Summary
If you ever wonder whether "Web 2.0" is just a fad, or what comes after Web 2.0, O'Reilly editor Nat Torkington's essay provides a light-hearted history of that future, with descriptions of IE 13, Firefox X, WebVista and, of course, Web 3.0.
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As far as buzzwords go, "Web 2.0," originally coined by publisher and entrepreneur Tim O'Reilly, has proven a keeper. What "Web 2.0" means is perhaps less important than the fact that the phrase provides fodder for articles, conferences, and lively discussion. And it also has been the subject of intense research, with one of the perennial research questions being, Just what comes after Web 2.0?
O'Reilly editor and author Nat Torkington ventures to answer that question in great detail in his recent blog post, The Future of Web 2.0. The post is an amusing read, whether or not you agree with his predictions about Firefox X, IE 13, WebVista, WebXP, and similar fancies. Here is a snippet:
2009: Semantic web researchers develop a deductive calculator that solves arbitrary problems using the math knowledge encoded in the web. It would be heavily adopted by school children to solve their homework but it will require the problems be expressed in TeX markup and the only papers to have been expressed in the format will be from a obscure Russian grad school that specializes in the geometric expression of information theory results in Riemann spaces. The imminent arrival of Web 3.0 will be predicted...
2013: A long delay will pass without much innovation, during which time Firefox 6 will achieve near-complete market penetration before the arrival of malware targeting it. The Mozilla team, caught between bug fixes and new features, will struggle to finish Firefox 7. Their solution will be to acquire Opera and release it on top of OpenSolaris as an "Enterprise-ready Firefox". The resulting fragmentation of the web (thought to be over after IE 13 was retired when Microsoft turned into a pure services company in 2012) results in chaos. Mozilla will promise but never-deliver a web portability tool dubbed "No Trouble", and in its honour wags will dub this era "Web NT".
Torkington's predictions lead all the way up to the year 2022.
Reading this, I'm pessimistic. I think, come 2020, the fraternity of web media gurus will still not understand the value of a standard format for publishing databases on the web (i.e the semantic web). They will keep on trying to stuff everything into the UI, according to their visual minds, but still be thrilled by such revolutionary ideas as keyword tagging. There will be no Web 3.0. There will be a Library 1970 with a coolness plugin to support the collective intelligence of virtual library users in choosing their ingenious thought leaders.
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