Web 3.0

Various interpretations as to what is next after Web 2.0

Nancy Spivak believes it will be centered around Semantic Web developments.

Danah Boyd sees it as centered around place-bound contextualization.

My own take (Michel Bauwens) is to see it towards more truly distributed architectures.

Nancy Spivak

Cited here at http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2007/02/evolution_is_un.html

Three Phases of Web development

Web 1.0. -- Web 1.0 was the first generation of the Web. During this phase the focus was primarily on building the Web, making it accessible, and commercializing it for the first time. Key areas of interest centred on protocols such as HTTP, open standard mark-up languages such as HTML and XML, Internet access through ISP's, the first Web browsers, Web development platforms and tools, Web-centric software languages such as Java and JavaScript, the creation of Web sites, the commercialization of the Web and Web business models, and the growth of key portals on the Web.

Web 2.0. -- According to the Wikipedia, Web 2.0 is defined as: "Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004[1], refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services - such as social networking sites, Wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies - that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users." I would also add to this definition another trend which has been a major factor in Web 2.0 - namely, the emergence of the mobile Internet and mobile devices (including camera phones) as a major new platform driving the adoption and growth of the Web, particularly outside of the United States.

Web 3.0. -- Using the same pattern as the above Wikipedia definition, Web 3.0 could be defined as: "Web 3.0, a phrase coined by John Markoff of the New York Times in 2006, refers to a supposed third generation of Internet-based services that collectively comprise what might be called "the intelligent Web" -- such as those using semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data-mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies - which emphasize machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience." (http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2007/02/evolution_is_un.html)

Expanded Definition of Web 3.0

"Web 3.0 Expanded Definition. I propose expanding the above definition of Web 3.0 to be a bit more inclusive. There are actually several major technology trends that are about to reach a new level of maturity at the same time. The simultaneous maturity of these trends is mutually reinforcing, and collectively they will drive the third-generation Web. From this broader perspective, Web 3.0 might be defined as a third-generation of the Web enabled by the convergence of several key emerging technology trends:

Ubiquitous Connectivity

§ Broadband adoption § Mobile Internet access § Mobile devices

Network Computing

§ Software-as-a-service business models § Web services interoperability § Distributed computing (P2P, grid computing, hosted "cloud computing" server farms such as Amazon S3)

Open Technologies

§ Open API's and protocols § Open data formats § Open-source software platforms § Open data (Creative Commons, Open Data License, etc.)

Open Identity

§ Open identity (OpenID) § Open reputation § Portable identity and personal data (for example, the ability to port your user account and search history from one service to another)

The Intelligent Web

§ Semantic Web technologies (RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, Semantic application platforms, and statement-based datastores such as triplestores, tuplestores and associative databases)

§ Distributed databases -- or what I call "The World Wide Database" (wide-area distributed database interoperability enabled by Semantic Web technologies)

§ Intelligent applications (natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, autonomous agents) (http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2007/02/evolution_is_un.html)

Danah Boyd

Web 3.0 is about place and geography:

"In early networked publics, there were two primary organizing principles for group sociability: interests and activities. People came together on rec.motorcylcles because they shared an interest in motorcycles. People also came together in work groups to discuss activities. Usenet, mailing lists, chatrooms, etc. were organized around these principles. By and large, these were strangers meeting. Early net adopters were often engaging with people like them who were not geographically proximate. Then the boom hit and everyone got online, often to email with their friends (and consume). With everyone online, the organizing principles of sociality shifted. As blogging began to take hold, people started arranging themselves around pre-existing friend groups. In this way, the organizing principle was about ego-centric networks. People's "communities" began being defined by their friends. This model is quite different than group-driven structures where there are defined network boundaries. Ego-centric system are a (mostly) continuous graph. There are certainly clusters, but rarely bounded groups. This is precisely how we get the notion of "6 degrees of separation." While blogging (and to a lesser degree homepages) were key to this shift, it was really social network sites that took the ball to the endzone. They made the networks visible, allowing people to put themselves at the center of their world. We finally have a world wide WEB of people, not just documents. When i think about what's next, i don't think it's going more virtual, more removed from everyday life. Actually, i think it's even more connected to everyday life. We moved from ideas to people. What's next? Place. I believe that geographic-dependent context will be the next key shift. GPS, mesh networks, articulated presence, etc. People want to go mobile and they want to use technology to help them engage in the mobile world." (http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/03/16/web_123.html)

More Information

See also Web 2.0