Tim O’Reilly on Web 3.0

Tim O’Reilly, one of the fathers of the Web 2.0 meme, joins the fray on Web 3.0 by debunking the heavy-handed efforts of Jason Calacanis to align the meme-from-hell with his Mahalo startup, and Nova Spivack’s more altruistic attempts to link the meme to something meaningful:

[from Today’s Web 3.0 Nonsense Blogstorm]

Nova Spivack started it by describing the as-yet-to-be-revealed Radar Networks as Web 3.0, but now Jason Calacanis has his competing definition, neatly tailored to fit his own mahalo.com. The resulting storm of derision is entirely to be expected.

[…]

I’d say that for “Web 3.0” to be meaningful we’ll need to see a serious discontinuity from the previous generation of technology. That might be another bust and resurgence, or more likely, it will be something qualitatively different. I like Stowe Boyd’s musings on the subject:

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.

I’m with Stowe. There’s definitely something new brewing, but I bet we will call it something other than Web 3.0.

Well, leaving aside all the folks sharpening their knives to butcher the fatted calf that they all long for Web 3.0 to be, there still might be something worthwhile in wondering about what is over the far horizon. Hey, Tim, let’s do a conference on that!