Web 2.0 - Web 3.0

Web 3.0

Definitions of Web 3.0 vary greatly. Some believe its most important features are the Semantic Web and personalization. Focusing on the computer elements, Conrad Wolfram has argued that Web 3.0 is where "the computer is generating new information", rather than humans.

Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, considers the Semantic Web an "unrealisable abstraction" and sees Web 3.0 as the return of experts and authorities to the Web. For example, he points to Bertelsmann's deal with the German Wikipedia to produce an edited print version of that encyclopedia. CNN Money's Jessi Hempel expects Web 3.0 to emerge from new and innovative Web 2.0 services with a profitable business model.

Futurist John Smart, lead author of the Metaverse Roadmap, defines Web 3.0 as the first-generation Metaverse (convergence of the virtual and physical world), a web development layer that includes TV-quality open video, 3D simulations, augmented reality, human-constructed semantic standards, and pervasive broadband, wireless, and sensors. Web 3.0's early geosocial (Foursquare, etc.) and augmented reality (Layar, etc.) webs are an extension of Web 2.0's participatory technologies and social networks (Facebook, etc.) into 3D space. Of all its metaverse-like developments, Smart suggests Web 3.0's most defining characteristic will be the mass diffusion of NTSC-or-better quality video to TVs, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices, a time when "the internet swallows the television." Smart considers Web 3.0 to be the Semantic Web and in particular, the rise of statistical, machine-constructed semantic tags and algorithms, driven by broad collective use of conversational interfaces, perhaps circa 2020. David Siegel's perspective in Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web, 2009, is consonant with this, proposing that the growth of human-constructed semantic standards and data will be a slow, industry-specific incremental process for years to come, perhaps unlikely to tip into broad social utility until after 2020.

According to some Internet experts, Web 3.0 will allow the user to sit back and let the Internet do all of the work for them. Rather than having search engines gear towards your keywords, the search engines will gear towards the user.