Defining the future of the web

Just when you thought you had this 2.0 stuff figured out … it’s time to go 3.0.

In a recent New York Times column, John Markoff sparked a debate when he suggested that the Web is morphing from “2.0” to “3.0” status. While Web 2.0 was never clearly defined, there‚s some consensus in the industry that it focused on several major themes, including AJAX, social networking, folksonomies, lightweight collaboration, social bookmarking and media sharing. So what’s different about Web 3.0? Tech entrepreneur Nova Spivack says the next phase would see the focus of innovation shifting back toward underlying infrastructure upgrades that ultimately will make the Web more connected, more open and more intelligent. Gone will be the siloed approach to content repositories and in its place will be what might be called “the intelligent Web,” which will focus on a third generation of Internet-based services, including the semantic Web, microformats, natural language search, data-mining, machine learning, recommendation agents and artificial intelligence technologies. The point, says Markoff, will be to “emphasize machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience.”

Source
KurzweilAI.net 18 Dec 2006