Web 1.0 - the boom of information publishing

This is the boom for publishing information on the net from a few big players, and searching of information from those publishers.
e.g. Yahoo, CNet, Google, MSN, Excite

• CMS
• Ecommerce
• Webring
• 3 levels drop list navigation
• ASP, J2ee
• Open source projects were still babies - drupal, phpBB

Web 2.0 - the boom of The Long Tail information

This is the boom for self publishing from the masses. This is also a boom for web applications that stores and manage users’ specific tasks. People are able to use the web to replace desktop application because the network speed has increased dramatically and browser technologies have stablised.
e.g. myspace, blogger, flickr, delicious, ta-da list, basecamp, youtube, odeo.

• blog
• socialnetworks
• folksonomy
• ajax, Ruby on Rails
• Open source projects matured - phpBB, wordpress, drupal
• Aggregators are still babies - bloglines, google reader, rojo …

Web 3.0 - the boom of intelligent information

This, I predict, will be the boom of personalisation and aggregation of content. This will be the start of an artificial intelligence era. We have spent a decade on making is easy to publish information to the internet and its about time to harvest those information intelligently. Information overload is a common problem.

The fame might go back to the big players because they have the resource and user base to aggregate content intelligently. With storage cost being close to zero and bandwidth cost coming down, there will be an overload of content in different media - mp3, video, pictures. Yahoo, Google, Microsoft will certainly put out new functionalities for search and aggregating all the media.
e.g. Google new search, Riya - facial recognition, Findory - personalised news

With the cost of mobile data going down and mobile technology stablelising, there’ll be alot more mobile applications just like the web 2.0 app.

• aggregators
• web services - Gdata, rss, REST
• personalisation
• mobile
• multimedia
• web development matures - .net, j2ee, rails
• mobile development begins - flashlite, symbian, windows mobile
• Natural language processing

Will semantic web ever take off?

I doubt there’ll ever be a time when everyone have the patience to build valid XML/RDF data on the internet. The mundane task of defining information into chunks is justÂÂ inhuman and the work should be pushed to the intelligence of the machines.ÂÂ Machines will get intelligent enough to understand the context of the content rather than us putting it into meta data. There could still be some use for rdf but it won’t be the common way of using the web.