Eschew Obfuscation

What is Web 3.0?

Posted by Max Dunn Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:08:00 GMT

Even while we continue to work on and define what Web 2.0 really is, many people have started to ask what is next; what is Web 3.0? Here is the answer: Web 3.0 is when all the Web 2.0 applications can start working together.

Mashups are a step in this direction. Mashups are when you take two different public Web 2.0 applications and put them together. An example of this is Zillow that uses Google Maps and real estate filings to show a map of home prices. The reason this can work is that each of these Web 2.0 applications has an API that allows it to be accessed, quered and displayed by another application.

However while mashups are great, they only work with “public” data, that is, those application that don’t require you to login or display any customized or private data.

For instance, let’s say you are writing a wiki and you want to let people upload pictures from their camera to the wiki. Can you simply create a mashup with Flickr to do this? No. Why not? Because Flickr keeps a separate list of users from your wiki so your users will need to go into Flickr first, upload their pictures, then come back to your wiki and browse for the picture and display it. You could have the user type their username and password into your wiki but users should be reluctant to trust your wiki with their Flickr account information.

This means that you can’t easily re-use web applications as components in other applications. So what do you do? You write your own picture uploader and storage component, even though it is a lot of duplicate work and won’t be as good as Flickr.

What is needed is wider acceptance and use of an API and applications that will handle the process of authenticating and authorizing users. There is progress in this direction with OpenID and SAML but our Web 2.0 applications need to use this instead of keeping their user information to themselves. For instance, when a user signs up for your wiki with their OpenID, they could be asked if they want to be added to the mailing list and to display their pictures. The wiki would then send a request to the OpenID server asking for permission to do this which the user could approve. Then when a user wants to put a picture from their camera on the wiki, the wiki could store it on the user’s Flickr account and show it from there.

Once we can get Web 2.0 applications working together, including having a common user API and being able to handle private data, then we will have moved to Web 3.0.