Alan Webber on the past, present and future of the internet

Question: When will we have Web 3.0?

Alan Webber: The amazing thing about web 1.0 was all of a sudden everything was available online. Information was accessible, you can get it on your terms, when you wanted it, it was permanent and instantaneous at the same time. So the notion that there is only way to deliver information into access information got blown up and space and time in real; this is not theory, we’re not talking Einstein theory, space and time fundamentally changed and it was great, it was freeing, it was liberating but it was still limited in its dimensionality, it was basically two dimensional.

Web 2.0 made it three dimensional ‘cause all of a sudden you add this component of interactivity and the customer is in charge and the customer drives and the open systems beats close systems is basically participatory, interactive, open communication dialogue, real time, personal participation in the life of information, creation, sharing, evaluation, boom. So you took something that exploded time and space and add another dimension which is your stepping inside of it.

I don’t that much about physics but what I know about physics is when you go into quantum physics, the game changes because the participant determines the outcome of the experiment, that’s web 2.0, okay? It’s no longer changing space, time, it’s reinventing reality so that the participants determines the outcome of the experiment and that blew the game open even more. What happens with 3.0, 4.0, I am waiting to see. As my friend, Keith Yamashita used to say, “Watch this space.”

It’s going to happen, I don’t know what it’ll be.

Recorded on: April 23, 2009