The whole Web 2.0 thing has annoyed me endlessly for a while now. Whilst there have been some fantastic websites built over the past few years self-claimed entrepreneurs have tried to cash in on this by releasing as many websites they can without vowels in their names. Clone websites of YouTube and Digg appear every single day, with loads of budding developers looking to get themselves a slice of the Web 2.0 cash cow.

Now that MySpace has joined Facebook in the Application’s department, and Google App Engine has rolled out its services Web 2.0 is about to blossom into full-scale application mode. The Internet will act as a method of providing online services as well as the leader of providing information. This may help provide different kinds of information, but a lot of it goes far deeper than that. Realistically, how much information are you going to get from the average YouTube video, aside from gawking at some womans breasts and learning what your favourite celebrity has been up to?

Web 2.0 is no longer really about websites displaying and providing information for its users. It’s become a development platform for all walks of application, from sharing photos and videos, creating presentations, viewing maps, and more. This is what website’s are fighting for now, to become the standard platform for their medium of choice.

This ties in nicely with what many are starting to call Web 3.0 (not another…), also known as the Semantic Web. In a way the Semantic Web aims to define the information displayed on web pages so that ambiguity is lost in what we display. Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Representation concepts will play an important part in building up the Semantic Web to the dream of the World Wide Web becoming the universal hub of information exchange.

This all sounds great, but aren’t we all jumping the gun a bit?

The Semantic Web is still in its infancy, and as a logical system isn’t developed well enough for it to be a usable standard for all web pages. Whilst it is inevitable that we will reach this stage the early adopters of the Internet are toying with unstable technologies that will most likely be dwarfed by tomorrow’s findings. Theoretically, is it even possible for the Semantic Web to exist? We’re taking the first step in trying to describe our own data, and technologies like RDF and XML are playing an almost naive part in this ‘hacking-together’ of current and new methods of information handling. I applaud all those developers that manage to get usable semantic websites up and running, because they’re working on very little actual grounded knowledge. These people are innovators, and whilst their work may topple and fail miserably from time to time their efforts are the logical stepping stones to the new Internet.

So at the moment we’re working on creating platforms for this information, and we’re still not that good at it. Tools like Google Documents and Spreadsheets are usable, but they’ll never be able to compete with Microsoft Office. You’ll be very hard-pressed to find web applications that beat their desktop rivals. Still, in a way we’re branching out new platforms onto the Internet in areas where only online would they be usable. YouTube (FLV) has almost become the new video format for many, and with many websites offering free episodes of your favourite shows the only thing stopping you from using these websites is video quality. Once those boundaries have been reached what’s stopping free video from taking over all animated media? If you could stream a HD quality movie would you bother buying it? In the same sense, websites like MySpace Facebook are defining user profiles, perhaps providing a link to defining information on humans in the future?

To me the future of this ‘version’ of the Web doesn’t exist in porting desktop applications to the Web, but by creating new applications designed perfectly for online use. I had always envisioned the new version of the Web to act more like a database, tieing the desktop and web application world together to provide the semantic web we all desire. Perhaps I wasn’t far off, because we’re on our way to it with only the tools we’ve got. It’s an exciting time to be in Web Design/Development and who knows where we’ll be in five years time.