The most common question people ask me at speaking events is, “What is the future of the Internet?” The Internet was a major revolution is information technology. But out society is never satisfied. We always want more, better, and faster. So what’s next for the Internet? That’s a question that’s been difficult to answer due to all the competing emerging technologies. They all drown each other out. What I mean is, there are so many new things and they are all happening so fast that predicting the future is virtually impossible inside the vortex of this storm of innovation. But something has happened that is big enough and evolutionary enough that it rises above the rest as the next big thing on the Internet.
Web 2.0 / Web 3.0 ... What’s next?
But first, let’s talk about Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. What is all that? Web 2.0 was the emergence of social networks, blogging, plug-ins, RSS syndication, and things like that. Web 2.0’s biggest accomplishment was that it empowered websites to syndicate content through RSS and plug-ins into other websites. If you update your website, other websites are suddenly aware of those updates and that helps other websites promote your current topics automatically. This is useful for shopping, blogging, news stories, and virtually any other information. This is a big part of what Twitter.com and FaceBook.com are. It’s hard to describe this all accurately, but basically if you can compare how many features websites have today compared to what features a standard HTML web page has, you can see the difference.
Web 3.0 has been debated and a lot of people have been trying to predict what that is, with differing opinions from different people. I don’t know what Web 3.0 will eventually be, but I have some ideas. My personal definition is probably different than anyone else’s, so we will just wait and see.
What I do see, regardless if labels, is a major shift in search engine technologies and that brings about a major change in Internet technology as a whole. The impact of these new technologies are paradigm shifts in how you build websites and how you interact with customers. The more I think about it, the more excited I get because I thrive in the chaos of transformation and these new technologies make my head spin, in a good way.
The Real-Time Web
Micro-blogging systems, such as Twitter.com and FaceBook.com, have created more of a real-time component for the Internet. But more than just that, real-time has implications with news releases, instant product specials, event updates, stock market sites, real estate, and much more. We will always have websites that have static information, sure. But we have more websites every day with up-to-the-minute information and the search engines need to deal with that information. Think about it, how long does it take a search engine to see updates on a web page? Hours? Days? That’s just not good enough for the new real-time Internet.
Google.com, Bing.com, Yahoo.com, and all the other search engines are scrambling to be the innovator of this major breakthrough.
Microsoft’s Bing.com is following certain twitter.com users. The idea is to identify the most popular users and follow them. Just as search engines try to follow the most important websites, Microsoft wants to follow the most important real-time sources. If this system is automated in a way that it closely monitors various sites and services based on a sense of importance, it could work out very well. This strategy makes search engine optimization for real-time search a whole new area. Bing.com introduces other search engine optimization challenges because of how Bing.com works. Microsoft’s approach definitely creates a new model for search engine optimization. But are they really setup to be the dominant force in real-time search? I don’t know. I think Google.com has a distinct advantage by offering up their servers.
Google.com is launching their new Wave infrastructure. This is designed to have everyone upload their data to a Google.com server and that makes indexing content super easy. After all, your data is already on the Google.com server and the moment you put your data there, Google.com is aware of it. You can’t get more real-time than that. It is not the ultimate answer since not everyone will use Google.com servers. But it is a very good start. I am sure Google.com will use technologies similar to the Bing.com strategies as well. Needless to say, the race is on.
The Google WAVE Technology
Google has created a new infrastructure for Internet communications. They have figured out that a blog post, an email, an instant message, a photo album, and a micro-blog system are all basically the same thing. They are all communication objects with dates, times, senders, etc. They can all be stored and transmitted using identical techniques and then displayed or edited using any desired method by the user. For example, I can write an email and that email can be viewed as a blog post or as a real-time micro-blog update or as an update to a photo album. How I post my communication isn’t important. How you view my communication isn’t important. How that communication is transmitted isn’t important. All that matters is that if I post a communication that the desired person can see it easily. We do not have to separate these communications into instant messages, file transfers, photo albums, blog posts, and so on. It’s all really just one thing. A communication object. I put something up, you view it. It doesn’t matter which technique I use to post it or what technique you use to view it.
The implications of this is the paradigm shift we really need to talk about. This means that you can actually have an interactive real-time conversation with someone while they are visiting your website or viewing your photo album. It means that email and chat, being the same thing, that instant messaging and email are actually the same thing and that you can have a real-time conversation with someone that is also an email conversation with history and archiving. Video instant messaging, photo sharing, micro-blogging ... they all merge into this new model. All information is real-time. All information has history. All information is in all places. You will never have to think about instant messages, photo albums, video chat, blogging, and websites as different tools. They are all merging together at the foundation. It creates entirely new ways to interact with your clients and it is ultimately a major simplification of the Internet. The winning formula is to take something complex and make it easy. Google has done that with Google WAVE. To see the video about this, go to www.google.com/wave. You can register to be part of this project here: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup/.
In real world terms, the possibilities of Google’s WAVE technology are incredible. You have to wrap your imagination around having a true real-time website. This could transform your business. It opens up new conversations for search engine optimization, web design, and software development. Instant Internet has amazing possibilities. The future is Google Wave and real-time Internet. If you want to know my definition of Web 3.0, it is real-time. The real-time Internet means that web pages will no longer “just lay there”. The new real-time Internet will be as fresh and current as television, but with millions of channels worth of information. Move over TV, the real-time web is here.
