Frank "verve" Kuhn

The internet, although a relatively recent invention, has become a mainstay of a large majority of people’s lives. Evolving from its ARPANET days, it has gradually moved from being a “read only” information database to its current guise of a fully interactive, virtual world.

The internet of has two distinct ages, Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Web 2.0 developed some time after the “dotcom” bubble, and subsequent crash, at the turn of the century. Gone were the static pages of Web 1.0, the new, improved Web 2.0 was fully user-interactive, it contained web-based communities, social networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis and blogs. The creation of a folksonomy, or tagging system, allowed users to find and track information in way never possible on the previous “version” of the web. Obviously, technological advancements played a major role in this evolution. In the days of Web 1.0 the average speed of a connection was 50Kb/s, now that average is roughly 20 times more at 1Mb/s. With such leaps in new technology in the last few years, it is difficult to imagine what a newer version of the internet could be capable of. There are however some visions of a possible incarnation of Web 3.0, the Semantic Web and the 3-D Web.

The Semantic Web, will be almost like a personal assistant. Imagine if you will, you are at the doctor’s office. You have just been told you need to see a specialist. You pull out your handheld web-browser and instruct your Semantic Web agent to search for one. The agent then retrieves information about your prescribed treatment from the doctor’s own agent, looks up several lists of providers of your treatment and checks for one covered by your insurance plan within a 20-mile radius of your home and with a rating of “excellent” from a preapproved ratings body. If a potential appointment clashes with anything else in your schedule, the agent then re-schedules your organizer and fits it in – all on its own without any help from you, past the initial command.

The 3-D Web is a web you can “walk through”. Many see it as an extension of “virtual worlds” being created in the present day. In the future, it is theorised, the web will be a 3-D recreation of our own world. You can take a tour of Paris, check out that house you’ve been interested in or even find the local cinema – all before you leave your home.

While this technology seems way off, developers are staring to lay the foundations for it (RSS feeds and Google Earth for example). 2010 should see an improvement in what we have and also some small steps toward what we can expect to see in the not-too-distant future.