Just saw an interesting thread on the evolution / creation of Web 3.0 Welcome to Web 3.0: Now Your Other Computer is a Data Center. I think he hits on some interesting enabling technologies, but I don’t draw the same conclusions he does about the significance and nature of what those technologies will enable.
By his definitions, (and these are by no means universally accepted), Web 3.0 is, essentially, software as a service (SaaS.) Software developers no longer need to concern themselves with data management and infrastructure. Developers can “focus on the core value they want to offer to customers,” because the cloud-computing infrastructure is there to support them.
I think cloud computing is utterly essential to bringing about transformation absolutely correct, but it’s really only an enabling technology. Now that anyone can innovate, anyone can write applications and distribute them, the potential for aware, intelligent, interactive applications is realized. By ‘interactive’, I don’t mean applications that the user interacts with, we’ve had that for a long time – that’s what web applications are, after all. I mean applications that can interact, integrate, and share data with each other, they can ‘learn’ and get to ‘know’ the user.
Did you ever hear the one about the three blind men and the elephant? The one fellow feels the elephant’s trunk and says, “It’s a snake”. The second fellow feels the elephant’s leg and says, “It’s a tree.” The third feels the elephant’s back and says, “It’s a boulder.” Each of these three is a separate application, and due to the nature of its interaction with the user (elephant) , it has some information about who and what the user is. But they can’t share their perceptions. Web 3.0 is what we get when these three blind men are able to share their information and create a complete picture of the user, when they realize that it’s not a tree or a snake or a boulder, but is, in fact, a pachyderm.
To me, and to Eric Schmidt of Google, Web 3.0 is "applications that are pieced together" - with the characteristics that the apps are relatively small, the data is in the cloud, the apps can run on any device (PC or mobile), the apps are very fast and very customizable, and are distributed virally. We’re seeing this already, the ‘mashups’ that are all over the web. Data and services in the cloud. And now with GoLife, applications that run on PCs and mobile (and cars, but that’s another subject).
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