This question excites business people, researchers and web enthusiasts… What will Web3.0 be? Gurus say it’s gonna be a set of technologies allowing to get rid of the browser, to work semi-connectedly (sometimes off-line) or it’s gonna be the so-called Semantic Web that W3C have been dreaming about for years, or maybe it’s about moving from the keyboard/mouse/screen paradigm to new human-machine interfaces… I think everyone is being too specific, in my opinion.

Here is my vision of the Web evolution:

  • Web1.0: sites that broadcast information to people
  • Web2.0: services that allow people to contribute and exchange information
  • Web3.0: platform that brings relevant and contextual information to every individual

If you read between the lines, you see different dimensions:

  • the information flow: broadcasting -> exchange -> relevant delivery
  • the platform: web sites -> services -> platform
  • the social aspect: people look for information -> people exchange (blogs, social networks, tagging…) -> every person is informed (personalized and contextual aggregation)
  • the relevance: company or service-based sites (brands, forums, chats…) -> convergence to topic-based sites that allow manipulation of information (widget, mashups, RSS feeds…) -> feed of personalized information based on the context of the user
  • the technologies: HTML (server-based pages) -> AJAX (rich client interfaces) and RSS feeds (extracting information from websites) -> ??? (A.I., semantic technologies…)
  • the interfaces: keyboard/mouse/screen -> support for more interfaces (webcams for video conferencing…) -> multimodal access (adapting to the context)
  • the community spaces: forums/irc/chat/im -> social networks, metaverses (second life…) -> augmented reality?

Sorry for posting such a draft, that’s just a bunch of random thoughts I just felt I had to write down!