David Weinberger, author of the excellent Everything is Miscellaneous, says he is often asked what web 3.0 will be.
Good question. But don’t expect a concrete answer.
Weinberger’s reply is that we don’t know and really can’t know.
In fact, it’s likely we’ll never get to something that can be tagged with the next increment like software.
Web 2.0 also makes it less likely that a single change will sweep the entire Net, for Web 2.0 makes it easier to diversify the Web’s offerings. So Web 2.0 may also spell the end of giving the Web point revision numbers.
With any luck he’s right and we can figure out a name for all this stuff that makes more sense to people outside this echo chamber.
Web 2.0 is social networking/collaboration/cloud-sourcing
Web 3.0 will be combining cloud-sourced data with social networking with weighted algorithms with the goal of automatically determining which data is more likely to be accurate and valuable to you
Apartment reviews are my favorite example. Right now, any apartment review you read online is basically worthless because they’re all anonymous…you have to assume that the good reviews are written by the people who work for that complex, and the bad reviews are written by people who work for the complex across the street. If there were a way to know which reviews came from people that were generally more trustworthy (maybe because they’re a friend of a friend, or maybe just because lots of other people trust them), then the reviews would actually be useful.
Challenges:
– systems must be impossible to “game” or rig
– reasonably accurately estimating how much you can trust someone that you really don’t know
– conveying these more complex ideas to investors, developers, and users
There are hints that this is where things are going:
– anytime you see someone question a Wikipedia article, or a blogger unfamiliar to them, or any source, the need is shown
– popularity of discovering content based on votes from unknown (to you) people in the crowd: Twitturly, Digg, Google’s PageRank, listing the Alexa rank of a site
– popularity of discovering content based on recommendations from people you know
It’s really just a small tweak of Web 2.0 concepts, but the opportunities will be incredible once we start seeing this and users start taking advantage of it.