What Will Web 3.0 Hold For Us?

My Cyber Social MapImage by frankdasilva via Flickr

Are you aware of what Web 3.0 is? Before we give it an apt definition, we will have to determine what its predecessor, Web 2.0, is supposed to be. By and large, most people would agree that Web 2.0 involves the collaboration and social facilitation among people interacting with each other on the web. Thus you have social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and other varied forums on the Internet to differentiate it from Web 1.0 which was an Internet that contained purely static information.

Many predict that Web 3.0 is just around the corner, and we will see glimpses of it by 2015 or so, if not sooner. Evolving from Web 2.0, it is predicted to be a result of great changes with the way we use and interact on the Internet – an evolution of sorts.

Will Web 3.0 be a boon or a bane to society as we know it? No one can tell. Some herald Web 3.0 as the advent of artificial intelligence permeating the Interwebs – a far cry from the human intelligence that runs current social media networks. This factors out the involvement of human manipulation, and we may very well have an Internet that can separate the good from the bad, as akin to social bookmarking, only without the negative elements.

Web 3.0 is also seen as the harbinger of a semantic web, where all information is stored and categorized in such a manner as can be understood by a computer. It is also seen as a virtual world similar to today’s virtual shopping mall, where users can walk into virtual buildings or virtual streets and interact with each other there, very like World of Warcraft, only on the human scale. One might even say that the web, as we know it, will evolve into an encompassing virtual world.

Whether good or bad, the future of Web 3.0 will certainly change the way we view and use the Internet.