Now that the craze to have swept the Internet, known as Web 2.0, has died down, I often lie awake at night and wonder what horrific websites that Web 3.0, the future, will bring us.
Before I go through the possibilities, it’s important to remember that the money making re-emergence (possibly) of the dot-com bubble owes itself to the marketing genius of Web 2.0. If only there was an HTML tag for sarcasm. Let us not forget that Web 2.0 was nothing more than thinking of a name for your website that made absolutely no sense (Bebo, Azoogle, Flickr etc.), slap the word ‘Beta’ in small letters near the title and fill in the logo with some form of gradient colour change. There you have it, a Web 2.0 compliant web site.
So, with this in mind, what do the ‘gurus’ have in mind for Web 3.0? Some of the possibilities floating around the Web 2.0 concept of the ‘blogosphere’ include:
- A 3-D Internet. That’s right, the Web 3D Consortium are lobbying for the concept of an entirely 3D virtual world to represent the Internet. We’re talking about a vastly bigger version of Second Life. Now, why would we want to do that?
- Another, admittedly more interesting, idea for Web 3.0 is the ability to blur the line between off-line and on-line. With services already being provided by the likes of Microsoft and Google to compensate this, is this the way forward for the Internet? Are we looking at a future computing world where the offline desktop no longer has it’s place?
- An intelligent Internet. This idea is again somewhat appealing but how intelligent exactly do we want the Internet to be? Contextual merchandising and targeted adverts were probably the first step towards making the Internet in anyway intelligent. Being shown adverts relevant to what you’re browsing was probably a good idea. Albeit annoying to us nerds but the non-technologically inclined people, or plebs, will more than likely find some use for buying crap online. So what’s the next step in making the Internet intelligent? I have a feeling that social networking and social bookmarking may be laying the foundations for providing a more personalised, self-catered version of the Internet, which may be the way forward for 3.0
- Last and by all means least, but admittedly my utmost favourite vision of Web 3.0, comes from the man behind the world wide web itself, Tim Berners-Lee, who wants to see XML driven scalable vector graphics.
Well, that was a great insight into the future of the Internet was it not? While I may not know what direction it is going to go in, I can guarantee that it will go down the same route as Web 2.0 and be a set of pseudo-rules for websites to adhere to, only for the reason of looking cool. I mean, come on, the concept of splitting content from design is not a revelation that came with Web 2.0.
That’s it from me, though one last thing to leave you with is that I have heard rumours of the possible creation of Web 0.0. My inside sources tell me that both Al Gore and George Lucas are behind this techno-prequel and are intent on making an entire trilogy. I think I’ll settle for marquee texts and dancing hamsters.
Chez