good.

Yahoo and AOL were the navigators across this new information superhighway. They collected the sights and locations of this new world and gave it to querying users in lists and lists of aggregated data. All one had to do was sift through some few thousand pages of indexed content in order to find what it was that one was looking for. But it was enough. This was the Web, and we were the consumers of content.

But all was not well. There were dissidents in our midst; dissidents that wanted more than just the consumption of content. They wanted to produce their own content. They wanted to interact with each other and share information, and use the Web to enable this narcissistic, egomaniacal scheme. Ajax was born, and SOA became the new go-to software paradigm for application development. Applications provided services to each other as well as to end users, and a new era of collaboration and sharing emerged. And when the dot-com bubble burst, we all came to know that the time of Web 1.0 had passed.

New wanderers emerged from the ashes of the 1.0 wasteland. These companies and people realized where their progenitors had gone wrong; the Web was not just a brochure for people to read; it was a massive publishing empire, and every user contributed to that effort. The more users you had on a network, the more successful it would become. Google and Facebook and YouTube rose to dominance, providing both vectors for the generation of user content and the venue to easily share and disseminate that content. They knew, perhaps intuitively, that their greatest asset was not the application; it was the data. Long-tail economics turned the Pareto Principle on its head, and companies began to see where the real power behind the internet lay; democratizing the tools of production and distribution, and then connecting supply with demand. And thus Web 2.0 was borne, and was saw that it too was good.

This is, of course, no more than a convenient fiction. In reality, the web is a messy, chaotic place littered with client-side scripting, APIs, XML, mashups, and probably some extremely cool stuff that some 14 year old kid developed between social studies and the nap he usually takes in Algebra I. But even this myth provides a perspective on the public and economic development of the Internet. What once began as a tool to aggregate and sort data morphed into a tool to create and share data. Social media replaced the hallowed web portal. The internet is now and has always been a universe of accelerating evolution, and those entities that could not keep pace with the state of change found themselves bleeding to death from a thousand tiny cuts. In a nutshell, we left Yahoo for Facebook.

What shape will Web 3.0 look like? Fortunately, few people care, and the “Web 3.0” moniker has yet to really emerge as the marketing engine that “Web 2.0” once held. But there are the few of us that wonder what the next phase shift of the Internet will look like. And we wonder who will be the winners and who will be the losers.

Many futurists believe that Web 3.0 will be a return of sorts to the promise of Web 1.0. With zettabytes of data now available on the web, the ability to parse and procure information germane to the context of one’s search becomes more and more elusive. Semantic processing of data is a potential solution to this problem. Instead of creating complex Boolean strings for search engines that try to filter out noise from search criteria, experts envision a universal medium for information exchange by interrelating each discrete piece of data with another. Using both semantics and data from sources like Facebook or Twitter, machines would communicate with machines in order to capture data that would be regionally, culturally, and personally relevant to your search. This would obviously require the development of a very sophisticated ontology that described the nature properties of classes of objects.

Another Web 3.0 definition is around big data. With zettabytes of data now available on the web, the ability to parse and procure information germane to the context of one’s search becomes more and more simple. Predictive analytics might be the Big Brother future we all have been dreading. Imagine applying for a job and having an employer run all of your education, travel, cultural norms, socioeconomic status, etc. through a big data engine to probabilistically describe your chances of success in a certain role at a company. Perhaps universities might use that to craft the perfect class schedule for you. Perhaps the government might use it to… well, who knows what they might use it for.

My personal belief is that Web 3.0 will be a platform change. Web 2.0 in many ways described a move away from the browser to the services behind the browser. In Web 3.0, we will see a move away from traditional compute devices and their limitations into a world of mobile access points. Smartphones, iPads, tablets, and other next-generation end-user devices will fundamentally alter the way we access, interact with, and modify data on the web. This will require a shift in consciousness of many of the titans that rule the internet landscape today. The client-side demands on processing will have to change, as will how the information is presented to the user. The entire end-user experience will have to be re-tooled for mobile devices that currently choke on Java, Flash, and scripting. And just in case there’s any confusion, the ability to find data, create data, and share data will need to be incorporated into this new interface, but this time within a model of impermanent findability and location based services.

Whatever form Web 3.0 takes, it will be fun to watch. Disruptive hardware and software will reshape the internet. Social mores will shift, and user demands will confound the programmers that have been hired to appease them. And in the midst of this chaos, younger companies will inherit the Internet, while the old and infirm will founder.

And it will be good.

Jamal Khawaja
Follow me on Twitter or Facebook.