All things 3.0

When we do some pitching about ExperienceOn and our first vertical for travel, BeFogg.com, we normally end up receiving the same question. It’s more or less like: ok, so you are a Web 3.0 service, right?.

Our answer is yes, but the problem is that, as with most of the umbrella terms, it’s likely that our vision for Web 3.0 is not the same as other people’s vision. In fact, there’s huge discrepancy in the Web about what’s exactly Web 3.0, and even whether it should exist or not.

In this post we outline our vision about Web 3.0.

Should Web 3.0 exist?

The 3.0 in Web 3.0 is a version number. In software, we use versions when there are changes in the form of that software. Major version changes are used to mark very significant changes, and minor version changes are used mainly for bugfixing and minor improvements.

For us, Web 3.0 would be justified if a new major change was to be introduced in the web.

This major change may have many forms, for example, a significant modification or introduction of protocols, architectures or technologies that have clear end-user impact, or the introduction of a new behavioral or organizational paradigm for doing things in the Internet, among others.

For example, in the Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 transition, there were many technological improvements, but the major change that motivated the change of Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 was not technological. It was mostly a behavioral and organizational change (people using the Web not only to consume information but also to produce it, and also using it not only to interact with websites but also to interact and group with other people).

Some definitions about Web 3.0

Here we present a brief summary of several articles about Web 3.0.

Victoria Shannon, from the International Herald Tribune, in the article A more revolutionary Web defines Web 3.0 in the terms of the Semantic Web, a web of structured data that is directly processable by machines.

Berners-Lee … sees only two distinct versions of his Web: the Web of documents, which emerged in the 1990s, and the Web of data, which will be the result of the semantic programming languages.

John Markoff, from the New York Times, in the article Entrepreneurs see a web guided by common sense, proposes the addition of a new layer over the existing web

… a new layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion …

Sramana Mitra, in her blog post Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS), defines Web 3.0 services by means of a set of ingredients that each one of these future services should have. In our opinion, she introduces a very important secondary change that Web 3.0 will introduce: contextual services. We will comment on that later in the post.

In Web 3.0, I predict, we are going to start seeing roll-ups. We will see a trunk that emerges from the Context, be it film (Netflix), music (iTunes), cooking / food, working women, single parents, … and assembles the Web 3.0 formula that addresses the whole set of needs of a consumer in that Context.

Nova Spivack, from Radar Networks, in an article called The third generation web is coming, introduces a list of technologies needed for obtaining a more connected, open, and intelligent web. He points to several technologies like Semantic Web technologies (mainly the ones defined in W3C Semantic Web Activity, like RDF, OWL, SWRL and SPARQL), associative databases (e.g. triplestores) and also natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning and autonomous agents.

The threshold to the third-generation Web will be crossed in 2007. At this juncture the focus of innovation will start shift back from front-end improvements towards back-end infrastructure level upgrades to the Web. This cycle will continue for five to ten years, and will result in making the Web more connected, more open, and more intelligent. It will transform the Web from a network of separately siloed applications and content repositories to a more seamless and interoperable whole.

Phil Wainewright, in his Software as Services blog, includes an article called What to expect from Web 3.0, where he introduces an architectural vision for the Web 3.0, composed of a multi-layered service architecture, where he defines an Aggregation Layer that builds upon several services in an inner backend layer called API Services Layer, and at the end an Application Layer that contains application that solve most of the problems in a broad context (in order to avoid the classical fragmentation problem). Also, Phil thinks that the delivery of the services of the Application Layer will be by means of rich client technology, that is managed (he says serviced) from the server.

Web 3.0 isn’t just about shopping, entertainment and search. It’s also going to deliver a new generation of business applications that will see business computing converge on the same fundamental on-demand architecture as consumer applications.

Hakia’s Emre Sokullu, in his article Pivots of the web: What’s next after social networking?, writes about the next big thing after social networking (using its own numbering scheme for web eras). He says that the next big things are a Social Web OS/social platform like Facebook, where almost any interactions and user actions are to be done, and also notes Joost online television as one of the future big players.

