web 2.0 Infinity An article by Scott Loganbill in the monkey_bites section of webmonkey reports that “As our economy sours more and more technologists are writing off Web 2.0 as dead.” Then he goes on to say, “We believe … the web is evolving.  In fact, there’s no sign it will ever stop.”  He also states that “Luckily for all of us, web technology is still in it’s infancy…”

I side with Scott on this.  Whoever the “nervous technologists” are, they are wrong.  Human beings are all about connections and relationships.  The World Wide Web, that Tim Berners-Lee so un-selfishly gave us, is all about connections.  The web is still in it’s infancy.  As it progresses into the future, those connections will increase both in number and sophistication.  We wont see a “bubble popping” like the dot-com crash of 2001-02. 

 

Rob Hoff at BusinessWeek said of our current “tough times”:

…I’m not so sure it will be a bad thing in the long run—maybe quite the contrary. So if you see the inevitable stories in coming weeks and months predicting the demise of innovation in Silicon Valley, read them with a heavy dose of skepticism. As any battle-tested entrepreneur will tell you, the bad times are the best of times to start a company that will last.

Ray Kurzweil, IT innovator and futurist said:

… (he) sees the Internet rapidly evolving to a world-wide mesh, tied together by an unimaginable number of devices, including ones embedded in the environment, on our clothing, and inside our bodies. Devices now spokes on the network, such as cell phones and wireless PDAs, will become nodes. Search engines of the future won’t wait for us to ask; they’ll anticipate the information we’ll seek.

To say that the web has stopped progressing is like saying (in 1908) that there would be no further progress in automobiles past the Ford Model T.   Web 2.0 will eventually go away but not because it has decreased or failed.  The Web will continue to progress and become more social.  Web 3.0 is just over the horizon.  We have a little economic uncertainty and some tough times to get through, but we will get there, and past that the web has an infinite future.

 

From Amazon.com:

Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web  by Tim Berners-lee (Author) "When I first began tinkering with a software program that even gave rise to the idea of the World Wide Web, I named it Enquire,…" (more)