Why Is It Still Web 2.0? - Alexia Tsotsis

Tsotsis attends Web 2.0 Summit and wonders why we haven’t started to adopt the term Web 3.0, which she associates with Reid Hoffman’s big data ideas.

Well, for one reason, six dozen other attempts to define Web 3.0 have sputtered and died like the attempt by Jason Calacanis to say that what he was up to at Mohalo was Web 3.0 or the many efforts to say that the semantic web is Web 3.0.

The reality is this:

I personally feel that Web 2.0 has a long way to play before we can advocate jumping onto some new wave. Have we seen the full culmination of the social revolution going on? No, and I think it will be awhile before we do.

Personally, I feel the vague lineaments of something beyond Web 2.0, and they involve some fairly radical steps. Imagine a Web without browsers. Imagine breaking completely away from the document metaphor, or a true blurring of application and information. That’s what Web 3.0 will be, but I bet we will call it something else.

Whatever the cool kids call what they are doing when they shift the metaphor away from what we are doing now won’t be Web 3.0. The ones that invent the next thing won’t count back. They won’t even remember Web 1.0.

Next giant step: social operating systems, which will lead to social networks — and communication through them — becoming the central purpose of the web, not just a bunch of unintegrated applications.