This morning we were asked what to call “the next level of interactivity” now that “Web 2.0″ has become, well, a bit worn out (to put it lightly). It’s not all that easy a question to answer, but we’re going to take a stab at doing so and also explaining why it might not be necessary.
“Web 2.0″ has stopped being a useful phrase because it has become so ubiquitous as to be virtually meaningless. However, there was a time when it meant something. Without going into the whole history of the thing, it was used to discuss what was quite clearly and palpably a second generation of the public Web. Most concisely, it referred to the fact that the Web has become (or was becoming) a platform rather than a series of interlinked documents. The Web was interactive, applications ran on it, software was all of a sudden available as a service. A lot of things changed.
There’s a good argument to be had that these changes had a great deal to do with the rapid increase in broadband Internet access. Dial-up ISPs from the mid-to-late 90s limited what was possible on the Web both because of slow connections and because they facilitated the walled garden features of things like AOL.
But things have continued to change. Now we aren’t just dealing with widely available broadband access, but widely available mobile access, both on computers with wireless broadband modems and on “phones” (it hardly seems fair to use that word for the latest wave of handheld devices). People can do word processing using Web apps and storing all one’s data online instead of on a hard drive is not just realistic but seemingly inevitable. Watching television streaming off the Internet—legally—is common place.
And then there are all those developments that fall under the heading of that other great buzzword of our time, “Social Media.” Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, FriendFeed, and seeminlgy thousands of others.
What do we call all of this? Web 2.1? Web 3.0?
It’s possible that it’s just “the Web.” This is what we have now and it’s not worth categorizing it anymore because there’s nothing to compare it to. That said, there are some useful terms that refer to specific elements or evolutions of what was once “Web 2.0″ that might be useful in talking about “the Web.”
- The Semantic Web
If there is going to be a time when Web 3.0 is worth talking about, it’ll probably have something to do with the semantic Web. Semantic Web technology is about making online information well organized enough that it can be processed by computers rather than just people. This involves natural language processing, sophisticated new markup methods, and other substantive advances that are categorically different from the insights that produce new social or productivity Web applications. But development in this area does open the door to genuinely new levels of interactivity on the Web. Still, the term only applies to select parts of what’s going on now and most of the time isn’t helpful in talking about the parts of the Web that get the most attention in less technical circles. - The Social Web
This fairly accurately captures what’s currently meant by Web 2.0 as well as Social Media. To the extent that there is an interactive, user-centric set of spaces on the Web that are more than a set of documents, there is a “Social” Web out there. Basically, it’s the Web in which users “live” rather than the Web they merely visit. - The Social Graph
This one is a bit more tricky. It combines both Semantic Web and Social Web concepts to refer to something that is more than or other than “the Web”. Tim-Berners Lee, who is justly credited with creating the World Wide Web, has called this the Giant Global Graph (GGG) in a fairly interesting post on this matter. The word graph in this contexts refers to the mathematical discipline of graph theory, the study of “mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects from a certain collection.” They look like this:
In the Social Graph those little circles aren’t just numbers but rather people and places and objects and ideas and really anything else. The Graph is the map of how they all link together in different ways: I am friends with her, she lives there, that place is where these things are sold, these things were invented by him, he knows my cousin, etc. etc.
The Social Web is the current set of sites and tools that attempt to manage all this information and facilitate communication over different sets of connections. The Semantic Web is the emerging set of technologies that will make that management more efficient and accurate, allowing the creation of new tools and applications that “understand” the different nodes and connections and thus offer more powerful ways for them all to interact and communicate.
The Social Graph or GGG is the abstract set of really existing things and connections that the Social Web models and the Semantic Web tries to process. People talk about the Social Graph or my Social Graph because there is both a large, all-encompassing way to understand this and a local, personal way to do so. One could talk about “my” Social Web, meaning the tools I personally use, but it doesn’t make quite as much sense.
All that might be more confusing than it is helpful. Unfortunately, that’s often the case with buzzwords. The real question is whether we really need a special name for what we are all seeing and experiencing on the Web right now. Those who really use “Web 2.0″ don’t need to call it that because it’s familiar—it’s something they experience from the inside rather than look at from the outside.
So there’s not an easy answer. We like to use the phrase “social technology” to describe the tools that people use to create, share, and discuss content in a many-to-many model online. We find it easier to talk about specific instances of social technology in application rather than the broad set of everything that might be social technology all lumped together. In terms of a larger category, “Social Web” might be easiest to express even if “Social Graph” is a bit more interesting.
But even if there were an answer, how long would it be before we’d have to ask the same question again about that phrase?