Web 2.0, Web 3.0, and Change.Infinite

Steven Ishak

“According to former Secretary of Education Richard Riley, the top ten jobs that will be in demand in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004” (scottmcleod.org). This quote is extremely exciting, yet frightening for any college student graduating within the next few years. We’ve now come to a point in time where many of the things we learn about technology one year will quickly become outdated two to three years down the line. This statement means that we, as technologically savvy people, must be constantly aware of the advances taking place and be able to understand how to implement them into advancing our businesses’ strategies as oppose to how to actually use and operate them.

In a quest for understanding the rapid advances of technology we must first understand the most important underlying theme that is driving all of these advances: mass customization. In an effort to better understand the peer-to-peer traffic on the internet, we are now developing what we know as Web 2.0. “Web 2.0 refers to a perceived second-generation of Web-based services…that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users” (Wikipedia.com). Examples of Web 2.0 sites include facebook.com, youtube.com, and myspace.com. All of these sites are user content driven sites and allows for communication and personalization that has never been seen before. In addition to these networking sites, companies are now revolutionizing their own websites in order to better serve their customers. For example, being a huge basketball fan, I am constantly visiting one of my favorite sites, www.nba.com. Recently I just noticed they have now come up a new feature called an “NBA Widget.” This allows you to implant information about your favorite player, team, or scores to your own personal networking website or search engine such as Google.com so you are constantly informed about the latest news even though you are not on the nba.com site.

As stated earlier, technology is changing at an incredibly fast pace. Nearly 4 weeks ago, I heard of the term Web 2.0 for the first time in my life. While researching information on Web 2.0 to write this blog I couldn’t help but notice coming across another buzz word: Web 3.0. When I first noticed this term my thought was “what the hell is going on? Here I am trying to learn about what I had thought was some new fancy buzz word and by the time I truly understand it, it would have become outdated. What I really should be doing is learning more about Web 3.0 and speculate what Web 4.0 might be like.” So I did just that.

Since Web 3.0 is an extremely new buzz word the information about it is rather limited. One definition for Web 3.0 is “the realization of composite applications that provide easy, transparent and organized access to ‘the world’s information’. Another definition proposed by Nova Spivack [founder of Radar Networks], proposes that a more objective way to define Web 3.0 is as the third decade of the Web, to take place from the year 2010 to 2020. Spivack suggests that Web 2.0 has largely been focused on front-end user-interface improvements such as AJAX, while Web 3.0 will shift the focus back to the backend -- the underlying technologies of the Web, enabled by Semantic Web technologies” (wikipedia.com). Also Web 3.0 is believed to also become the evolution of a 3-Dimensional internet. This is a feature that can be of great interest to companies in regards to mass customization. Web 3.0 is seen as an “era when machines will start to do seemingly intelligent things”(nytimes.com). For example, if a user is doing a search on Web 3.0 to find a good hotel “concepts like room temperature, bed comfort and hotel price, and can distinguish between concepts like ‘great,’ ‘almost great’ and ‘mostly O.K.’ to provide useful direct answers. Whereas today’s travel recommendation sites force people to weed through long lists of comments and observations left by others, the Web 3.0 system would weigh and rank all of the comments and find, by cognitive deduction, just the right hotel for a particular user.”(nytimes.com)

If the Web 3.0 system is ever completely created the only step I could see being done after that, aka “Web 4.0,” is complete artificial intelligence where machines could one day search, find, and order our specific wants and desires for us with minimal input into the devices. Although it seems a little far fetched right now, I do believe that is the direction where we are heading and it may be attainable in the near future.

Now what does all this have to do with me? Being a senior, MIS major and hoping to find a job in basically any IT department of any company, this evolution of the internet has a huge effect on any future jobs I may have and I need to be aware of the constant changes of the internet. More importantly, I hope to one day have a business of my own, and nowadays it is very difficult to own a successful company without also owning a successful website. So truly understanding the constant changing forces of what drives a successful website is extremely important in making that success possible.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” – Charles Darwin

http://www.scottmcleod.org/didyouknow.wmv

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_3.0#Web_3.0_technologies

Markoff, John, “Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense” http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/business/12web.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5088&en=254d697964cedc62&ex=1320987600