I’m really into numbers and comparing things. Really. I also like to wonder about how things are going to be in the future. Or soon. Depends on how you look at it, I guess. Just recently I heard about internet 1.0 being behind us, and internet 2.0 being here. I thought : ‘hey that’s cool, they just upgraded internet.’ A few days later, I read a post that said everybody was talking about 2.0, but in fact there’s already a 3.0 version. So I was wondering what this was about. And then I started to think about how it could become. Then I thought it’d be funny to mix some news items with these future thoughts so I took two stories and started to ‘be creative’ with them.
Let’s start from the beginning. The 1.0 version of internet. To my knowledge, the protocol for this version has been [documented by the w3c] in the February 15th, 2005 recommendation : “Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Fundamentals”. I don’t think it’s wrong to say that internet 1.0 is the web as it used to be. Internet-only. The only way to collect data was by means of a personal computer, later on shrunken to a laptop or desktop computer. The way the data was encrypted was more or less conform a coding language. (HTML, JS, PHP,ASP,…) Internet 1.0 still exists, and will stay alive, because apparently internet upgrades are sort of like Microsoft’s upgrades: in the end it covers it all. It just takes some upgrades. But the old ones still count. There’s no ‘override’.
Sort of related : the [Web 1.0 summit on Flickr] + [HTML 2.0 (September 22nd,1995)]
Last year in October there was a conference about Internet 2.0 or Web 2.0, which is seen as the birth of “The Web as Platform,” and from then on people started exploring how the Web has developed into a robust platform for innovation across many media and devices – from mobile to television, telephone to search. The conference has its second edition this year. [Tune in] for more info.
Through [IrishEyes] I read about a [Tim Bray] who says 2.0 is just a ‘faux meme’ and a ‘vacuous marketing hype’ and that actually, some are already on the 3.0 edition. Tim O’Reilly replies to him at [O'Reilly Radar], defending the 2.0 whole idea :
“While being completely right in the details (we are quite arguably on 3.0 or even 8.0 if we’re thinking about the internet compared to other software versioning), Tim is completely wrong about the big picture. Memes are almost always “marketing hype” — bumper stickers is a better way to say it — but they tend to catch on only if they capture some bit of the zeitgeist. The reason that the term “Web 2.0″ has been bandied about so much since Dale Dougherty came up with it a year and a half ago in a conference planning session (leading to our Web 2.0 Conference) is because it does capture the widespread sense that there’s something qualitatively different about today’s web.”
“[...] Web 2.0 is the era when people have come to realize that it’s not the software that enables the web that matters so much as the services that are delivered over the web.”
So I’m glad we’ve sorted this out. The count ends at 2.0, officially – for now.
I’m going to cut some various news items and base a ‘web 3.0 theory’ on them, just for fun.
From Andrew Kantor from the USA TODAY, through [Yahoo!News] :
[...]“This replaces the current method, in which you hook ye olde PowerBook to a cell phone and dial up a modem in the newsroom.
What’s funny is that, as clunky as the old system was, it let you file from any spot that had cell phone service. Sure, the connection was slow and the procedure awkward, but it worked. The new Windows/Wi-Fi system is a lot slicker and faster, but because Wi-Fi only has a range of about 300 feet, you need to find a hotspot to file. “[...]
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Kids will get Wi-Fi hotspot scanners as a present for their 6th birtday, or for the first day at school. They will be tagged by hobby, diaper-size or loudness to then become indexed by GoogleSchoolSearch and IntelliRanked on correct answers throughout the educational learning process.
Students will be urged to return to their GeoLocation immediately or else they will have to
video-conference the principal through the interactive blackboard in their classroom.
Penalties will be under the form of the inplant of a small chip that acts as a device
disruptor, thus blocking all electronical stuff to work when they touch it. That way, they can’t enjoy their portable gadgets anymore. The chip disolves in the human body, after a certain time. (let’s say: three days).
Houses will be designed and decorated with [WiFi blocking wallpaper]. Then there’s things like [Spyguard], a transparent film that blocks any and all WiFi signals from leaking out through your windows. People that don’t do it will be sued for [Electronic Harassement], and people will crave for [SignalJammers] to get some ‘real’ clean air.
***
From Antone Gonsalves at TechWeb, through [Yahoo!News] :
[...] “Once installed, the application, which is launched through an icon embedded in the browser, lets users search for product prices from multiple retailers. If a shopper is looking for a product on a site, then the toolbar will automatically ask if the person wants to see listings from other vendors.” [...] “With Dealio, you won’t have to change your normal shopping behavior. Just shop at your favorite Web sites as usual. When you view a product page, Dealio will automatically search stores to find you the lowest price for the exact product.” [...]
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Vendio’s [Dealio] Toolbar is something, when applied to mobile search, that could affect many consumers and their buying patterns. Imaging you’re standing in a store, and see something you like. You enter it in your Google Mobile Search and have a DealioMobile installed (yet to be invented). Based on your GeoLocation Google will return sponsored stores in the hood at walking distance – customly set by user ;) – that offer the exact same item, but cheaper. Bing!
A little while ago, I posted on [InsideGoogle] a story about [The GPS Shopping List] which in fact is PlaceMail, by Pam Ludford. Suppose you could combine PlaceMail with the Dealio tool and [GoogleMobile]. That would look like this : Mom needs milk, so inserts the alert in the network. Then PlaceMail googles the item (milk, in this case) locally and returns stores that are then compared with a Dealio-alike tool. The first one in the family that passes a store that came from the results gets an alert when within a mile’s range of the address. Cheap shopping guaranteed. (this is under the hypothetical hypothesis that Google has indexed the contents of all stores in all cities and is able to return a page with prices and addressess for a local search for ‘milk’ that can be compared with other stores in that neighbourhood.)
[Dan Gillmor's already on the 3.0], so he says. Who’s informing O’Reilly? :)