Web 2.0? Try 3.0

(I'm writing a periodic column for the Financial Times. Here's the one that appeared on Wednesday.)

So World Wide Web 2.0 is now upon us?

From my perspective, what’s happening feels more like Web 3.0 - and it’s just a hint of what’s yet to come.

We are barely a decade and a half into the existence of the web, the network of networks intertwined around our ever-smaller planet. The elemental units haven’t changed much, but the web’s functions have evolved in a dramatic way.

The first web was fairly static, and it was basically a read-only affair. For the most part, we’d simply download text and images from remote sites that were updated periodically with new text and graphics.

There were hints, early on, of what was to come.

When we used a commerce site such as Amazon, or a search site such as AltaVista, the computer on the other end would do some calculating; we were using their machines remotely to do work for us.

The first big shift - to what I prefer to consider version 2 - came when the web became more of a read-write system. This was a huge change, and it’s still in progress.

Now, writing online wasn’t exactly new. E-mail has always been about writing.

Bulletin board systems and Usenet “newsgroups,” which got their start in the 1980s, were places where people could write what they thought. Chat and forum applications helped turn America Online into a powerhouse, and message boards became a popular web function in the 1990s.

Personal websites from companies such as GeoCities (later acquired by Yahoo) helped everyday people put up their own sites quickly. Such pages, however, tended toward dullness and infrequent updating.

The big change in the read-write sphere came about because of applications such as weblogs, the personal journals that put newer material at the top, and wikis, sites on which anyone can edit any page. Not only could people make their own sites, but they could update them easily and rapidly.

Blogs have been especially important in the world of the read-write web.

They are far more than the “what I ate for breakfast” diaries of cliche; they have become a key part of a growing, complex global conversation.

We are moving quickly beyond text and pictures in this version of the web, to audio and video.

The cost of the gear we need to make high-quality content is plummeting while the power and ease of use continue to grow.

And then comes the latest web. This is where it gets really interesting.

The emerging web is one in which the machines talk as much to each other as humans talk to machines or other humans. As the net is the rough equivalent of a computer operating system, we’re learning how to program the web itself.

An operating system offers programmers something called an "applications programming interface," or API. The APIs are essentially shortcuts for programmers who want to use underlying capabilities of the operating system, such as displaying text or printing, and they help products interoperate with each other.

The electric outlet in the wall is, to stretch the metaphor, an API. A manufacturer making a product that uses electricity can equip it with a plug that fits into the socket.

A variety of web APIs, offered by companies such as Google, Yahoo! Amazon and others, is letting programmers create new kinds of applications by wiring together various functions into what are called “web services”.

E-commerce has always been a web service, but when we can mix and match from various sites, by pulling specific information from their rich databases, we are moving into an entirely new sphere.

From my perspective, this gets most intriguing when people start wiring web services together to create entirely new kinds of applications.

That’s what Erik Benson, a programmer and blogger, did when he created a site called All Consuming, which shows what bloggers are saying about specific books.

Valdis Krebs, using web APIs to analyse book-buying habits, unsurprisingly found little overlap among people who buy books with a left-leaning perspective with those who buy right-wing volumes.

If the web is becoming an operating system in its own right, can anyone monopolise it the way Microsoft did on personal computers? As long as the web’s basic functions remain open, the threat is more theoretical than real.

Let’s hope it stays that way.

Comments

[Joe Buck]

Dan, I think you missed the zero'th version of the web, the version that we had before the release of the first Netscape. It was also a highly participatory web, and new users were encouraged to produce their own "home pages" (and most did). In some ways, we are returning to that era.

Marc Andressen's 1993-era list of "What's new on the Web" was basically a blog, in hand-coded HTML; entries were dated, with new entries appearing at the top. A large number of people who had access were in universities, and lots of people got their feet wet coding their own HTML. Experimentation was rampant, and the business world had not yet invaded. Web pages had grey backgrounds and simple layout, and almost anyone with any interest could quickly make a page or two.

[Jeremy Zawodny]

Your link to Yahoo's APIs actually goes to Google.

I think you meant to use http://developer.yahoo.net/ in there.

