Can the Web Survive v3.0

robotsrule writes "The battle lines between skeptic and evangelist are already drawn. Either way, Web 3.0 will either be the new face of the Web that launched a thousand empty business plans, or the tipping point into a vastly more exciting phase of the Web. This Web 3.0 article asserts that the marraige of artificial intelligence to the infrastructure of Web 3.0 will dramatically accelerate our capacity for distributed problem solving. However, it also issues dire warnings on the potential hyper-euphoria that will accompany it."

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[Anonymous Coward]

We don't even have Web 1.0 (tm?) nailed yet, simple stuff like accessible XML styled with CSS. IMHO, that was where the development reached 1.0 and AFAIK MSIE still doesn't fully implement the 10 year old CSS level 1 spec. Web 3.0, WTF!?

A failure to communicate...

[HobophobE]

but nonetheless, a profitable failure. Buzz about things like this are much like the continual buzz leveraged by the political parties to generate donations. Nothing new there.

The difference here is mainly in the public's perception about what the internet is and isn't, and what the web is and isn't. In a lot of ways this stems from something like a meme, but not exactly. I guess a close characterization is an "ambience meme." It is to say, the feel of a time and place. The sixties, the great depression, world war II: these times and places held a special energy in them for those who lived through them and still carry a particular flavor for those of us who hear and read about their history.

So right now the web has a certain shift in ambience that is partly driven by the change in the major players on the web, and also how they do business. It could be claimed that this started with Google's IPO, or earlier, or later. Users are seeing redesigns on everything from Yahoo! to /. and beyond. They are seeing new and upcoming websites like YouTube and Digg. There's a lot going on right now. Some marketeers decided to memetize the process and deem it an idiotic "2.0"

Really, though, there's not as much going on right now as there seems to be. In a lot of ways the state of things stems from the fact that for awhile there was kind of a sticking point. There wasn't all of this major, visible progress, and then suddenly there was. But that is not '2.0-worthy' in itself. The question is whether there will be a _continual_ surge of changing and newness now, or if it was just a periodic shift. The latter is more likely, but if the former were to be the case it would seem worthy of being called a second version.

Now, what could possibly set a web 3.0 apart? The end of the web. Just like there are major misconceptions due to the ambient meme that has been labeled "web 2.0" there is a very pesky problem with the internet of ours: the dominance of the web; the fact is, for most people the web is the internet. Why is that a problem? Mainly because it seems as though we have an infrastructure capable of more diverse interactions and we limit it to a large extent. And I think that's where web 3.0 will be. There will be the web, but there will be new entities and institutions that will be separate and still connected with the web.

Slowly e-mail has been joining the web (webmail), and so has usenet (google groups). Over time it's come to the point where you can access the majority of the non-web internet via the web. In the future it seems highly likely there will be other interfaces developed to allow you to access equal volumes in different contexts.

Re:Is it so continuous?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

That's an interesting definition. Ignoring any technicalities about O'Reilly, I would have said that a lot of geeks (since no-one else knows or cares about the phrase "Web 2.0") would associate the term with:

• the community/blog/open contribution concepts (Myspace, Digg, LiveJournal), and/or
• the often-related "open" visual style (pale backgrounds, bright colours, rounded corners and fade effects, etc.)

To me, the use of AJAXy stuff seems almost peripheral to the contribution model or the general presentation style, but then I haven't seen Tim and co's official definitions...

Re:2.0 isn't even out of beta yet!

[Iron Condor]

Seriously, I never even noticed this supposed Web 2.0. Who decides these arbitrary numbers for a continuous process?

This fallacy is exploited in a number of little riddles that kids usually ponder. Where exactly is the line between a tadpole and a frog? There is none, of course. If you give a poor man a penny, he won't be rich - he'll still be poor. But if poverty cannot be removed by acquisition of a penny, then it can't be removed by another penny and another and another...

Most people grow up at some point and realize that it doesn't really matter where the lines are drawn. Nobody cares when exactly a tadpole turns into a frog, except retarded sophists. There's clear, unambiguous differences between the one and the other and so we give them different names and when we're faced with something in between then we say "it's somewhere in between".

A frog can breathe air. A frog has legs. A frog has no tail. There's no sharp transition when any of these somehow "suddenly" happen, but they're clear distinctions from a tadpole.

This is quoted directly from here [blogspot.com]:

The "old web" was all about information. Access to information. Bringing information "online". Putting information out on the web. That was a new concept. The big battles were about information-access. Between the ISPs and the ISP-alikes. And between the browsers and similar information-access infrastructures. The AOL and IE quasi-monopolies were forged then. This was a new concept and a multitude of schemes were hatched to see how one might make money of this. Some even successful.

The "new web" isn't about information and its access any more. We've figured that one out. Something like Firefox can still make a splash, but there's never going to be a "Netscape vs IE" battle again. Todays battles are about finding information, organizing information, structuring information. Search engines. Portals. Web-directories. And "web-communities". Anybody could have seen that one coming. As we already knew back in '92: The killer-app of the nineties is -- people.[1]

And the extremely thinly veiled admission that a thousand people contributing a little here and there beat any silicon infrastructure any day of the week. That's the Google admission, the DMOZ admisssion, the wikipaedia admission and in the end, yes, the MySpace admission. Don't try to solve any big task -- structuring the web itself, the encyclopaedic knowledge of mankind or even just simply to entertain your visitors -- when there's a million people out there who'd be happy to lend a hand here and there and the harvest of these little bits will create a better yield than anything any mega-corporation could produce. Any self-respecting nerd should recognize this as the open source model.

We all know these things.

And sufficiently complex systems cease to be binary: there's no sharp transition when a tadpole suddenly becomes a frog, but the differences between tadpoles and frogs are so obvious that we have different words for them. And in the same vein there's no particular single thing that marks the new web -- it's just that anybody with eyes in their head can see that this is a whole different critter from 10 or 15 years ago and so we give it some name to refer to this change: "Web 2.0". We could have done worse.

Re:Architecture

[cnystrom]

Exactly correct. That is why I am working on NewIO [newio.org]. Join me.