Defining Web 3.0

    – David Siegel

The World Wide Web has evolved from the original hypertext system envisioned by physicists to a planetwide medium that has already transformed most of our lives. What comes next should be truly stunning. Web 3.0 refers to a combination of advances that will change the Internet radically, making Web 2.0 look like a new paint job on an old car going down the Information highway.

In 2000 I gave a speech to business leaders telling them that as a futurist I could predict the future of eCommerce with 100% accuracy. The next phase of eCommerce, I said, was going to be called – commerce. There wasn’t going to be anything special about purchasing goods and services online.

In this article, I’m not trying to predict the future of the Web. I’m helping create it. Web 3.0 starts now. The waiting is over. For a while, it’s going to be called Web 3.0, to distinguish it from what we have today. After the transition phase, though, it’s going to be called – everyday life.

[SIDEBAR: In 1996, Jon Bosak, Tim Bray, and others laid the foundation for Web 3.0 by creating XML, the eXtensible Markup Language, which began to add structure to the Web. Tim Berners Lee envisioned the Semantic Web as early as 1998. In my 1999 book, Futurize Your Enterprise, I described a set of commercial scenarios to help show how different this world could be. ]

I’ll start by simply describing where we are today, but soon enough you’ll see that the world of tomorrow is going to be very different.

Web 1.0

The Web started as a way to share written electronic documents of all kinds. This blog is a Web 1.0 project. Amazon.com is a Web 1.0 project. Even Google (the search engine) is designed to figure out what you mean when you enter something like “Sofia Coppola” and show you an appropriate document. However, If a search for “Sofia Coppola” leads you to this page, you’re not likely to be too interested in what you’ve found, because this page contains the words “Sofia Coppola” but is not about “Sofia Coppola”. Web 1.0 generated a lot of words, pictures,  sounds, documents, and MySpace pages (does Sofia Coppola have a MySpace page?). And all these pages are meant to be read (some of them enjoyed) by humans.

Web 1.0 is a great start, but its utility is starting to wane. We can continue to add more media (mobile, video, music, interaction), but it’s getting harder and harder to actually accomplish something. It’s good for selling advertising. But it’s far from turbo-charging your life or your business.

Web 2.0

Do I even dare define Web 2.0, after the great Tim O’Reilly has told us in no uncertain terms?

Sure.

Web 2.0 is a lot of things. It’s Sarbanes-Oxley, which made it so only a few companies can go public, which led Google to go on a buying spree, which led VCs to invest in companies to sell to Google, creating a long slow boom in valuations, bringing in more investors, fueling more innovation. It’s AJAX, technology that lets us run applications in our browsers rather than having to download a Java applet or a plug-in. Using AJAX, I typed this article right into my browser without opening Microsoft Word. Because of AJAX, I can play Sudoku on my cell phone without having to manage any downloads. It’s a 10x reduction in cost of building and maintaining web sites and applications. It’s cheaper bandwidth and servers, so you can now run enterprise-class servers out of your dorm room. It’s mashups, which lets you scrape Craigslist and put all the puppies for sale with their Flickr photos on a Google Map. It’s tagging, which brings us Del.icio.us and TagWorld, and video searching. It’s Wikis, which let people contribute (and sometimes delete) content on a drive-by basis. It’s collaboration, which lets people contribute to knowledge bases like Digg by acting in their own best interest. It’s social networking, which has pretty much doubled the Web’s traffic inside of 18 months and given us the power to flirt electronically. It’s RSS and podcasting, which lets us subscribe to documents and have them delivered to us fresh off the hard disk.

Recently, IBM announced its “Marvel” system that can transcribe speech in a video to text you can read online. They call this exciting breakthrough (which several other startups have already developed) Web 3.0 – the Semantic Web. Is this Web 3.0? Is it semantic? No. Despite the hype, this is just transcription. It’s still human-readable media in a more searchable format. Web 2.0 makes lots of things more searchable, but you’re still searching for keywords and phrases and trying to infer context.

In short, Web 2.0 is really a faster/better/cheaper Web 1.0, with a few innovative concepts (and some rounded corners) helping glue things together. It’s very cool. Almost everything Google does is Web 2.0. I’m even starting a few companies to take advantage of it (like Large Scale Dynamics and LTR.com), but Web 2.0 is still fundamentally Web 1.0 on steroids. It’s faster and better, but it’s not more meaningful.

Web 3.0 Overview

Whenever a new technology comes along, people first use it to recreate the old ways of doing things. The first photographs were still-lifes and portraits. The first films were of stage plays. The first typefaces looked like calligraphy. The first TV shows were based on radio shows. So it’s no surprise that the Web recreated many familiar documents from the paper world: books, magazines, newspapers, TV shows, reports, radio shows, guides, movies, catalogs, contracts, and other human-readable documents. And we have indexes that help us find the words and phrases they contain.

The indexes try to be smart by implying meaning and context, but they have to guess what they think you are looking for. Ask Google to show you “a map of all the stores in San Francisco that carry maps of New York City.” Google has a lot of the information, but Google has no way to make sense of what you’re asking. Google doesn’t look at the little contextual words “of” and “in”, which in this case are very important. Although today’s search engines get a lot of things right, they don’t have the power to take us into the future.

The world of Web 3.0 is the world of semantics, where every piece of information has a standard meaning that can be understood not just by people but by programs designed to do mundane tasks for us. The standard example of Web 3.0 is scheduling. We all have calendars, but they exist just as text. Our callendars can’t collaborate. When I try to arrange a dinner for 10 people, I have to manually coordinate the schedules of all the people and the available tables at the restaurants I’m willing to consider. That takes hours of going back and forth trying to maximize many variables in our heads and on paper. What I should be able to do is simply list my restaurants in order of preference, specify the preferred dates and times, ask all my friends to do the same, and let software agents work out all the scheduling details. A software agent is just a small program that carries out these kinds of tasks for us, saving the hassle and letting us make the decisions, rather than do the legwork. For that, all these systems need a common language that really doesn’t exist. Yet.

Web 3.0 is much more than just semantics. Another example (of my own) is collaboration. Suppose I’m collaborating with a team of architects and designers on the design of a building. We decide to use X23 lights in all the corridors. The X23 lights (I’m just making them up) are energy efficient and light weight. By spacing them 8 feet apart, we would have to order 4080 lights. Today, we would look in the catalog or online, research the lights, then specify them by name and add their symbols into the drawings. Some one later would have to take our specification and turn it into an order – probably with mistakes after all the various changes in the plans. But if instead we could refer dynamically to their online specifications, then everything known about these lights would go into our design system, so the design system would instantly calculate how much weight they add to the entire building, how much light they would add to each floor, how much energy the building would use when they are on, create models of the lighting at different times of day, etc. And, if we changed to the X45 lights, which are heavier and more expensive but burn cooler and last longer, and space them 9 feet apart, we could see the impact on all these systems immediately. We could run comparisons, seeing how they light the hallways, how much the wiring has to change, how much the lights cost to maintain over time and where the savings are. Then, when we want to order, the system initiates and maintains the order automatically, so that each time we change the number of lights needed per floor, or the number of floors, the system automagically updates the order. As the building is built, the system changes from a design system to a construction system. Each light now has its own destination — right on each light’s box are the exact geospacial coordinates of where it’s to be placed in the building. Eventually, the construction system turns into a maintenance system, and lights are re-ordered when they burn out (or even as they are predicted to burn-out, based on the actual data from other lights in the building and from lights in the same manufacturing run used by other buildings around the country. In this world, everything is not only connected, it speaks an interchangeable language of information, so each system knows what the other system knows.

That’s Web 3.0.