Web 2.0? Web 3.0? What?

One of the more fascinating discussions that occurs with technology folks happens to be the regular "let's discuss buzzwords and what they mean". This sort of impromptu meeting helps everyone to better understand what some of the latest terms that are floating around mean.

In truth many professionals out there really have little idea of what Web 2.0 means. Strange but true. Their organizations have very limited exposure to such tools or so very rarely use them due to issues involving security and governance. These issues tend to be very much at the core of why an organization will or will not adopt something. For example most people acknowledge that being able to discuss a concept between peers within an organization is tremendously effective. In large geographically dispersed companies this is very hard to accomplish. Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis can help improve communication and collaboration if a company chooses to do so.

With many companies still wrestling on how to deal with Web 2.0, now along comes the term Web 3.0. This again seems to be yet another marketing buzzword with little value to an organization. However like many of the terms that preceeded it, this term covers the growing trend associated with significantly different concepts. In my opinion web 2.0 could be called the era of openness, and web 3.0 is going to be era of social relevance and discovery. Simply putting what you knew out onto wikis, blogs, etc. helped to get information and knowledge out to the masses. Yet finding what each individual wanted or needed for a particular problem was still a lot of ad-hoc searching, looking through results, and searching again. So the hunting for things got better because now people were sharing what they had. Yet one problem still remained: how do I get what I really want, right now?

Enter the era of web 3.0. With new paradigms entering into the mix such as those from Twitter, Friendfeed, GetGlue and WolframAlpha, it is clear that people are looking for better ways to find what they want. What many of these new services offer focuses on automating something that humans have been doing for a long time: what do my trusted friends/associates/community think about a topic? When you want a restaurant most people still treat recommendations from those close to them socially far more so than say a random search on Yelp. Similarly, many people wanting to know more about say MySQL would naturally seek out those that they respect professionally and personally for advice about that product. Web 3.0 is attempting to automate and extend the reach of this powerful and naturally understood process.

With these new tools it will become possible to tap into your social network for real time relevant results and interaction. Whether you are at your computer or on your mobile device, you will be able to interact with whom you want, when you want, on topics that are of interest to you. This is tremendously powerful and far different than what has been seen by most individuals and companies.

Imagine being able to tap into different yet knowledgeable social networks within an organization to find the most latest HR updates and what they really mean. Or to compare what various business divisions notice how their customers react to products. Imagine customers seeing not only what their favorite brands are offering but being able to share their likes, dislikes and would-like-to-haves with their friends, family, community and ultimately the companies themselves. These are of course really basic examples but the change would be very profound.

It is not merely marketing or sales that are intrigued with these ideas and concepts, it is the world in general. That is why technologies such as GetGlue, Open Calais, Twitter, FriendFeed and others are growing so fast and garnering so much interest. The resultant growth in these technologies is due to new capabilities they bring for an individual's ability to interact more real-time than ever before in communities based on common interests whether it be a person, a term or a web site. Eventually one could see these new services replacing the prior generational offerings as they have learned to become platforms unto themselves with rich and open APIs that allows others to create new and more exciting experiences for themselves and others. 

So as with anything else the web is evolving. While it may be web2.0, web 3.0, semantic web, social web, or whatever, there is definitely a growing trend to become more social and more relevant in this dimension. 

This creates tremendous opportunities for companies to explore these new approaches and to get ahead of the game so to speak to create value and community for their products and services. Ultimately technology professionals will find themselves once again under tremendous pressures not only to catch up with more of their technical foundation stones, but also for the new challenges that comes with these emerging trends. Some examples that come to mind:

• Governance. This is not simply a matter of roles that have been traditionally viewed but now include social dimensions and value into those equations.
• Social scalability and performance. This is closely akin to internet scalability and performance but driven by social context. How do you prepare yourself to handle growth around a really hot topic? Or even more challenging many hot topics.
• Real time search and discovery. In looking at many of the patterns of use for these new emergent technologies it is clear that real time processing on both active and historical subjects will become challenging. Currently such patterns while similar to large scale 

Hopefully technology professionals will continue to embrace and extend these concepts for their organizations and for their own careers.