I write about Web 2.0 here out How To, but because it is the weekend and the most interesting thing I can find is a demo of Window’s Live Folder, I’ve decided to do some speculation. O’Reilly beat me to the punch by defining Web 2.0, so I felt it would only be fair if I gave the How To Split An Atom’s Guide to Web 3.0.


Web 3.0

Definition: Highly specialized information silos, moderated by a cult of personality, validated by the community, and put into context with the inclusion of meta-data through widgets.

Now that we have a definition, lets take a look at what this new web will look like.


Search Engines In Web 3.0

In this future, I will start my journey through the web with one of three tasks — seeking information, seeking validation or seeking entertainment.

Seeking Information

The web as it is now uses keywords in order to aggregate data into usable chunks. Search engines index the internet en masse and present it to the end user in order of relevance. They determine relevance by using complex algorithms. Web 2.0 brought us a change in the basic way that we search, tagging. With tagging you could describe anything as anything and search for items in a fashion that is more in line with the way people really look for things.

Web 3.0 will take this one step further. If you are searching for information on Cars, for example, you would use the search engine as you normally would, but your results would be more specialized subengines. I would find BMW Search or Kia Search. From there, I would be able to dig deeper and find items that have been tagged as relating to BMW and sort them into their major categories (pictures, videos, blog posts, news articles, commerce etc…) Each of these could be captured as an RSS feed so that I can be alerted when something new is added to by search profile.

The way the engines would order these items would be a combination of the old and the new. The strong algorithms that are currently used would be kept, but in addition some weight would be given to items that the community has flagged as interesting or voted on.

Meme: Community built around search results.

Seeking Validation

If I am not necessarily looking for information, but instead am looking for “news” (I use news in as loose a fashion as I can) the way I would use search would be slightly different. Along with the specialized search engines, People Search would be available. You could type in what you were looking for, “conservative viewpoint on Darwin” for example and it would pull up results ordered by relevance (algorithms), tagging, and validation through user voting.

Seeking Entertainment

StumbleUpon may be the closest analogy to how we will be entertained in Web 3.0. You fill out a profile, define your tags and then flip the channel. It will be a lot like services like Joost as well, where you can interact with the content that you are seeing and generate communities around it.

Meme: Relevance through user interaction.

Related Companies: Swicki, StumbleUpon, Joost


Where Do Social Networks Fit In?

Remember when I said that Web 3.0 would be based around cults of personality? Imagine a world where you could search a name and bring up that person, all the social networks they belong to, and produce a feed around them.

In this world, the idea of “Social Networks” will be completely replaced by People Search. If I put a proper name into the search engine of Web 3.0 it would provide the running profile of my presence on the web; it would show everything in the webosphere that has been tagged as belonging to me, ordered by community validation and relevance. Once again, this would not necessarily be a simple search. In this Wikiality my page would contain both information that I have written about myself and information that has been written about me.

Meme: Everyone will have Page Rank.

Related Companies: Explode, Spock, The Gorb, Orangeply.


Blogging, Websites and Everything Else

Now that I have found the page that I am looking for, what will those pages look like?

Personal Pages

While I don’t believe that classical blogging will ever disappear, alongside it will be a vast increase in Microblogging. People want to be able to blog from anywhere, without having to spend hours writing a properly formatted post. Web 3.0 will see a more complete integration between devices like cell phones and the world wide web (does anything still use that term?) Posting pictures, videos and text from anywhere, anytime with as little hassle as possible.

Included in my personal page will be meta-data from around the rest of my Web Empire. Our pages will be little more than our personal interpretations of all the data available on the web, plugged into these pages through a growing array of widgets and shared with the world.

Meme: The Widget Web

Related Companies: Jaiku, Twitter, Tumblr, Blidget, Netvibes, iGoogle

Commerce

Commerce is one area that I don’t think will have too much of a Web 3.0 makeover. If anything, marketing will change as popular cults of personality (with high Page Rank) are courted for advertising campaigns.

The entire advertising landscape will change, as companies do their best to target the niche audiences produced by the inclusion of People Search and ultra specialized subengines. Contextual advertisement will take second seat to product placements on sites, search results and subengines relating to the messages that companies are trying to get out.

Meme: We are all our own brands

Related Companies: MySpace


Web 3.0 Design

REST, AJAX, Silverlight, Widget Enabled, Taggable, Searchable everything…

Meme: Draggable, droppable, searchable


In Summary

  • Specialized Subengines for Search
  • Social Networks replaced by People Search
  • Your Online Presence Searchable, Taggable and Ordered by Relevance through Voting and Algorithms
  • Increased Microblogging and more Powerful Widgets to allow you to place any of your feeds anywhere.
  • Increased Integration between devices like cell phones and the web.

Throughout the post I have tried to point you in the direction of some sites which are at the cutting edge of what Web 3.0 is going to be all about. There are plenty more out there, and I suggest you search around to find them.

Web 3.0 may be years off, but the seeds of it are growing even today. The question, as always is, will it be a change for the better or just another reason to add AJAX?

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Other Sites: Really Great Stories | All The Little Things (Book) | Twitter