Web 3.0: The Semantic Web
March 10th, 2007There is so much hype around Web 2.0, yet very few people seem to really know what it is. I recently heard about someone suggesting that they were going to redesign their site this year to “make it Web 2.0”; and next year to “Web 3.0”. I thought that Web 2.0 was a stretch for many companies and few understood it, never mind Web 3.0! What is Web 3.0 anyway?! I figured this was just big talk, but decided to look into it because Web 2.0 is very real and I guess eventually a newer generation Web will follow Web 2.0.
My concern with the “next year we upgrade to Web 3.0″ suggestion is that while the term Web 2.0 has been around for a couple of years, it is barely starting to mature. Web 2.0 is all about social computing: Blogs, wikis, syndication, mashups, user generated content (UGC) and using ajax to make Websites more interactive. It trusts the community and empowers them to contribute and police content. Very few corporate Websites have ventured into this terrain. They would like to invite and build community, but dare not open the doors.
So what about Web 3.0? As it turns out people are, at this point, just speculating what Web 3.0 is going to be. According Wikipedia Web 3.0, a.k.a. the Semantic Web, is “an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily”. Some people define it as Web 2.0 + artificial intelligence (AI). Others as a “world wide database”.
The graph below was created by Radar Networks and shows a believable prediction of the evolution of the Web.
So I believe we have a couple more years before Web 2.0 will be fully embraced by enterprises and only after that will Web 3.0 even start to get defined. I also believe that Web 3.0 will be more elegantly simple than what people are predicting because people love “simplicity” – just ask Google.
March 10th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
I told you!!
March 14th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Web 2.0 is all about giving users what they want and recognizing that users add value. Web 3.0 is nonsense for now until we have learned more from Web 2.0.