It’s not over yet, not quite. But Nick Wilson says there will come a thinning of the herd, and the Web will focus for a while on doing some more useful stuff, like interacting more cleverly with information, and delivering services and results in pages that are worth clicking in for.
Nick’s podcast is only seven minutes – you can do that – and you have to, actually, if you want to know what he said, because we don’t have a transcript. It’s worth it for the wake up call. Nick is a tech-entrepreneur who did Web 2.0 as a player, and now he’s looking for the next margin. He founded Threadwatch, then moved on to co-found Performancing, and now he’s playing around with widgets, and letting his eye rove. And it’s a pretty sharp eye.
He’s been reading portents in two great articles, the first is Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services, by architect Alex Isgold. See if this sounds like the Semantic Web to you:
Others will try to keep their information proprietary, but it will be opened via mashups created using services like Dapper, Teqlo and Yahoo! Pipes. The net effect will be that unstructured information will give way to structured information – paving the road to more intelligent computing.
The other article is by venture capitalist Peter Rip, who notes that while there are plenty of start-ups still coming, there aren’t any new ideas. His brief analysis, Web 2.0 – Over and Out, presents a compelling view of trends that show the innovation called Web 2.0 – user-generated, sociallly networked, and media-rich – has peaked.
What follows, even as Web 2.0 adoption becomes a swarm, is the next wave of innovation, and this will be challenging. The current Web is analogous to DOS, and iteration 3.0 is Windows, except hopefully more reliable. This precurses the semantic Web, wherein disconnected “islands” of web sites come to communikcate with each other in an interoperable, coherently unified Web-as-platform, Web-as-operating system, Web-as-database kind of scenario.
Finally, in the same vein only lighter: before you even start to think how to turn your website into an API for all those mashups out there, your first move is good housekeeping – sharpen up that code and make it fully XHTML compliant. No one could be better than Chris Pearson at giving us the tips for doing this, and for tagging the true structure of the blog page. Take a read here: The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs
