So Is Web 3.0 Already Here? - Sarah Lacey

Oh god, not another attempt to label something as Web 3.0’! Reid Hoffman and Tim O’Reilly are smart guys, but why flog the Web 3.0 angle?

Back a few years ago, Jason Calacanis tried to dub what he was doing at Mahalo as Web 3.0, and I wrote this:

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.

The new new deserves a good name. This new world arising from the collision of a number of semi-independent trends:

• social as the primary mode of human-computer interaction (meaning that human-human interaction is primary, not human to computer),
• ubiquitous connectivity,
• touch mobiles,
• and post-desktop, internet-based operating systems.

So, I will start referring to this as SoCoMoIO (pronounced ‘so-co-mo-eye-oh’). But that’s just shorthand, not a sweeping terminological handwave.

And I think the meme of using ordinal numbers is generally tired, and never has caught on for any number past 2.0, anyway. By the time we get to what might realistically be a third generation, no one remembers what preceded 1.0.

Whatever this new new winds up being called, I don’t think it will be defined by mounds of data being pored over by algorithmic ‘engines of meaning’ (as Bruce Sterling said).

The next decade will be defined by the enormous social leverage cracked open by SoCoMoIO: this will dwarf the the rise of the web to date, and it will make what we are doing today look like the foothills overshadowed by the Rockies.

But no one will call it Web 3.0.