All Things Digital

If the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 are “groundbreaking” Facebook widgets, easy access to dumb capital and haughty start-ups dangerously over-leveraged on other companies’ assets what (or who) will define the Web 3.0 epoch?

The answer’s obvious isn’t it? Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff.

Why? Because he says so, that’s why.

Speaking at the company’s DreamForce Europe event, Benioff said that Web 3.0 will be the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) era. A fascinating definition–convenient too, since this is precisely the sort of business Salesforce.com (CRM) is in. “We think Web 3.0 is now upon us. It’s the era of platforms,” said Benioff. “New platforms are coming right out of the cloud. It’s time to make a choice. You can continue to build your applications in the software model or you can move your applications to the new model of cloud computing. There is a new way to build your applications.”

So Web 3.0 is not, as Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, once suggested, the semantic Web–”day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives handled by machines talking to machines.” Rather, it’s Web 2.0 with another 1.0’s worth of marketing BS. The “Whatever-I-Say-It-Is Web”–the “Al Franken Decade” of the Internet age.

Well, the “me” decade is almost over, and good riddance, and far as I’m concerned. … That’s right. I believe we’re entering what I like to call the Al Franken Decade. Oh, for me, Al Franken, the ’80s will be pretty much the same as the ’70s. I’ll still be thinking of me, Al Franken. But for you, you’ll be thinking more about how things affect me, Al Franken. When you see a news report, you’ll be thinking, ‘I wonder what Al Franken thinks about this thing?’, ‘I wonder how this inflation thing is hurting Al Franken?’ And you women will be thinking, ‘What can I wear that will please Al Franken?’, or ‘What can I not wear?’ You know, I know a lot of you out there are thinking, ‘Why Al Franken?’ Well, because I thought of it, and I’m on TV, so I’ve already gotten the jump on you.”

People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you’ve got an overlay of scalable vector graphics–everything rippling and folding and looking misty–on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you’ll have access to an unbelievable data resource.”

–Tim Berners-Lee, May 2006

Web 2.0 is well documented and talked about. The power of the Net reached a critical mass, with capabilities that can be done on a network level. We are also seeing richer devices over the last four years and richer ways of interacting with the network, not only in hardware like game consoles and mobile devices, but also in the software layer. You don’t have to be a computer scientist to create a program. We are seeing that manifest in Web 2.0 and 3.0 will be a great extension of that, a true communal medium … the distinction between professional, semiprofessional and consumers will get blurred, creating a network effect of business and applications.”

–Jerry Yang, co-founder and CEO of Yahoo, November 2006

“Web 1.0 was dial-up, 50K average bandwidth, Web 2.0 is an average one megabit of bandwidth and Web 3.0 will be 10 megabits of bandwidth all the time, which will be the full video Web, and that will feel like Web 3.0.”

–Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix, November 2006

Had to happen sooner or later, right? The lexicographers who gave us the term Web 2.0 have finally gotten around to issuing an “official” definition of Web 3.0 and, having undoubtedly scurried to trademark the term, are probably already plotting the pricey industry conference that will accompany it.

So what is Web 3.0, “officially”?

Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.”
–Jason Calacanis

In other words it’s Web 2.0 2.0, Web 2.0 with another 1.0’s worth of marketing BS. Or, as Josh Kopelman, managing director of First Round Capital, aptly puts it, “any Internet-based company that has launched after 2004.“