Web 2.0 goes way beyond rounded boxes, icons that look like bubbles and really nice gradations. It’s become more about online conversations. The sites where this is happening are like a great human conversation compilers in that they allow for people to connect in a infinite amount of ways, all through one place. They allow many-to-many conversations, many-to-one conversations, one-to-many conversations and one-to-one conversations. Many of these site also allow people to have conversations with their data. An example would be a site like Mint.com where users can manipulate their already existing financial information to show them better ways to spend, save and generally understand their money. All this really means that the scale at which people communicate with each other and with their online data is becoming so big, it is becoming the majority of how people use the internet. Conversely people are less and less passively surfing or reading online. We cannot predict how this will continue other than to know that it will continue to be more and more true and continue to evolve.
Web 3.0 to me is all about the data. All data. Everything from census polls to medical and scientific research to personal shopping habits to search engine results to traffic information to weather patterns to social media conversations to EVERYTHING. I am really excited about the time when this concept reaches critical mass. That’s when the internet will really take on meaning and power. That is when all of the stuff that everyone knows out there will start to be shared and compared and crunched and processed as one data set. That is when the internet becomes one giant computer for everything and everyone.
Depending on how open people are with their information, we will start to see all sorts of people creating mashups of seemingly unrelated information and displaying it in really interesting ways. A great example of software that’s built for this is Hans Rosling’s Gapminder which was picked up by Google in March of 2007. It’s freely available to use which makes it poised to take advantage of what I think is coming. The knowledge and learnings that will pour out of this data - if it’s handled right - will be astounding. The trends and correlations between things we can’t even begin to see now will open our eyes and, I believe, launch an age of discovery explosion.
I have always believed that information is gold. In the last few years I have had to revise that to “information is free, making sense of it is gold.”
Video via David Gillespie.
