Rasmus: Future of the Web - A Continuing Evolution

Coming from where I come from I kind of laugh at the Web 2.0 thing. Because I remember when the web was Arpanet and Darpanet in the aerospace community – because that’s my background; I spent quite a bit of time in the US Aerospace – so to me anything that we’re doing is probably more like Web 12.0, because I think we just started numbering it way too late. It’s much older technology than we give it credit for. When I think about Web 2.0, that’s somewhat of a marketing view of where technology is going to go. It’s that blend of consumer technology, the ability for people to take control of their environment, citizen publications around blogs, the environments of Wiki’s for doing the collaborative view of information. I think that’s all great. I don’t think it necessarily… I always say: I don’t think concepts need version-uppers. I think it’s a continuing evolution because if you actually look at the original html browsers, there were mark-up capabilities in those that you could co-create web pages and put comments on them. That was in the original html specification. So having people be able to comment on a Wiki to me is not new stuff, right. It may be new to business - some places kind of hype that up. I don’t look at that as anything new. I think it is just a continuing evolution. Web 3.0 or the semantic web I think has some interesting stuff. It’s been a long time from the standpoint of, as I said that I did artificial intelligence in the past, and I think that one of the things that is still a challenge for the computer industry or the information industry, is to understand the information that is available on the computing platforms and actually understand what is on your disk, let alone understand what’s on the web. And so there are facilities being built inside the web to help make that understanding happen, but I’m still a bit sceptical about our ability to really create this overwhelming knowledge-based infrastructure where the web really knows what’s in it and how it’s all related. Because a lot of that – as I know firsthand – is handcrafted by individuals saying: “Here’s how we’re tagging things, here’s the relationship between this and that.” I think we’ll get to the point eventually. I don’t know if it’s the Web 3.0 timeframe, that systems will be able to understand information and build relationships. And I think that will be a revolution. But I’m not sure it’s going to happen in quite the timeframe that the Web 3.0 people are promising now.