Web 2.0 is SO last year...

For those of you that are more than 24 hours behind the times, Web 2.0 is dead. There, I said it. Web 3.0 is the new hot thing. Why? Because 3.0 is a bigger number than 2.0.

Also, because the NYT wrote an article about Web 3.0 (in November of 2006!!!), thus ushering in the age of "better than 2.0". It is the circle of Internet life.

From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence.

Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.

For those of us still trying to grapple with Web 2.0, the difference is well defined:

The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up” — for example, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.

In contrast, the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.

The business opportunities that lie with that depth of interaction are mind boggling. Excuse me while I lock myself in a room without food or water until I can think of the next billion dollar Web 3.0 idea.



The interesting thing about this chart (also from 2006!!!) is the last few words of the Web 3.0 text.

"All media flows in and out of virtual web worlds". Second Life? Should have seen this coming.