I had an epiphany over the past month, one in an area where no person should spend much time dwelling or prognosticating. It happened after looking at the demo videos for the Pre again, while skimming through Windows Live looking for their calendar.
I don’t even really know what Web 2.0 was about. Presumably, this arbitrary numbering system is a kind of global consensus of paradigm shift. In the case of 2.0, I perceive it as the change from static, posted state change web content, to applications that run in the browser, powered mostly by degradable Ajax. Maybe that’s wrong, but for the sake of our conversation, consider that the major version number is the indicator of paradigm shift.
What other people say about a “social web” being 2.0 or 3.0, I’m not sure. I doubt any of it. The social web has always been there, which I think is one of the key elements and perpetual paradoxes of the idea that it’s new. The pundits are merely suggesting a return to the one-on-one interaction that at one time made mom and pop operations better than Walmart; interacting with a consumer and the consumer demand that is much more powerful than it was when they didn’t have the internet megaphone. But this concept always existed and it’s not a new paradigm.
Virtually everything written these days about “web X-point-oh” has the word “Profit” nearby. Yeah, it’s just another buzzword that the money-hungry can attach to, but even so, I think it’s worthwhile to notice and identify key changes in perception and implementation. Whether that’s using the trendy-stale “Web X.0” moniker or something else can be entirely up to you – the name will be of little consequence to those who apply or implement it.
The Semantic Web is close to my revelation, but still not quite it. The semantic web is just a stepping stone to web 3.0; some technical attribute of information that has to be implemented in some way - whether by actually forming the semantic markup or figuring out a smart way to apply metadata to unintelligent sources - before Web 3.0 exists. I think there are great problems with implementing the semantic web itself. It’s at once freeing and limiting, in that you can make sense of information, but usually only in the way you’ve defined. This is at such greater a technical cost than what we spend on data output now that I doubt it will be accomplished exactly in the way that technologists expect.
But the result…
I watched a video today of Wolfram’s Wolfram Alpha product. This is one of the most amazing things I’ve seen on the web in a long time. And I think that somewhere deep within this project is the left ventricle of Web 3.0 - the ability to take seemingly disparate data, in response to a natural language query, and grind it all together to produce the intended answer.
You’re thinking “mashup”, and so was I at first. But it’s not just a mashup. A mashup takes 2 or more things and combines them in a specific way. This Wolfram Alpha-like thing, whatever it is, takes any source of data - whether it uses the semantic web or extracts information from places in a different way, I can’t say - and combines it in useful ways with other sources of data.
I can’t imagine right now that Wolfram Alpha is using other data sources rather than things it has been programmed to know; preset datasets and reports. The dataset it uses must be pretty extensive, but it is still small compared to everything that you could harvest from the web. The complexity involved in converting the information on the web, even if everything is semantic, would be way beyond what we’ve been talking about. But this is just the left half of the heart of Web 3.0.
The other side is something much more apparent when you see it. While the visualizations in Wolfram Alpha are nice, they’re not necessarily useful output. What we need is a way to move from an answer to an action.
This is something that is particulary startling about the Palm Pre interface concept. Throw out your thoughts or prejudices based on your working with the iPhone. Here’s where Palm’s money is in this phone, hidden deep somewhere where (sadly) no consumer will ever see it: The ability to move seamlessly from presentation of an answer to application of the answer.
What is my friend’s contact information? Most phones show you the contact’s phone number and will let you call. Pre is smarter with its actions. It can create events using that contact. It can set up an instant message conversation with that contact based on which service they’re currently connected with. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the Pre could find photos of that person on your photosharing account.
The key is that instead of looking for information one way, in one context, the information is available to all contexts, but indexed for the context in which you’re viewing it. If you’re looking at photos, choosing the person in the photo could take you to their contact entry. Touch their face to start messaging them.
When you blend that interaction - answer to action - with the ability to relate disparate sources of information, that’s where I think Web 3.0 lives.
Sure, the first pass isn’t going to be as smart as the future. It’ll work with limited datasets. There will be a time when actions are limited to only the partners with whom a certain service works. Eventually these avenues will open, and users will be able to move seamlessly from one context to the next, getting answers, taking actions, and producing results.
It think it’s time that the web stops being simply a portal to information and a means to create social connection, and moves beyond that into producing work and results with a guiding human mind.