[Dan Gillmor]

Jeremy, sorry...fixed.

[Neil T.]

Hey, congrats on the FT gig. Nice to know that they got someone who knows what he's talking about :)

[Dan Gillmor]

Joe, excellent points.

[Ran Talbott]

"Such pages, however, tended toward dullness and infrequent updating."

Or, to put it another way: Such pages tended to fulfill the original vision of the Web, which was to allow absolutely anyone to publish information that might otherwise be lost to the public, in a way that allows it to be searched, indexed, bookmarked, and linked to related information. And accessed by absolutely anybody who's looking for it.

As opposed to today's "dynamic" Web, where you need a broadband connection, an industrial-grade graphics workstation, and more plug-ins than a Roman orgy just to look up the atomic weight of molybdenum. Which you can't bookmark because the URL is a dynamically-generated conglomeration of the hostname, your session ID, the phase of the moon, and the bra size of the webmaster's current girlfriend, that doesn't point to a page that's actually stored on disk somewhere.

As nifty as it is that people have found new ways to make use of HTTP and HTML, we seem to be slowly losing the very concept of "publishing" as "preserving a record of today for future recall". Instead of being the equivalent of an "address" where one can "go" to retrieve information, the URL has become a "magic incantation" that instructs a distant server to perform some action that may or may not produce the same results as the last time it was used.

In some ways, that's good: it's nice to be able to use the same mechanism to say "Bring up the latest edition of Dan's blog", "Show me the current pressure and temperature readings of Injection Molder #7", and "Display page 7 from our company's 2003 annual report".

But there's some very scary Orwellian potential here, as well as the risk of exacerbating the Digital Divide by constantly ramping up the minimal platform needed to access much of the web. Those librarians Dan mentioned lately shouldn't be the only ones worried about making sure that a large percentage of online content remains "dull" and "static".

[adamsj]

"more plug-ins than a Roman orgy"

God, Ran, I'm jealous--that's a brilliant turn of phrase.

[Ross Mayfield]

Was odd to have this copy of FT on the plane to Europe and have the IT section seem like the Merc

[jim wilde]

Hi Dan,

I love this stuff - xml, webservices, oss. We took a cms, drupal, and added several of our own webservices to ceate a service - Ideascape - that interacts with del.icio.us and turns knowledge and idea management as well as open innovation upside down.

[Joshua Porter]

My favorite Web 2.0 (3.0) app is the Google/Craigslist app written by Paul Rademacher. This is a great example of bringing in the content from 2 services via their APIs and creating a new, powerful interface that couldn't have existed in earlier versions of the web.

[mahlon]

I'd argue that the catalyst for moving from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 was relevant search, driven by Google's innovation. The price we pay for the participatory, read-write Web has a much lower signal-to-noise ratio than the one-way, read-only Web 1.0, and before Google, it nearly collapsed under its own weight. Do you remember trying to find a needle in a haystack with AltaVista? But through relevant search, we now routinely filter out most of the noise.

On Google's first-quarter analyst call, Larry Page said, "What we've done for the Web, Google aims to do for television." If you think about it, today's read-only, one-way TV has a lot in common with Web 1.0. What will TV be like if Google can do with TV what they did for the Web? I have a few thoughts on Google TV, and would love comments.

Of course, Google's got much more competition now than they did 10 years ago, and there are many good competing ideas for TV 2.0. But who else has the scale to make this work?

[Stéphane LEE]

Using web services for aggregating tags : Guten tag (RSS included).

Enjoy !

[Matt]

I've got a different opinion on things. I see web 2.0 as more advanced, websites as services, tagging, social mixing, etc.

I see web 3.0 as being more of what's coming -- rich web frameworks like rico, dojo, backbase, etc., all providing ways for a new breed of web applications to actually accomplish the "browser as a platform" promise we heard so much about in the web1.0 days.

[nick botulism]

thanks for writing this. the term "web 3.0" makes more sense to me than "web 2.0". the term "web 2.0" irritates me and gets my hackles up, because it implies that we are on the brink of the first major change in the web. "web 3.0" recognizes that the web has already been going through a lot of changes. more accurate, less hubristic.