October 28, 2007
Web 3.0 and beyond: the next 20 years of the internet
Web 3.0 and beyond: the next 20 years of the internet - Times Online
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.
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 more 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.
October 28, 2007 at 12:05 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink
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