Web 1.0

Any respectable web expert can tell you that when the switch from web 1.0 to web 2.0 came about, a lot of people were caught with their pants down. The web 1.0 was like a giant library. If you were there, you remember it. It was like a load of people had been promised what we now know as "Web 2.0", but the reality had fallen a bit short. The internet of the 90's was a place where there was undoubtedly a wealth of information, yet it wasn't really dynamic. Someone wrote it, you read it, and that was that.

Web 2.0

Suddenly, the paradigm shifted completely. Perhaps not *too* suddenly, but generally the web evolved from the "Giant Library" web 1.0 model and became something else entirely. The library was still there, but suddenly it was a place to hang out. It was a place to meet, and a place to interact with other people efficiently. In many cases, more efficiently than could be achieved by conventional means. This is our current model of the web. The web is "Social". The web is a meeting place, and the content quite literally comes from all of us: the users. the following is an "America Online" ad from 1996, as you will see in the ad, none of the themes from "Web 2.0" or "The social web" are even touched on:

The Pre-Social Web

Holy crap I lost it watching that ad. It sounds like a Viagra commercial nowadays: "My friends said I should try The Internet, so i did!". Anyway I dug up the old AOL footage because really for a lot of Americans this is how we first got on the internet! As you can see in the commercial, the Web 1.0 was all about the endless supply of information that was available to you. The angle was generally that the content was provided, and you were receiving it. The driving force of web 1.0 was commerce. Everything was basically a brochure that a user could browse through. It changed the way we thought about 'brick & mortar' shops completely. The leaders of the web 1.0 world were sites that made the first attempts to consolidate the information of "The Library". These were revered internet-superpowers like Yahoo, AltaVista, and Lycos, who were trying to figure up a good way to categorize and index the information of the world wide web, and present it in such a way that your average user could navigate through it efficiently, a-la "search engine". Even Geocities (remember!?) would make a lasting impression on the web by taking the very first steps into Web 2.0: giving users an easy portal to make their own webpages, and thus their own internet location. To that effect, geocities almost had the quality of being a 'Social' place, however it was more users just making new books for the library, rather than a true shift of paradigm.

What Web 2.0 Isn't, and what it is

A whole load of people would say that web 2.0 has everything to do with "glossy sleek designs, some easy non-contrasting colors, careful typography, and AJAX". While they are wrong, they're not entirely wrong. These things listed are simply a sign of the times. These technologies are filling a lot of holes that previous ages of the web couldn't fill, and right now we're seeing them booming, but this does not characterize the heart of web 2.0. Web 2.0 is about user generated content. Thus, web 2.0 applications are about providing users a means to 'get involved' in the web. A 'platform' from which they can easily meet certain needs, which are generally: 1) to easily be able to publish/create content, and 2) to publicize it.

Web 2.0, the Pre-Semantic Web??

So, if you remember the idea of geocities in 1996, they were web 2.0 pioneers, and they struck it really big with that, eventually getting acquired by Yahoo. Interesting right? In the age of "The Library Web", the first ones in the race to "The Social Web" get the cheese. This is a very important point. I believe that this is what we're seeing right now. If you look at web 3.0 as "The semantic web", this adds a whole new and not-totally-unexpected peice to the evolution puzzle. The term "Semantic" when used referencing web 3.0 generally conveys the idea that the barrier between computers and directly inputted human content will be much smaller, thus allowing computers to attribute relevance to content. Note that this is something largely impossible by today's standards. A computer can help you edit video, publish it, and publicize it - but for now all it knows about what's inside the video are the words we humans attribute to it. So, the web 3.0 may mean quite a few things:

• It may mean the age of the incredible data mash-up, where micro-formats analogous to 'tagging' of internet content are used to hone in on content meaning and context.
• It may mean that finally we develop smarter software which can interpret data dynamically from a 'human' source, like a video camera, a spoken word, or even a photograph, and thus the computer can dynamically attribute context to such content
• It may mean that the graphics capability of the modern computer will shift so sharply that the very way we visually experience the web will be different, perhaps even a true end to a two-dimensional web
• It will mean being able to depend on the internet to actually understand the context of your requests, and the ability for applications to contextually infer data from other websites.

Web 3.0: The future is smart!

It's very likely that it'll be a mix of all of those. So, as we've seen with the transition from 1.0 to 2.0, the leaders are usually the ones gunning for the next generation of features, first. Google (I believe) will be (already is?) one of the first pioneers into the web 3.0 world, as they are already introducing as much 'semantic' features into their applications as they can. Adsense (google's ad platform) mashes up useful ads against tag words and tries to place them in places where they 'fit' contextually. These first small steps towards web 3.0 have earned them millions. Let's take a hypothetical example. Lets say tomorrow flickr makes an announcement that in conjunction with BlahWhatever Corp they've developed an algorithm that can identify individual objects inside of a photograph. The entire internet would change. If you searched for the word "Ball" in flickr you would no longer get a picture with a ball in it, but instead you would get only the ball itself: the most semantically correct response for your search.

Web 3.0: backwards-compatible?

In another very different situation we have sites like facebook and myspace, which rely heavily on the social aspects of web 2.0 to generate their content for them (their driving force). Now, with the advent of what's soon to come in 3.0, strictly web 2.0 companies won't necessarily be losing out, but it'll be a big "Caught with your pants down" moment, and perhaps even one that doesn't end so gracefully. After all, where are the superstars of web 1.0? What happened to america online's 1990's business model for "The library of the world wide web"? Well, not much, obviously - this is the kind of fate that I believe awaits the current empires of the social web. If you don't stay ahead of the curve, you fall behind it. It was a giant gap for developers to take an existing "Read-only" web 1.0 site and turn it into something social, and I imagine turning "social" into "semantic" won't be an easy task either. Not just for developers, mind you; when the whole paradigm of the internet shifts, your code and your business model generally need to shift with it. This is the art of staying right on the bleeding edge, and not falling behind.

...So that's it. Just wanted to shed some thoughts about the future, because I think it's the most interesting topic there is. What I don't need are 40,000 comments about how calling it web X.X is bullshit, and "blah blah blah, stupid buzzword, blah blah, sells articles, blah". I don't fucking care; we're calling it web 2.0 because everyone is; it's here to stay. The next paradigm is already named web 3.0, because it makes sense. Deal with it.