Ben Bashford

Here’s what I say…

Web 1.0 was “information” spread over pages that made up sites. If you wanted a bit of the web there was no option but to get dirty with HTML and build stuff from scratch (possibly publishing to something like Geocities. The limits of this was that you’d have to email everyone you knew (or post to usenet) so that they would be aware you’ve done so.

I can almost guarantee that none of your friends were interested because it was way too nerdy.

Suddenly nearly everyone you know has a profile on some social network or another, right?

Why?

Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 (amongst other things) is a series of web based applications allowing people with no technical knowledge to publish their (largely meaningless) content and share it with “friends” online.

The limit to this is that you may have friends on one social network that aren’t on another – and they may be completely oblivious to your irrelevant outpourings unless you tell them. All your friends, girlfriends, pets, colleagues, ex-girlfriends, family, family friends (and in some instances, clients) can see your blog, photos, music preferences and see who you’re friends with – If you let them.

What is being referred to as “Web 3.0” I suppose is linking all these things together in such a way that people can’t escape being updated when you publish stories about your new plant or how you’re worried that so-and-so doesn’t like you anymore. If you so much as fart in public everyone you’ve ever known will know about it within seconds.

Seriously though… I think it’s all about Tim Berners Lee’s original vision of the Semantic Web, or getting as close to it as possible, which is why technologies like Microformats and OpenID will play a big part of what people will probably call “3.0”.

http://microformats.org/
http://openid.net/

Today you search for restaurant reviews London and you’ll get a list of pages containing the words restaurant, reviews and London.

A Web 3.0 search could be something like “photographs and reviews of restaurants visited (and rated above three stars) by my friends and friends of friends in the last three weeks”. It won’t return pages containing reviews – it’ll return ACTUAL content. The search results page would be a custom page displaying content pulled from compatible web applications based on your query.

I agree with what he says in that this will mean smaller, leaner more tailored social applications that are easily linked to build your online “persona”. Friends lists and profiles will be shared and controlled from one central location.

I for one am looking forward to this and am already doing some interesting things with this in mind. I just hope it’s not called Web 3.0.