Web 3.0 and the future of social media
Posted on November 22, 2009
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Just spent 80 mins watching this recent webcast of Stephen Fry, Biz Stone (Twitter founder) and Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn founder) discussing the future of social media.
The gist of it was that the internet, and therefore social media, is too organic to figure out where it might go. 80 minutes to agree that they don’t really know. Brilliant.
It was interesting though and the discussion of what it might be. If we talk of Web 1.0 as the first decade of the internet and the increase of mass information to the mass market and Web 2.0 as the rise of social media and user generated content and people making connections with each other, then what is Web 3.0 going to involve?
Looking around the internet we can find various views on what Web 3.0 might entail. Wikipedia talks of a ’semantic web’ where the internet grows intelligence and can begin to analyse the mass of data and data types that is out there or the “finding, sharing and combining of data”. The Times talks of “a web that will be able to connect every aspect of our digital lives – be it a website, an e-mail, or a file on our PC – to every other aspect. It will know, for instance, when you are typing an e-mail, what the subject of the e-mail is, and be able to suggest websites and books as well as documents, photos and videos you have saved that may be relevant to that topic.”
It seems then that the onus is going to be back on the developers. Creating back end systems that could even go as far as “natural language search”. I’m not going to argue, but surely the key to allowing the internet to stay accessible to everyone and by everyone is going to include open platforms where user aren’t restricted by brand or format?
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