Any veteran of the software industry will tell you that version 2.0 of any product tends to be a shortlived staging post on the way to 3.0, which is where it finally hits the mark. Windows was a classic example. 1.0 was so buggy it was hardly worth using. 2.0 fixed some serious problems but still had a lot of shortcomings. 3.0, launched in May 1990, was an instant success, and the rest of the story, as they say, is history.

Web 1.0
It was fairly static, and it was basically a read-only affair. For the most part, we’d simply download text and images from remote sites that were updated periodically with new text and graphics.

There were hints, early on, of what was to come.

Web 2.0
A phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.

The first big shift - to what I prefer to consider version 2 - came when the web became more of a read-write system. This was a huge change, and it’s still in progress.

Web 3.0
An article in the New York Times by John Markoff entitled "Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense" on November 12, 2006 labeled "Web 3.0" as being about "adding a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web" which concept is commonly referred to as Semantic Web or being about Artificial Intelligence "with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century".

Web 3.0 technology is devided into three distinct layers:

API services form the foundation layer. These are the raw hosted services that have powered Web 2.0 and will become the engines of Web 3.0
Some of the providers, like Google and Amazon, are important players, but there is a huge long tail of smaller providers.

Aggregation services form the middle layer. These are the intermediaries that take some of the hassle out of locating all those raw API services by bundling them together in useful ways.

Application services form the top layer, and this is where I believe the biggest, most durable profits will be found. These will not be like the established application categories we are used to, such as CRM, ERP or office, but a new class of composite applications that bring together functionality from multiple services to help users achieve their objectives in a flexible, intuitive and self-evident way.

If the web is becoming an operating system in its own right, can anyone monopolise it the way Microsoft did on personal computers? As long as the web’s basic functions remain open, the threat is more theoretical than real.

written by Florin C.