The phenomenon of Web 3.0
This article by Martin Zwilling is about one of the most popular fads in business and entrepreneurship today – Web 3.0. One of the first things I notice on the webpage are the Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter icons right under the title introducing the article and already I realize how much this phenomenon has affected me and most likely everyone I know. For those who are unfamiliar with the subject, Web 2.0 is associated with online products that allow information sharing through online networking, blogs, video-sharing, and the like. What makes Web 3.0 so unique is its ability to not only share things on the world wide web, but to personalize and extend the network of hyperlinked web pages and their relations through more intelligent technology. In other words, not only do people network within each other, but also machines draw conclusions from networks that are formed between web pages as well.
The article states that there is an art and a trend that can be drawn to explain the success of this online craze. The first is micro-blogging, or people’s new ability to essentially cut a long-story-short in a way that gets the thoughts across in a quick and efficient way. The next is virtual reality worlds, which allows users to interact with other users who are different places of the world in a 3-D, eye-opening experience – in other words cutting out the need to actually travel around the world to meet new people. Third is extended personalization like when a website remembers choices the user has made before and adjusts settings to fit the user’s needs. The fourth great option is using mobile smart phones that can surf the Internet and allows you to connect with people cyber-ly through well-accessible phones. The last is real time on-demand collaboration, which describes a kind of external hard-drive ability that some websites have (for example Google Docs, and Wiggio).
Web 3.0 is a perfect example of how networks function in the world – or rather, the world wide web. Not only do people create triadic closures, local bridges, and clusters, but so does the internet itself through machine-readable metadata that keeps track of the networks of users, web sites, and trends. This new openness of the web, use of mobile phones, and more intelligent means of searching the Internet allows for the ability to gather information, spread information, and network in a way that is faster, more competitive, more exciting, and more accessible.
Source: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-08-22/strategy/30047439_1_web-sites-web-technology-smart-phones