Metafluence

Web 3.0

Sometimes when I use the term Web 2.0 with someone unfamiliar with the term, they’ll ask what is Web 3.0? I posted a few months ago about what I think the next iteration of the web will be, and I didn’t think we’d call it Web 3.0. I speculated that we’d call it the Rich Web because I think it is a new layer on top of Web 2.0 not a revision of it, but now I’m not so sure.

The Rich Web

I feel pretty good about the prediction for this term because I see a lot of evidence that has unfolded supporting it. The term rich internet applications is now all but ubiquitous. The race to be the emergent leader for the rich internet application development platform of the next generation apps has heated up now that Microsoft has thrown what appears to be a good hat in the ring. Microsoft inadvertently entered the world of rich internet application development platforms out of a need for a better tool to mock up their operating system. Vista was years behind schedule because the UI designers created everything in Shockwave and by the time the software engineers got ahold of it, there was a huge disconnect between what was possible and what was mocked-up (and publicly shared). The project that began with an obvious Flash rip-off name, Sparkle, is now known as Silverlight. Michael Arrington thinks Silverlight is a very viable contender and recommends that developers begin paying attention to this language. Adobe isn’t waiting for the threat to become real, they have already started working to integrate Flash at the browser level and open the code to the Mozilla Foundation.

There’s more to the Rich Web than the battle between Silverlight and Flash. In fact, the Internet’s merge with T.V. is probably a more significant factor. The reason is because T.V. still holds all of the largest advertising dollars despite it’s continuing decline in consumption (most teens spend more time in the Internet than T.V., and the programs they do watch are generally on YouTube). As the money from television finally moves onto the Internet it will blow open the money spent on developing the Rich Web.

Client and cloud services

Another hallmark of the next generation of web will be the increased demand on cloud services. Not too long ago Steve Jobs and Bill Gates participated in a joint interview for the D5 conference. For me, the biggest takeaway from that piece was their discussion about the permanent place in the world for client services even as we increase our demand for cloud services. Nevertheless, we are going to see an ever increasing use of interconnected applications via the Internet to accomplish aggregated tasks. A great example of this are sites like PageFlakes, iGoogle, NetVibes, and more. Users pull together features from many websites into a single page where they can make more effective use of their screen real estate. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, answered a question about Web 3.0 at the Seoul Digital Forum that does a great job of explaining the future of cloud services:

Web 3.0 Structure

Web 2.0 was originally coined by the O’Reilly Group to explain the new wave of websites and relating technologies that are fueling our current Internet economy. Their chart showed that Web 2.0 essentially replaced Web 1.0 as seen below:

The next generation web is going to be less of a replacement of Web 2.0 and more of an additional layer. There’s nothing broken about the Static Web’s world of HTML, CSS, AJAX, and XML. It’s just that humans want more rich media and they want it to be more than simply embedded elements on a static “page”. However, two of the most important advantages that we get from text-based content is accessibility and machine readability, which mostly matters to search. Therefore I think we’ll see a layered effect where rich media is served on top of static media so that an experience can degrade elegantly for users with minimum functionality devices, users with disabilities, and machine interpretability. In order to allow the rich experiences of things like video, I think we’ll see a layer between the static web and the Rich Web known as the translation layer. The translation layer will be software such as speech-to-text conversion, facial recognition, and more. Here’s a visualization of how I think it will appear:

Speaking of layers, we’re not too far off from a major overhaul to the foundational layers of the Internet. To quote the Stanford Clean Slate project:

We believe that the current Internet has significant deficiencies that need to be solved before it can become a unified global communication infrastructure. Further, we believe the Internet’s shortcomings will not be resolved by the conventional incremental and ‘backward-compatible’ style of academic and industrial networking research. The proposed program will focus on unconventional, bold, and long-term research that tries to break the network’s ossification. To this end, the research program can be characterized by two research questions: “With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?”, and “How should the Internet look in 15 years?” We will measure our success in the long-term: We intend to look back in 15 years time and see significant impact from our program.

One of the biggest issues is that we’re running out of addresses on the Internet. If it wasn’t for networks creating their own addresses behind a single IP address, we’d already be out of addresses. The most relevant project to date tackling this issue is IPv6. That project seeks to upgrade the Internet from IPv4, which is nearly 20 years old now, to IPv6. In addition to that project, Internet2 is also working to increase the speed of the Internet’s backbone and improve and introduce new protocols.

So, in addition to a new layer of rich media presented on top of semantically labeled static content, this next generation web will also have a new chassis and roads.

What will Web 3.0 look like?

Now, the question is, what will it look like? ;) If Web 2.0 is marked by bright colors, gradients, and plastic shine; what will Web 3.0’s signature look and feel be? The elements of Web 2.0 design exploit the nature of the displays and the CSS standards, so if you ask me what’s coming, I think we’ll see higher definition screens, which means we can make type smaller and therefore use more scale. I also think we’ll see more typefaces once we can link to a font and not rely on the client’s local font library. Of course, animation will be the largest differentiator and therefore a seriously increased demand for motion graphics.

Conclusion

When I made the original prediction that we’d call the next era the Rich Web, I didn’t take into account the bevy of other key elements that will be converging at the same time. This leads me to believe that it is will be perceived as a new wave of interaction online worthy of a moniker that captures all of it. Since the term Web 2.0 is largely accepted and widely used, there’s a pretty good chance that we’ll call this era Web 3.0.