Waiting for Web 3.0

Paul Graham has been on an essay-writing rampage lately, with a couple of recent venture capital-related posts that I’ve been planning to comment on (and will do so soon). His latest piece, however, is on a different (and highly topical) subject: whether there is any substance to the term “Web 2.0”.

Let me say first of all that Paul is spot on in lamenting the dearth of geeks at the Web 2.0 conference in October. I entitled my talk there “Transforming Firefox into a Web 2.0 Development Platform” with the expectation that the conference would be a teeming nerdfest, but a large proportion of the audience seemed baffled. Note to self: next time, lighter on the TLAs, heavier on the big fonts and purtee colors.

Paul then proceeds to eviscerate his own contention that “Web 2.0″ might be meaningless by laying out one of the clearest and most thorough definitions I’ve seen. (That’s a compliment, by the way. I’m sick of being told that my Peer Pressure persona comes across as a crotchety old man. I’m a crotchety young man, dammit!) His conclusion: Web 2.0 has substance because it’s a web that works. But he regrets that we feel the need for a special term just to point out that something isn’t broken anymore.

But isn’t that a proud tradition in the tech industry? Actually, the cliche is that nothing ever works until the third version. So not only do I still like “Web 2.0″ as a coinage, I think we should be on the lookout for Web 3.0. In fact, I’d like to think that a lot of the ideas we are developing at AllPeers are targeting a future generation of web applications, where users have a proper identity and the borders blur between client and server. The web’s still a baby, after all. Okay, at ten years old it’s maybe more of an obnoxious pre-adolescent. You get my point.

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4 Comments »

1. Can you explain your ideas on users haveing a “proper identity”?

   Or maybe at lease point me to some articles?

   Comment by Daniel VanMilligan — 11/23/2005 @ 9:08 pm

2. Daniel - by this I mean that a user has a universal identity of some sort that can be leveraged by different websites and web services, rather than having to create many different identities for different purposes.

   For more info, you might want to check out the Identity 2.0 meme.

   Comment by Matt — 11/24/2005 @ 1:03 pm

3. Paul Graham on Web 2.0

   I just read the Web 2.0 essay by Paul Graham. All his essays are excellent but this one is a must read. When I said that web 2.0 is more social than architectural thing I had in mind the democracy, and not dissing users. I’ll not quote anything more -…

   Trackback by Radovan Janecek: Nothing Impersonal — 11/25/2005 @ 11:45 am

4. […] or to your church. And if you really want to go down the rabbit-hole, read up on Web 3.0 here and here and here, or just run a Google search and enjoy. […]

   Pingback by finding Monsuun » Blog Archive » a quickie on Web 2.0 — 12/9/2005 @ 11:49 pm

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