… we will end up with the rebirth of online TV. Since we are all born lazy, video on demand is the way to go. And what Joost is offering is higher quality content (thanks to their collaboration with big content providers), higher quality watching experience (thanks to P2P technology) and a legal hassle-free alternative to YouTube, which has already shown tremendous success.

Note that the different authors introduce their candidates for the major change that will trigger the next era, the change between Web 2.x to Web 3.0. In our opinion, some of them are important changes that will have their places in the Web 3.0, but that mostly are an improvement of what we have today.

Our prediction for Web 3.0

In our opinion the big change will come in the way we interact with the web. John Markoff includes the key point in his article above: the Web… less of a catalog and more of a guide.

Now we’re interacting with the web in a very primitive and brute-force way, we go directly to the chapters (we visit web sites by typing or following links to URLs ) or we use the keyword index to find in which pages appear some words (in this case search engines, like Google, that return the URLs that contain the words we’re looking for).

We advocate for the addition of a new model of interaction with the Web, an intermediated model where humans don’t interact directly with websites or search engines, but use software intermediaries that act as their guides. You tell them what’s your problem, and these intelligent services will try to completely or partially solve problems in your behalf, only interacting with you when it’s really needed (i.e. to show you important information, to request for your decision given the options, …).

Please refer to our previous post About ExperienceOn Ventures for more information about Intelligent Services.

What happens to the Semantic Web?

The Semantic Web is a web of structured data that can be processed automatically by machines.

Reaching the full potential of the semantic web would imply that almost everyone in the Web generates and maintains machine-processable data. Clearly, this is a big hurdle for this vision to get real, mainly due to human and organizational behavior issues, as reported by Cory Doctorow’s Metacrap.

Notwithstanding the problems reflected above, there’s no doubt that many organizations, individuals and companies will start producing highly-authoritative, high-quality, structured meta-data that machines can directly consume.

Clearly, the availability of high-quality structured meta-data will impact in the quality of the intelligent services, and we will embrace this information when it’s available, but, even if the full vision of Semantic Web were to be reached, we’re far from there. It may fully materialize in later Web 3.x or Web 4.x. For the moment, we will mine concrete unstructured data sources to obtain useful information to feed our intelligent services.

We believe that the proliferation of structured data is very important, but we also believe that it’s most important what you do with this data. Intelligent services should benefit from the kind of information sources that are available at a given moment. We should start now, with the information that it’s available in the Web at this moment, without waiting for the further materialization of the Semantic Web.

Are there any more (secondary) changes to be included in Web 3.0?

Yes, we think so. And it will be important changes.

The continuous advances in broadband adoption and bandwidth and the current developments in rich-client technologies (AIR, Silverlight and JavaFX to name a few) will result in a spectacular improvement in the quality of the user experiences, gaining in interactivity, usability and real-time multimedia content, among others.

Also, there should be a movement of contextualization, that is, the creation or aggregation of multiple individual services to provide complete user experiences around specific contexts (travel, real-estate, jobs, …), avoiding the super-fragmented actual state of the web (where you have to visit a lot of services and web sites to complete a goal).

We will also continue seeing great advances in the market share, depth and completeness of the software delivered as a service (SaaS), due to the technical advancements and the increasing interest in the field of mainstream players like Google, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft.

Yet another Web 3.0 definition

Web 3.0 is the intelligent web. A web powered by a new kind of services, called intelligent services, that are able to access and reason over vast volumes of the information present in the Web. These intelligent services greatly simplify the tasks of doing research in the Web, acting as autonomous agents that analyze information and perform actions in our behalf, even in an unattended way.

Web 3.0 builds upon the foundations of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The intelligent services are able to process informational pages and use e-Commerce services from Web 1.0, and are able to benefit from the vast knowledge present in Web 2.0 social networks.

Web 3.0 will allow end-users to benefit, in a practical way, from the vast quantities of information present in the Web.