D7 claims that we are entering the era of Web 3.0 lack substance

Is Web 2.0 over? Is Web 3.0 coming of age?

A colleague asked me this very question last week as we were working on developing a message house for a Melbourne based Web agency.

The people behind ‘The D Confence – All Things Digital’, which was held outside San Diego during the last week in May, declared the end of the Web 2.0 era and heralded the beggining of Web 3.0. They claimed a number of proof points for this claim…

The reasons given:

because they think something major is happening at the intersection between tech and media
which deserves its own name
and because, apparently, when you run conferences you can say stuff like that
because developments on the Web are resisting the downward pressure of the economic downturn
the arrival of the thin client, running clean, simple software, against cloud-based data and services
the fact that we can read the WSJ and other news sources, including photos and videos
the prevelance of handheld computers

I don’t think that there is any evidence in this list that we are moving into a completely brand new era of Internet.

The fact that the Internet buzz is resilient to the economic challenges of our times does not herald a new era of the Web.

Cloud computing is attracted a lot of headlines as the new wave of the Internet but I don’t see that this is new either – open standards and hosted applications have been available for many years; the Internet itself has been expressed as a cloud or series of clouds for many years.

Robert Scoble agrees with me. In this post, he argues that the Web does not have version numbers. He goes on to define some of the current and emergent trends in the Web (something that the D7 guys failed to do). Scoble refers to the next Internet age as the 2010 Web.

I agree with Scoble that version numbers do the Internet a disservice.

readwrite-web Lets face it, some organisations are still trying to figure our Web 1.0 – and are yet to truly tap into the power of connectivity and interactivity that falls under what we know as Web 2.0. Labelling the Web as 3.0 without any real reason for doing so creates yet another layer of jargon andconfusion at a time when businesses and Government need clarity.

It’s going to be very hard to explain the differences between Web 3.0 and Web 2.0 to a marketing director when these differences don’t actually exist – many of these guys are already feeling overwhelmed by the speed at which this sector/ space is growing.

The consumerisation of IT is well documented – consumer IT is leading the enterprise into new territory, where they must go if they are to remain relevant. This is most apparent in the area of corporate websites, which are – in the main – static sites that offer few opportunities for engagement, personalisation and interactivity. I am often surprised by how bad search can be in corporate websites. Many corporates will be spending time and money applying the principles of social media to their corporate websites in the years ahead. In version number terms, they will be making the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. Lets not move the goal posts just yet – especially when the justification for doing so lacks substance (unless, of course, you are trying to generate a few headlines).