It’s fun to try and envision the future. Who could have imagined the capabilities of the internet just 10 years ago! Lets see if we can make some predictions about the near future of the web. This post will give a good overview of the direction of the web. Comment and give me your predictions!

Hat tip – many of these ideas are not my own and scrounged from many articles on Web 3.0 A few links I used are listed at the end. Thanks to all the brilliant people out there envisioning the future.

If Web 2.0 is all about:

• Interaction
• Connection
• Collaboration
• Contribution
• Sharing
• Blogs, Social media (Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Digg)
• Coding (HTML)

The versioning of the web is a bit of a stretch and overdone but we’ll go with it. Many of these technologies are just out of view of radar or in beta. But, they’re coming!

“Web 3.0″ is going to be about:

• Relevancy
• Recommendation
• Personalization
• Intuitive experience
• Intelligent predicted results “complete your sentences”
• Applications: (last.fm, Google Docs, games)
• Coding (XHTML, AJAX, Ruby)

 http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/

Provides daily updates on new tech ventures, and where they are receiving funding from.  There’s still a lot of money to be made in Web 2.0 and this site shows you where the funds are being invested.  The AlarmClock team does a great job keeping tabs on international developments.  While Facebook, Youtube, Ebay and Google dominate the market here, imagine the market potential in China.

“Web 2.0″ was one of the biggest buzz words last year. It means different things to different people, but in general, “Web 2.0″ is the idea of user-generated and controlled content on the web — the idea of moving away from static web “pages” to more dynamic web applications (anything from google earth to ebay). This idea has been at the forefront of web programming for years, but not many companies have succeeded in implementing it.  Facebook, which has “Web 2.0″ at the heart of its design, is one of a handful of successful applications.

 The very idea of Facebook is a user generated set of profiles. Without a large enough ratio of profiles to community, the application would be worthless, which is why it made perfect sense to gradually roll out the application. This doesn’t explain why Facebook is viewed more highly than MySpace and several other social networking sites, though. I think that there are three other reasons for this. Firstly, the ease with which one can customize his profile, as well as the many different modes of doing so, are better than any of Facebook’s competitors. Second, Facebook successfully (generally…) walks a fine line between censoring crude content and ads (and who can view YOUR content) and allowing freedom for consumer-created content. The third reason is the ease of consumer-created Facebook applications (those annoying viral applications like “join the pirates in the fight against the ninjas!!!, as well as some pretty cool ones like a stock market exchange). Any programmer can grab the necessary documentation to interface with the Facebook API in short time and be merrily on his way to creating the next Hobo Wars.

 Facebook definitely has its problems, such as the mass of annoying viral applications, but it is still a work in progress. Think of the basic state it was in four years ago when we could first get it at Grove City, and think of where it is today. It could be anywhere four years from now, but I’m guessing that it will have more of a focus around consumer-created applications and become a programming environment in its own right, much as the World Wide Web has today.

 -Blake Ingram-