Web 3.0 and beyond: the next 20 years of the internet
Silicon Valley has painted a picture of the web in
2030, and it is very powerful and very smart
indeed
Jonathan Richards
In the heart of Silicon Valley, at what is referred
to, somewhat romantically, as the 'web's edge',
something is stirring.
A new type of internet is being imagined, far more
powerful that the one which lets you link up with your
friends or watch a video uploaded by a stranger.
Facebook, YouTube and the other social networks and
blogs that fall within the scope of 'Web 2.0' may be
beginning to penetrate the mainstream, but to those
whose Cassandra-like vision lets them see the web in
2020 and beyond, they are but a pixel in a much larger
picture.
In a little over a decade, according to the engineers
building the internet of tomorrow, the web will be
able to connect every aspect of our digital lives
- be it a website, an e-mail, or a file on our PC - to
every other aspect. It will know, for instance, when
you are typing an e-mail, what the subject
of the e-mail is, and be able to suggest websites and
books as well as documents, photos and videos you have
saved that may be relevant to that topic.
Apple, MySpace and Nokia reverse years of tradition
with 'open season' for new product development
It will be achieve this by virtue of the inherent
'intelligence' in the underlying architecture of the
internet, they say. In other words, the web is
becoming
smart.
Nova Spivack is an evangelist of the next phase of the
web's development - what Silicon Valley, with its
expansionist zeal, has taken to calling Web 3.0,
or 'the semantic web'.
Broadly speaking, Mr Spivack says, Web 3.0 refers to
the attempt by technologists to overhaul radically the
basic platform of the internet so that it
'understands'
the near infinite pieces of information that reside on
it and draws connections between them.
If Web 2.0 was all about harnessing the collective
intelligence of crowds to give information a value -
lots of people liked this story so you might too
(Digg.com), people who like Madonna also like this
artist (last.fm), lots of people linked to this site
so that makes it the most relevant (Google's basic
PageRank algorithm) - then Web 3.0 is about giving the
internet itself a brain.
For those still a bit lost, Mr Spivack, the founder of
Radar Networks, a leading Web 3.0 company, says it's
useful to think about the web's development
in ten-year cycles.
"We have had the first decade of the web, or Web 1.0,"
he says, which was about the development of the basic
platform of the internet and the ability to
make huge amounts of information widely accessible,
"and we're nearing the end of the second decade - Web
2.0 - which was all about the user interface"
and enabling users to connect with one another.
"Now we're about to enter the third decade - Web 3.0 -
which is about making the web much smarter."
Each decade in turn corresponds to an engineering
focus on either 'the front end' or 'back end' of the
web. Web 1.0 was a back-end decade, focusing on the
web's basic platform, its link structure and
navigation system. Web 2.0 was front end, with a heavy
focus on users and usability, clean-looking sites,
and people making connections with one another.
In Web 3.0, the emphasis will revert to the back end,
with a renewal of the web's key index - the essential
data that is catalogued by search engines like
Google. That in turn, Mr Spivack says, will make way
for Web 4.0, another 'front-end decade', only with
more advanced programs than the likes of Facebook.
A prime example of a Web 3.0 technology is
'natural-language search', which refers to the ability
of search engines to answer full questions such as
'Which
US Presidents died of disease?'. In some cases, the
sites that appear in the results do not reference the
original search terms, reflecting the fact that
the web knows, for instance, that Reagan was a US
President, and that Alzheimer's is a disease.
"Our engine reads every page of the web sentence by
sentence and returns results by drawing on a general
knowledge of language and what specific concepts
in the world mean, and their relationship with one
another," said Barney Pell, chief executive of
Powerset, which is developing natural-language
technology.
The firm, based at the prestigious Palo Alto Research
Centre, in California, is sometimes talked about as a
Google-killer, should its offering - which
is not yet widely available - become popular.
It's not just search that will be overhauled in the
web of the future, however. One of the recurrent
themes in the presentations at the Web 2.0 Summit in
San Francisco was 'open platforms', the idea that a
website or device, like a mobile phone, should be able
to accommodate whichever features or applications
its user wants. Think of the iPhone as a folder into
which an owner could 'drag and drop' any application -
a weather forecaster, an e-mail service - without
Apple having to approve such an action.
Some of the world's largest technology companies -
Nokia, Apple and MySpace - all made announcements
embracing the idea of open platforms, suggesting that
the web will become a place where much more mixing and
matching of different services will be permitted.
Alongside this will come tmore mature virtual worlds,
or what Silicon Valley's faithful - perhaps to get
away from connotations of the computer game - have
started referring to as 'immersive environments'.
"The web is going to be a much more immersive, a much
more multi-dimensional environment," said John Doerr,
one of the founding board members at Google
and a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers,
which invests heavily in the tech sector.
Mr Doerr's presentation touched on a range of areas
that would be affected by the web, in particular green
technologies and the energy sector, as well as
disease therapy, and he gave stark warning to any firm
that was not willing to embrace emerging trends. "In
any real revolution there are winners and losers.
The internet wasn't some kind of 'kum ba ya' thing,"
he said.
When the time came to pack up the projects and
exchange the last business cards, there was a sense -
as there was seven years ago - that Silicon Valley
was riding a wave of seemingly limitless investor
confidence, begging an obvious question.
"Are we officially in a bubble yet?" one of the
conference moderators asked, repeatedly.
No one was willing to answer. In the meantime, the
vast sums of money to be made and the new services to
change people's lives, radically and everywhere,
were both things to be celebrated.
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