There are many suggestions as to what Web 3.0 will be. Here is one from Google’s Eric Schmidt that describes it in terms of applications structured based on simple Web services in The Cloud:
Sure.. I’ll accept that. But what about Web 4.0? Here are my thoughts…
Web 1.0 helped connect people to information.
Web 2.0 helped connect people to other people through social networks.
Web 3.0 will help connect Web services in The Cloud to form meaningful situational applications
Web 4.0 will help further connect the physical world to the internet
The Web is often compared to the human brain in its workings. Google, the search engine of the web, was designed around cognitive scientific theory, with its creators fluent in artificial intelligence. If the internet is the world’s brain, then in order to create a Smarter Planet, we need to connect the brain to the physical world. I always thought IBM was behind when it came to Web 2.0… in reality they are simply looking ahead with Web 3.0 (SOA) and now Web 4.0 (Smarter Planet).
To accomplish this sensory devices will be required that can translate physical qualities into data, and log the data chronologically through feeds. This is nothing new. Weather stations provided this type of data for many years now. But we’ll see it more and more in our daily physical lives, here for an example is a plant tweeting its soils moisture condition:
http://twitter.com/startrkplant
…and the data will become more readily available, immediately, through the internet, The Cloud, in the form of feeds, and processed and abstracted intelligently through layers of Web services or pipes:
Yahoo! Pipes
… the same way our brain processes, translates, and abstracts our own sensory data retrieved from our eyes, nose, hands, tongue, ears, etc.
I may expand on this thought more in future posts… till then it will be stuck in my head.
