People throw around a whole bunch of buzzwords regarding the impending web 3.0. It’s always fun to speculate, isn’t it? In my limited experience of web things1 I came up with my own speculation.
If web one was about “them”, and web two is about “all of us, for them”2, web 3 sounds like it should be about “me”. A return to that thing we used to celebrate called individualism. Something that social networking has kind of taken away from us.
Technologies like OpenID, Jabber and RSS are what’s needed to be able to have your presence where you want it, how you want it, and still be reachable by others. Using standards allows intercommunication more than a locked-down society such as facebook can provide. And we can do this from the comfort of our own site, our own blog, our own corner of the Internet. No, it’s not that complicated to get something running, no matter how tech-illiterate you think you may be.
Why? I mean, we’ve got all this infrastructure, why bother changing things, relearning?
Well, for one, think about what most of these social networks require. You and all your friends need to move ship everytime something new comes along that has some extra feature you can’t get otherwise. If someone’s left behind, well.. there they remain :) The link is broken and you start forgetting they used to be your number one commenter or what have you. Multiple identities spread around, your data in the hands of others. Not that connected.
Take OpenID. You can now establish an online identity3 that you can take wherever you go. Sign into any site or forum, jump into conversations on other people’s blogs, establish a reputation online. It’s centred around you, wherever your homebase may be.
Social networks provide a service, and more and more companies and software houses understand that people need services more than they need static software. But I don’t think my speculated web 3 takes away from services. It’s more of a way to centralize everything, to make it gravitate around your person. Flickr is a damn great photo hosting service - it won’t go away. E-mail won’t either. YouTube or Twitter or Last.fm or any other number of sites/services that do a great job of helping us ‘play’ - they have no reason to go away.
I can hope, right? And I can push for awareness of some of the technologies I think to be great - because, after all, technology is supposed to make everything easier for us.
- I am not against web 2 though I never got into the big social networks like Facebook or MySpace. Some say blogging is web 2 as well, and I’ve been doing this since before we had a buzzword for it [↩]
- The Digg and Facebook models of others’ creating content and you getting paid, I mean [↩]
- Of course, this may or may not have anything to do with your ‘other’, more physical self, if you choose to separate the two [↩]
