Far away in some coffee shop there are three guys sitting, taking gulps of their frappes and writing an insanely great idea on the back of a napkin. They’re going to blow apart the world of social network and provide the basis for the next great revolution.
Internet/Web 1.0 seemed mostly to be about discovering how to sell things online – dog food, books, videos and content. We discovered that food was a bad thing to sell online unless you were local to your customer. We discovered that books and videos can be compelling if you have a great supply chain and a few huge warehouses. We discovered that people don’t like paying for online content but if it’s a reasonable price, they’ll part with their readies.
Web 2.0 was hyped as being about the conversation but it really continued the idea that content should be free. Not just free to the consumer but also free to the provider. That’s why YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook are all doing so well. They chewed through investor money and then were either acquired or got huge investments from massive companies. What’s paying for these services? Eyeballs. Companies seem convinced that online advertising is worth billions.
Our three entreprenerds are working on inventing Web 3.0.
I see it as being some of the following (inspired by the Web 3.0 article on Wikipedia)
- ubiquitous mobile connectivity
- open identity, portable reputation
- semantic web and service oriented architecture
- distributed databases
- intelligent ‘pro-active’ web (building on intelligent applications)
- more open access to data and services
- cloud, as opposed to grid, computing
- persistent statement-based datastores
- expansion beyond the vanilla web
I’m expecting better and more intelligent heuristics in my mobile applications. I think SaaS/SOA only works with properly ubiquitous networking, something which we do not have yet and it will be a while before we do. So we need storage and processing power locally – not a lot though more than ever before. A rich client accessing web services is obviously the way to go as evidenced by the Google Maps application on the iPhone. The experience is much better than the vanilla web
I’ve used that term twice now, vanilla web. That’s the web we access every day using a web browser. It’s a lot better than it was, with all this AJAXy goodness but it’s hard to beat a dedicated client. That’s why I prefer an RSS reader app compared to Google Reader. Why I prefer Maps on the iPhone to maps in my browser. Why I want an IM application rather than using web-based IM clients.
I think Web 3.0 will be the start of the end for the Vanilla Web.
What do you think?
I think we will all have servers at home and devices to connect to our home horse-power-laden servers. iPhones, PDAs, whatever. They’ll all start to need more power than can be carried and in our capitalist society, people will need to own their own CPUs instead of rending processor cycles. Home CPU hubs and thin fancy client devices.
Our homes will become the next datacentres. Your media, your data, your applications, all available where you are, but stored where you live.
I agree to a point. I think that the CPU and Storage cloud will have to become less centralised. We may find it uneconomical to always contact our home processors much like bringing your own ice to a pub is probably frowned upon. Access points (or the infrastructure around them) could very easily become more “intelligent” or just more capable.
I think there’s something that can be done with intelligent proxying and bit-torrent-type networks for general information data – along the veins of the Palm web clippings from a decade ago. Trsffic, weather, news, maps, directions, telephone book, web search – all of this should be always available from your nearest node.