Remember when Office was Office 95? In a couple of steps it became Office XP and now it is Office 2007, soon to be obsolete. All that time the Web was just the good old Web 1.0… Or was it?
It’s my belief that we have gone way past web 2.0 and throughout the years development has jumped faster than from 1 to 2 in the last 10 years or so. If that is not the case at least going from 1.002 to 1.035 and from there to 2.0 might it be that 2.0 is actually still just a part of 1.0 and we have reached something around 1.0345. Is everyone confused yet?
This all started with the appearance of PC’s, file systems, FTP , email and USENET . Then came SQL, Gopher, HTTP, Java, Flash and from there emerged AJAX and Mashups among other technologies, not to forget the little matter of the whole social spectrum and all that jass. Really, what’s the real development now? I mean Flash was a great addition and, giving us the option to do real interactive animations and so on, may have been the first step to 2.0.
What will the future bring us? Is it the Semantic Web, semantic databases as Tim Berners-Lee predicted? Will the web become “Machine readable”…intelligent even? Probably, but I belive that this will be more an integrated part of the whole. How? That’s for the “Nostradamuses” of the Ineternet world to predict and for the “Edisons” to show us.
I do agree that the web will continue to develop at a fast pace for the next year, but I am not sure that anything monumental will happen in the next two or three years and we should focus on mastering what we have.
It’s my feeling that we’re wasting too much energy trying to foresee what cards will be dealt in the future while we are not playing well enough with the hand we already have. The web 2.0 and web 3.0 are fad words and in fact have no actual meaning in the minds of most “experts”, let alone “regular people”.
Just when the marketing sector is learning the ropes with the internet as a marketing medium, do we really have to go and complicate it all by telling everybody that we have passed static sites? That everyone should be using Ajax and looking into social search?
At least I know what I’m going to do. There’s life in the old dog yet and I am going to bet on traditional Internet Marketing for at least the next year or so. Let’s still focus on the real world, because in real life the majority of “normal folks” aren’t inflicted with our constant desire to upgrade to the latest software. Most end users are not technically savvy and when we market our products and services on the internet we need to bear that in mind.