Web 3.0 & Beyond - Are Machines Ruling Us Already?
The Year: 1982. Time Magazine says that the person of the year (or machine of the year rather) is The Computer. Back then computer was becoming so popular. People believed computers could provide answers to many of the questions, send letters at speed of light etc etc. Then there was personal computer becoming reality and accessible. Computers were helping people in day to day life. All sorts of calculations and computing jobs. Life was getting easier. Then there were games, internet, emails and stuffs like that. All good.
In the years to follow, internet really gained momentum. The world was turning into a so called global village. Businessmen thought we have to have website to reach a wider clients around the globe. And indeed web was becoming the number one source for information. Thus we had Web 1.0.
The Year: 2006. Time Magazine says that the person of the year is YOU. It was talking about the Web 2.0 generation by now. There were people generated pages scattered everywhere on the internet. There were blogs, there were social networking sites like the Myspace, hi5, user generated sites like wikipedia, youtube, flickr, community sites likes delicio.us, digg and countless others. Almost everyone were busy writing content more than reading contents. People were starting to live their lives based on computers. People knew each other from web. Some were racing the web race, while others who were left behind were finding it harder to catch up. Everything was moving fast.
The computers got smaller. People got mobile - always on the run. Now people were even using their tiny hand held devices to do things. YOU were getting busier. The Web 2.0 phenomenon was racing.
The Year: Very near future. Time magazine released its last print edition of the magazine. The end of the Web 3.0 & start of the Web 4.0. But what did we have on Web 3.0? Initially there were people trying to sort all the mess created by Web 2.0. People thought they will build a more easier web world, where everything is organized. They called it semantic web. People could do just about anything on the web. All data & information were synchronized. They were trying to make the computers & the machines act like human. The way human thought. Computers now had intelligence. When one typed their name all the details would pop up. From the likes and dislikes to all the secrets. When you transferred someone's photo from you digital camera, the computer would immediately say - "Hey I know that person..he came to this house yesterday too. He's a weird person. In fact I hate that person..." Machines talked, machines walked, machines did all the things. Humans were left behind.
Actually it might not be as weird as it sounds now. We might actually be heading towards a better collaborative world wide web. We all hope for a safer & smarter web for humans. Just that we need to make sure machines are there to make the human lives easier; rather than machine dependent.
