Web Designers India

The web is about to enter a new decade – Web 3.0 – which is currently making waves. There is always an engineering focus on either ‘the front end’ or ‘back end’ of the Web , and this happens decade after decade. Web 1.0 was a back-end decade, Web 2.0 was front end, with a heavy focus on users and usability, clean-looking sites, and people making connections with one another. In Web 3.0, the emphasis will revert to the back end, with a renewal of the web’s key index – the essential data that is catalogued by search engines like Google. That in turn will make way for Web 4.0, another ‘front-end decade’, only with more advanced programs than the likes of Facebook. A prime example of a Web 3.0 technology is ‘natural-language search’, which refers to the ability of search engines to answer full questions such as ‘Which US Presidents died of disease?’ In some cases, the sites that appear in the results do not reference the original search terms, reflecting the fact that the web knows, for instance, that Reagan was a US President, and that Alzheimer’s is a disease. “Our engine reads every page of the web sentence by sentence and returns results by drawing on a general knowledge of language and what specific concepts in the world mean, and their relationship with one another,” said Barney Pell, chief executive of Powerset, which is developing natural-language technology. The firm, based at the prestigious Palo Alto Research Centre, in California, is sometimes talked about as a Google-killer, should its offering – which is not yet widely available – become popular. It’s not just search that will be overhauled in the web of the future, however. One of the recurrent themes in the presentations at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco was ‘open platforms’, the idea that a website or device, like a mobile phone, should be able to accommodate whichever features or applications its user wants. Think of the iPhone as a folder into which an owner could ‘drag and drop’ any application – a weather forecaster, an e-mail service – without Apple having to approve such an action. Some of the world’s largest technology companies – Nokia, Apple and MySpace – all made announcements embracing the idea of open platforms, suggesting that the web will become a place where much more mixing and matching of different services will be permitted. Alongside this will come more mature virtual worlds, or what Silicon Valley’s faithful – perhaps to get away from connotations of the computer game – have started referring to as ‘immersive environments’

~ by webdesigners4india on September 8, 2009.