The whole numbered Web thing is something I’m pretty much over. However, over at his blog, Seth Godin riffs on what Web4 might bring. It all starts with three base requirements:
- ubiquity
- identity
- connection
It goes way beyond the phenomenon of Web 2.0 where collaboration and sharing between social networks that are coupled in a range from very loose (think 43 Things users who want to go to Thailand) to pretty tight (think of Basecamp users on a given project).
Further, it richly and deeply extends Tim Berners-Lee’s Web 3.0/Semantic Web, where the Web is a “universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange”.
Seth’s riff goes all the way, to a point where the devices and technologies we use are so aware of our needs and wants that information comes to users pre-filtered, pre-organised and pre-connected. To my mind, this is the ultimate aim of technology and tools in the 21st Century – to be an almost preternaturally aware set of functions that automatically, preemptively and predictively facilitate improvements in collaboration, social interaction, travel, information provision and identity.
When we have these, the possibilities become virtually endless. Every device we have is completely interconnected, all the time, both to the network in a technical sense and to the network of people, places, needs and wants that our identity represents. For web workers, for whom the desire (and oftentimes, a very real need) for connectedness is pretty much the norm, the ubiquity/identity/connection is Holy Grail stuff.
I’ve had a running joke with my friends for years that I’ll be the first in line when the opportunity arises to get a biological implant and “chip in”… Seth’s Web4 is almost there.
Image © HJ Barraza. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
