It must have been sometime in the middle of 2004 when the term Web 2.0 really gained momentum. A combination of the opening up of data sources, the social aspect employed against common services, the changing of economics from the dotcom boom years, the ease of development using open source technologies, and a shift in power from traditional companies to the people themselves especially in areas like journalism, among a myriad of other things – Web 2.0 was embraced by just about everyone.
But now, in less than 2 years, we’ve raced to Web 2.8 and accelerating. With everyone jumping on the bandwagon, there are now TOO many blogs, TOO many little tools, TOO easy for others to take your idea and incorporate it into their own services. How does a consumer differentiate between all the services out there, whose reported competitive differentiators are indistinguishable in the minds of the consumer? A lot of these services were also built with no business model in mind. How do they support themselves? They may be cool mashups and little desktop tools, but they aren’t big enough to drive enough revenue to support even the developer.
Sure now the Web has transformed quite a bit since the early growth days from 1995 to 2001. But I would argue what is next? The Web’s quick development time has also become it’s own way of forcing evolution to run at lightspeed. Like the frightening mutations of viruses becoming resistant to drugs faster than new ones can be developed, the Web is also transforming at an alarming rate – too alarming for those of us operating in the Web world to keep up?
Is there a Web 3.0 about to appear and what will that look like?