For those still trying to play catch-up with the whole Web 2.0 world, be warned that Web 3.0 is on the horizon and has been brought to recent public awareness by Eric Schmidt (the CEO of Google) at the Seoul Digital Forum when put on the spot by a questioning audience member:

After first joking that Web 2.0 is “a marketing term”, Schmidt launched into a great definition of Web 3.0. He said that while Web 2.0 was based on Ajax, Web 3.0 will be “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, customizable, and are distributed virally (social networks, email, etc).

However, it was Profy who hit back the next day with a much more descriptive explanation as to what Web 3.0 is all about.

For a good period of time, there was noticeable discontent over the increasing use of the term ‘Web 2.0’ by bloggers, and, eventually, full-fledged journalists. To a sizable portion of Web users, the label had no real meaning whatsoever. They thought it was simply a name conjured for use as a marketing tool. A new spin devoid of meaning. It aggravated. It caused a ruckus on some occasions. And then, almost at once, everyone began to accept it en-masse.

Schmidt’s explanation, in a nutshell, is why I find it much too early to make any serious attempts at defining something that has not yet come to be. As I’ve reiterated many times before, we are only now achieving things we’ve wished to have for a decade, maybe even longer. In 1997, we were still far from the point at which we could buy anything and everything via our browsers. We could buy a lot of stuff back then, but not everything. Nor were we close to understanding what it would really be like to interact with websites as we did with everyday desktop-based applications. And we’ve years before we see seriously impressive code being produced for remote use as feature-full replacements for current utilities operating on our own personal machines.

Spencer (our graphic designer) asked the other day what the look and feel of Web 3.0 was, but since we are still several months away from a full blown epidemic, which will in turn need time to be styled, appreciated, and then duplicated, the real answer is, "Whatever we build it as!"

Let’s not forget a previous article also from Read / Write Web (back in March) where they hit the nail on the head with well thought premature reasoning:

Today’s Web has terabytes of information available to humans, but hidden from computers. It is a paradox that information is stuck inside HTML pages, formatted in esoteric ways that are difficult for machines to process. The so called Web 3.0, which is likely to be a pre-cursor of the real semantic web, is going to change this. What we mean by ‘Web 3.0′ is that major web sites are going to be transformed into web services - and will effectively expose their information to the world.

So bringing together Open APIs (like the Amazon E-Commerce service) and scraping/mashup technologies, gives us a way to treat any web site as a web service that exposes its information. The information, or to be more exact the data, becomes open. In turn, this enables software to take advantage of this information collectively. With that, the Web truly becomes a database that can be queried and remixed.

The opportunities that will come after the web has been turned into a database are just too exciting to pass up. So if conversion is going to take place anyway, would it not be better to rethink how to do this in a consistent way?

It would not be fair to talk about Web 3.0 without getting Widgify’s take on things, where they take us back a little bit further and also discuss how we found ourselves in the world of Web 2.0 to begin with:

Web 1.0 –> Web 2.0
[publication mechanism to platform for services]

The primary disruption associated with the DOT-COM boom, retroactively labeled Web 1.0, was the shift from traditional print publication mechanisms to the web as a pervasive publication mechanism. The Web 2.0 is the next step in this progression. Specifically, it is the transformation of the web from a publication mechanism into a platform for decoupled online services. Data and applications are quickly being atomized into reusable components that can be mixed and match to create new services. There is a shift from unstructured data (HTML) to structured data (web services/RSS/microformats).

Web 2.0 –> Web 3.0
[Atomic services to integrated experience]

So the theme of Web 2.0 is atomization. If Web 2.0 is about atomization, then Web 3.0 will be all about integrated experiences in a world of atomic content and services. As the web continues to become disaggregated, there will be a burgeoning demand for tools that can help users effectively leverage these “information atoms,” together in a meaningful manner. Not only will there be a need for tools that help users aggregate widgets, but also tools that enable widgets to work together. Imagine a world where there are as many widgets as there are web pages. Won’t it suck royally if they don’t work together?

It Begins (again)…

You all might have noticed the recent buzz around Yahoo’s new product, Pipes. Some folks even emailed me and asked me why I did not post about it. Anyway, this new product is the first step towards the Holy Grail of programming – enabling non-programmers to program. According to Yahoo:

Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.