Technology and Web 3.0

As we all might know right now we use a lot of: jquery, Yahoo! UI, ajax, tag clouds, syndication, web apis and a lot more. We design fancy web sites with large, shiny buttons and titles. We have blogs, wikis, social sites. We develop within strict standarts. We put it all together and call it Web 2.0. So Web 2.0 is summary in one name of all the technologies and practices used in certain period of time.

Word Web 2.0 has been around for a while and there have been a lot of debates about upcoming Web 3.0. Mostly people say, that Web 3.0 is *Semantic Web

• with a lot of personalization. Ok, I could agree, but..

I think mobile applications is our Web 3.0. Why? You would ask. Because apple with iphone and google with android has changed the way we used the web before. Technologies has been changed from XHTML to Objective-C, C++, Java and HTML 5 + CSS3. These technologies have been around, just like asynchronous javascript requests were before Web 2.0, but right now they are being used very actively by making better experiences on mobile phones. Design has been changed from large buttons to small and simple ones to fit into mobile screens. Currently most of popular applications are built for well know social sites, wikis, blogs. Although there are some popular new collaboration applications on the application market (foursquare, for example), it do have a web interface, but it is more valuable to use it on your phone, than a web browser. I think there will be some new stuff on mobile market, that will get really popular. Right now you don't need a computer with a browser to use the web. Also mobiles will be cheaper, at least the first ones that came out some years ago and even more people will be joining mobile networks.

Future can go in different directions, but it looks to me, that with upcoming 4G mobile network, there will be very few people using full size computers. This is a list of things, that will lead us to completely switch to mobiles:

1. 4G mobile network - mobile providers is already testing it.
2. Greater capacity batteries at the same or even smaller size.
3. Better processors and larger memory.
4. Some sort of projection or hologram as a virtual display and some new input method for better accuracy so you can use: photoshop, illustrator, autocad, maya and such products with a charm.

There is actually a very close concept from mozilla labs to the future mobile phone: http://mozillalabs.com/conceptseries/2010/09/23/seabird/

It looks like mobile phones are going the same way as PCs were some years ago, just new, smaller format. Imagine ten years ago .. 1Ghz processor was such a power. :) Now some of the newest phones have 1Ghz processor. It is similar migration as it was to PC. Questions remains the same. What comes next? How far can technology possibly go?

As for Web 3.0, it is an arguable question if mobile applications really are Web 3.0, even for my self, but it feels like so. :)

Updated!

Karlis pointed it out, that some time ago we were migrating from desktop applications to web browsers and now we are migrating from web browsers to mobile applications. For some time we were using web sites as they were, but now you create a service give an api access to developers and developers create tools to actually use the service. Couldn't agree more.