Web 3.0, What will it be? (Part 2)

In my last post on Web 3.0, I talked about separating out individual pieces of content to its own web page but did not elaborate on why. Today, I'll talk about the merits of doing so. Lets start with the simple and obvious reasons first.

Deliver Content That Matters

The Internet has made information readily available to everyone. However, as I have mentioned in the first article of the series that most of that information is typically found in what amounts to an information junkyard, mixed in with other information that may not be relevant to the viewer.

Presenting only the content that matters to the viewer, that's the key. It is what Google has been doing all along. Simple presentation, only information thats important is shown.

The same should be done for Web 3.0 content. When presenting an article, keep it simple. Put the article on its own webpage, and do not decorate the article with irrelevant stuff. If possible, the only decoration should be a title logo indicating the article's source and one or two non distracting AdSense-style advertisement.

Browser Liberation

All the above leads me to the what I believe is the key feature of Web 3.0 technology, liberating web content from web browsers. Increasingly, web content is not viewed on a computer, inside a web browser application like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. The most commonly cited example is web surfing on mobile phones, but that isn't the only case.

Increasingly, web-based content is being used in ordinary applications. It started with behind-the-scene stuff like a software update feature that download and installs the latest version of the software from the Internet, or verifying your account information online before enabling software features meant for registered users. Some of you might be familiar with BitTorrent applications that check RSS feeds for the lastest stuff to download, that's yet another use of web-based content. These are only the initial uses. Some applications have gone one step further and actually displaying web-based content in the application itself.

Apple's iTunes application is the perfect example. How many of you noticed that the iTunes store, your iTunes song search results are actually web pages served from Apple's web servers? In fact, Apple has so seemlessly melded web and non-web content that even I do not know for sure exactly which parts of iTunes is generated by some remote server on the internet.

Some other applications include SongBird, an audio player, as well as online video player Joost. Both applications are built on Mozilla's web suite built on Mozilla's web application framework, the same framework that is used to build Mozilla's Netscape, FireFox and Camino web browser as well as Thunderbird email client. Both SongBird and Joost seamlessly integrate web-content within an installable application.

This is what Web 3.0 is about, not web services or semantic webs. Rather, it is the fact that the web will no longer revolve purely around web browsers. Instead, application programs that seamlessly integrate both local and web-based content will be the next wave in the evolution of the world wide web.