Summary
- Web 1.0 is about 1-way information sharing.
- Web 2.0 is about bi-directional participation and collaboration.
- Web 3.0 is about the semantic web and ubiquitous computing.
- Enterprises always lag behind consumer adoption on all leading web technologies.
- There’s a long overlapping period between each of these phases due to the laggards.
Long Version
Web 1.0 is about information sharing. Web sites are built and information are put up. Usually web 1.0 has the “build it and they will come” type of mentality, and it’s mostly a one way communication. The poster children of Web 1.0 are companies like Yahoo, Ebay and Amazon.
Web 2.0 is about participation and collaboration; it’s about bi-directional communication. Social media such as blogs, wikis, and forums are huge in the Web 2.0 era. Post children of Web 2.0 are Wikipedia, Facebook, and MySpace. Web 2.0 has the “build it and encourage others to come and participate” mentality. The expectation of “they will come” is not as prominent. Most of these sites work hard to create a core community and get others to join.
Notice how both 1.0 and 2.0 are both about users going to these sites. These sites require users to fill in their profiles, browse around and understand what the site is all about. In essence, these site require the users to understand the web and go to the web.
Web 3.0 is going to change that. The notion of Semantic Web, which was first described by Tim-Berners Lee, is about having the web understand its users and go to the users, wherever they are and whatever they are using (Ubiquitous Computing). The web will carry enough meta data so that it’s self-describing. The web will know where its users are (by communicating with the devices that the users are carrying wherever they go.) The web can go to the users and present/share the relevant information and allow the users to collaborate and participate with the web as well as other users.
The technologies behind Web 3.0 are quite long, including different ways to describe the web (RDF, OWL, etc), different ways to connect and locality awareness (cell phone, portal computing devices, etc), cloud or web services (cloud computing, SaaS), etc. The piece that’s not as well understood and developed is the Semantic Web. It will be a while before websites will start describing their information in a structured manner.
Like most trends, leading edge technology will first be used in the consumer space, then slowly migrate to the enterprises. So there’s usually a pretty long overlapping period between the X.0 phases. For example, universities and consumers started building websites way before the enterprises realize the benefit of using the web to communicate. Same as Web 2.0, the collaboration tools such as blogs, wikis, forums, communities are first popularized in the consumer world, and it’s just now that enterprises are starting to adopt them. This enterprise adoption trend is referred to as Enterprise 2.0.
This again will happen with 3.0. The consumer space is now attempting to to do a lot of mobile computing, which is the start of ubiquitous computing. Cloud computing and SaaS have also been more prevalent in the consumer space. For example, Facebook, Google and others have been offering web-based services for sometime now. The enterprise space are just now starting to wake up to it. Some of the key obstacles to enterprise adoption are data governance, SLA and integration issues. However, companies like Salesforce.com are trying to change that.
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