Boinblog | Ramblings from a french entrepreneur

Jason Calcanis started an interesting debate about the web’s future and gave his definition of what Web 3.0 could be.

“Web 2.0 services are now the commoditized platform, not the final product. In a world where a social network, wiki, or social bookmarking service can be built for free and in an instant, what’s next?

Web 2.0 services like digg and YouTube evolve into Web 3.0 services with an additional layer of individual excellence and focus.

A version of digg where experts check the validity of claims, corrected errors, and restated headlines to be more accurate would be the Web 3.0 version.

[…]

Also of note, is what Web 3.0 leaves behind. Web 3.0 throttles the “wisdom of the crowds” from turning into the “madness of the mobs” we’ve seen all to often, by balancing it with a respect of experts.”

I must say his vision of the next web is pretty seducing for me, mainly because my upcoming project, Bixmix, is pretty much about this: taking a bottom-up approach to building a semantic web using Web 2.0 tools, and using a dual human-experts/technology approach to do this.

When Tim O’Reilly defined Web 2.0, one of the most understated (and still vastly mis-understood) caracteristic was the ‘Web as a platform’, and today, the platform is here, waiting to be used, just like an OS asking for software. Countless API, RSS, microformats, OpenSocial, low cost semantic publishing platform… every single component to built Calanis’ vision of Web 3.0 is available, most of them being free.

Recently, Dapper and OpenCalais released high end semantic tools to leverage any content and start building a semantic web (still in a bottom-up approach). So what are we waiting for? Actualy, nobody seems to be waiting, and chances are we will see many initiatives to build this Web 3.0 in the months to come.

Another very interesting point in Calanis’ definition is that the ‘wisdom of crowds’ will come to an end and that experts will either leverage this wisdom of crowds or replace the crowd. Of course, Mahalo comes to mind, but many different ways to mix web 2.0 technologies and human expertise will arise and offer fantastic new services tomorow.

Web 1.0 was a warmup, Web 2.0 was abut building a platform, Web 3.0 is about building on Web 2.0… Makes sense, does’nt it?