Aug 7th, 2008 |
Most of the people who ask me so, when are you going to start calling it Web 3.0? (and often follow with a har-har and a poke in the ribs) mean it as a joke. For the uninitiated, its a way to signal that they know its a version number, and that versions go out of date. We started this conference brand (and birthed the term) in 2004 — Who would let a product go four years without an update? (never mind, dont answer that).
The problem is that what appears to be a version number is misleading. The web as a platform is too deep and significant a phenomenon to be supplanted by a plus one; trend watchers or trend setters may think the term has been around long enough, but the real work of building an internet operating system is not well served by suddenly declaring that we are entering new phase. Moreover, my inbox and news reader have a half dozen of references to Web 3.0 this week, and none of them have anything to do with each other. Salesforce is trying to brand Web 3.0 as platform as a service, a conference on the semantic web calls itself Web 3.0, and another marketer is using it to mean, pretty much, whats new. Hey look, something shiny!
I like shiny as much as the next guy, but its hard to do something significant if you dont modulate the ADD a bit. Tims opening keynote in San Francisco last April (watch it here) urged the audience to tackle the big, hairy problems, and the time for that focus is right. As he wrote recently:
Precisely because we’re getting through the giddy stage of “everything ajax, everything advertising,” and returning to an understanding that the internet as platform means far more than that, there is more innovation today than there was last year, even as some of the froth seems to abate.
This will be interesting to watch at Web 2.0 Expo New York next month, where Marc Benioff will keynote, interviewed by our own Tim OReilly. Marc made a guest appearance on TechCrunch last week with a post entitled Welcome to Web 3.0: Now Your Other Computer is a Data Center. The nugget is here:
While the world doesnt need another buzzword, I feel that both the emerging generation of entrepreneurs and developers, as well as traditional software ISVs, need to grasp the enormity of Web 3.0 and its potential to create change, disruption, and opportunity. Web 3.0 is about replacing existing software platforms with a new generation of platforms as a service.
Tims comment on the post will give you the sense of some of the territory he and Marc will cover on the stage, and Im looking forward to hearing a lively debate. Buried in Tims comment is this:
When people ask me what might qualify for the 3.0 monicker I say the one thing that might qualify is the rise of cloud applications that are primarily experienced on (and driven by) mobile interfaces.
Working now as we do in Japan, and hopefully soon in India, where the mobile phone is the only platform for most of the country, I’m eager to explore the implications Tim suggests here. But as my colleague Paige Finkelman and many many others have said, can we please not call it 3.0?
[...] can read the rest of this blog post by going to the original source, here [...]
hi
just tagging any site with web2.0 or 3.0 or so on is not relevant,indeed term web2.0 itself not understood by everyone.
I would like to ask a question can anybody describe the differrence between 2.0 and 3.0 in tangible form or in a manner where we can feel it that it is 3.0?
jennifer,
i love your perspective. to date my experience has been most people who are talking about web 3.0 and even web 4.0 don’t have a facebook profile, don’t have a blog, wouldn’t know a tweet if it bit them in the a**. see a blog post i wrote on this very subject: http://tinyurl.com/5klyfg.
i thought tim did a great job at the sf expo when he talked about how the web as a platform is not going away, user generated content is not going away, aggregating the wisdom of crowds is not going away, software above a single device is not going away nor is any other attribute that defines web 2.0.
i am interested to hear benioff speak. unlike the other nose bleed experts i cited previously, he and his company are fully immersed in web 2.0, pioneered the saas category and can certainly speak from the inside out.
as a marketing geek i will say that tim and the rest of us will have a positioning challenge ahead of us as we address the need to evolve a positioning that is rooted in something that has a visceral association to a shelf life. have tim give me a shout and i will do a pro bono project on the best way to handle this.
see you in ny!
peace out.
Jen:
I too feel that the whole naming convention is now too far out of control. The Web 3.0 zealots claim that it is Web 2.0 plus semantics, a ludicrous claim given semantics are ubiquitous, whether explicit or not. From a pure logical standpoint, making such claims is meaningless and only shows a lack of understanding of ontology work. Nevertheless, it likely will persist.
Semantics is the “meaning” of something. Like architecture, everything that exists can be linked to it (everything has an architecture, whether explicit or not). There is a 3 sided map of the major concepts in most semantics work which includes the referent (the object in question), the label (the name or symbol representing the meaning and linking it to the referent) and the conceptual domain (the place where we meaning exists). There is also a forth dimension of semantics which is a contextual plane. This is the set of circumstances which surrounds an object in question and can affect it’s meaning and importance.
Most semantics work gets stuck in the label region. It really should be done in the conceptual domain, which is the focus of ontology work. During the presentation I gave at Web 2.0 Expo earlier this year entitled “Ontologies for the Enterprise”, this was explained.
Since the objects and labels exist today (plain English is a natural language filled with terms or labels for just about every referent that exists), we have the tangible parts of the Semantic Web today, hence there is no logic behind advancing the version nujber of the web to Web 3.0. I think Tim has stated himself that it was a bad idea to name it Web 2.0 as it leads to this kind of foolishness and I would presume that “Web 2.0″ should not be taken literally as so many have, only in the exemplar context. What needs to be focused on is the Conceptual plane’s ontology work. While a lot of this does exist today, making it more explicit and providing concrete interfaces to such work is where semantic web work should be focused IMHO.
I vote that the web community never version the web with 3.0, 4.0 unless there is literally a non-backwards compatible version of the internet invented.
[...] by Hilarywithlove2009-04-12 – Watch These Web 2.0 Summit Keynotes saved by pokepoke2009-04-09 – Web 3.0: Here We Go Again saved by mcroydon2009-04-05 – Wednesday – Keynote saved by dwc2009-04-02 – WinHEC Keynote Built on [...]