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While the Internet started growing decades earlier, it was the release of the first Mosaic web browser that heralded in a new revolution. Though it reached its peak in less than ten years, the era of Web 1.0 will be long remembered as a turning point in human society. As we are still deep in the midst of all of the change it is easy to overlook just how profound the Internet revolution really is.

Web 1.0 was the great equalizer. It put everyone on the same playing field. A single individual sitting at a computer in the remotest region of the globe had the ability to publish as easily and as widely as the largest newspapers. While it has taken several years to get to the point where this has become commonplace (for reasons that may be explained in defining Web 2.0), even the earliest days of the web turned the conventions on their head. From private citizens like Matt Drudge to garage startups like Amazon.com, Web 1.0 was the beginning of an era in which the smallest player on the field could have just as much impact as the largest conventional institution.

Yet the technology of Web 1.0 was simultaneously both ground-breaking and surprisingly traditional. It was ground-breaking in the sense that it reduced the cost of data distribution to nearly nothing. Yet it was traditional in the sense that it generally followed the model of the printing press. (Albeit with very, very inexpensive machinery.) It allowed anyone to run their own printing press, and it removed the middle man from the distribution process. Web 1.0 was a revolution in which hundreds of millions of consumers found their way to millions of new producers.

Web 2.5 will be about creating safe, supportive, and effective places for structured collaboration to take place: "Safe" will mean not only that information contributors are protected by mechanisms that insure that "only people who should see x, see x", but also that there are mechanisms to appropriately build trust in those contributors among consumers of the information.  Seller ratings on eBay are the poster child for what's meant here.  A prediction -- we're bound to see, at some point, a "portable online credibility profile service" that is analogous to a financial credit rating.  People with an interest in being perceived to be credible online will register their personas on different sites with a third-party service, credibility ratings of these personas will be aggregated (scraped or parsed at minimum if APIs or RSS extension feeds aren't there for this), and as liquidity builds in such a service, sites will incorporate this into their platforms (as Truste vouches for the security of a site, these services will vouch for the reputations of participants in a site).  At an even more technical level, platforms must and will evolve to support complex "subsite" structures with sophisticated permissioning schemes.  .LRN provides a good example of an advanced architecture for this. "Supportive" will mean that both contribution and consumption of information is coached and encouraged.  Assuming "safe", many more people could be using blogs to share information to their own and their colleagues' and friends' benefit, but they may feel awkward or unsure about Why/ what/ how.  Well designed applications will provide not just "defense-in-depth" help mechanisms for when people have problems, but more extensive tours and ongoing coaching for users as they progress from new to more experienced in their familiarity with the system.  For example, earlier incarnations of the ArsDigita Community System featured a "Curriculum System" module to help people track what they've already learned and what they still need to know to use a system effectively (See http://philip.greenspun.com/doc/curriculum.html). "Effective" will mean that the contribution and consumption of information in applications is made both simple and obvious.  Applications like our restaurant review experiment are especially useful because the information is easy to contribute (the provided structure prompts, but is flexible enough to accomodate orthogonal descriptions) and consume (the data can be viewed geospatially on the map, or via different sort options).

In summary, for me Web 1.5 was all about the realization that the real value of the Web for business lies in supporting and leveraging collaboration, not simply opening up a new channel for transaction.  The keys to doing this well:  focus "communities" on high-value exchanges; structure communities so logical subgroups based on powerful affinities can be created maintained, and easily extended -- not only by site sponsors, but by community members as well; support users through the "why" and the "what" of collaborating, not just the "how"; and, make contribution and consumption of the information as easy as possible. 

Web 3.0, expected to debut in 2007,

December 17, 2006

Web 3.0 might be defined as a third-generation of the Web enabled by the convergence of several key emerging technology trends