The New York Times has a front page story today with the headline “Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided By Common Sense” that is about– are you ready?– Web 3.0. A newer and even more improved version of Web 2.0, no doubt.
Here’s a passage that tries to explain the difference between 2 and 3:
The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up� — for example, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.
In contrast, the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.�
Under today’s system, such a query can lead to hours of sifting — through lists of flights, hotel, car rentals — and the options are often at odds with one another. Under Web 3.0, the same search would ideally call up a complete vacation package that was planned as meticulously as if it had been assembled by a human travel agent.
Somehow, I have my doubts….