As an entrepreneur, I do a ton of thinking about what the next trends will be. Currently I’ve been thinking about what the next iteration of the web will be or what some people have termed ‘web 3.0′.
Originally, the web was originally created by Tim-Berners Lee as a reference tool for himself and others, allowing researchers to link to information on his server from other servers and vice versa. Wow, did that work. Today, the web is just that, a massive online reference engine, allowing you to find any information about anything!
The next iteration was Web 2.0. No one really has a definition of what this is but wikipedia seems to think its an Internet “that [derives its] effectiveness from the inter-human connections and from the network effects that [the Internet] makes possible, and growing in effectiveness in proportion as people make more use of them.”
The next natural evolution to me, seems to be interconnected sites that will leverage all this data in intelligent ways… taking all the data that’s been put into the web, and making something really useful out of it. I think we’ve hit the tip of the iceberg with collective intelligence. I think there’s so much more to come as we start to figure out what to do with all this data.
While some may say that ‘web 3.0′ is the “cloud”, I look at the cloud as a way of achieving next level Internet computing. The cloud will definitely be necessary to process these massive data sets. But what’s truly amazing is that we’ll be able to do it econmically. I think that the cost of cloud computing is so cheap, that we’ll see an explosion of new startups building sites that won’t just be point and click sites, but sites that offer you advice based on other data that the site is receiving.
Examples of this are the plethora of personal financial software sites that are popping up, link Mint, wesabe, thrive, etc. They take all your data, and compare it to other ppl on the site, giving you better insight how you can help yourself.
I think its a pretty exciting time, even with the given economic situation. I think we’re going to see new projects done with collective intellgence that we didn’t even think possible before. Hopefully I can be part of one of them!!
