Xavier’s blog

Xavier Damman is a serial* entrepreneur. He founded the first participative magazine in Belgium TRIBAL.be back in 1999. He is now founding commentag.com, a tag repository for the Web of Thoughts.

 * serial starts from 2 right?

With the success of Web2.0, many have tried to imagine what the web3.0 would be.

There have been many attempts. But most of them did just not satisfy me.
To me, the most interesting one is The Main Street Web, or in other words, when the Web2.0 will break the chasme and be widely used in the main street by people who don’t even notice they are using a web2.0 service. The Mobile Web will largely contribute to this situation as it will allow the rest of us to be connected without having to manipulate a clumsy computer.

This will change much more things than we could imagine now.

First: GPS
GPS will radically change the way we interact with web2.0. Whatever we will upload, a geotag will be added.
Therefore, everything will be adapted to the place we are. Facebook will show our closest friends (in terms of distance), when we will look for a review of a restaurant it will show the one just at the opposite of the street with its menu and other clients’ reviews.

It means that not only IT companies will now have to worry about their reputation on the blogosphere, but also any single main street business. Every single shop, every single restaurant.

Second: Interface
You don’t write a text with a mobile phone as you do on a computer with a full keyboard.
The iPhone doesn’t even have a keyboard!

So the whole interface will have to be reengineerd.
Which makes me think that on the Web3.0 you will not search for content anymore, but you will browse for content.
The same way that on the iPhone you don’t search for a song, you flip through your albums.
You will not write posts on your blog on your mobile, you will share your thoughts.
The web3.0 could also be called The Web of Thoughts.

What will rule web3.0?
Till now, people where only connected through a Desktop computer.
They were confortably seated. They had a goal when opening their browser. They knew they are looking for …… (insert here your keywords).
And Google was the best player to search among a huge source of information where it does not matter either you search for reviews or critics because on millions of pages, someone would have use the keyword you are looking for.

On the Web3.0, people will be mostly connected through a mobile device they always wear. People are not seated, people do not have time, and most of the time people do not have something to search for.
Instead, people will have a look to their mobile device to see if there are some information about the place they are. As they don’t know in advance what kind of information other have left in that place, a google page with “type here what are you looking for” is pointless.
In the contrary, a tagcloud to browse to the different types of information that place has would be much more efficient.

The Google of the Web3.0 will be a Tag repository.
It would be like the file system of your hard-drive. It will remember for every piece of information metadata (tags) to allow access to it when you need it.
In the desktop era (Microsoft era), it was all about a tree (one tree applied to many documents => one-to-many). It worked well because you were mostly the only one who needed to access the information on your computer.
In the web era (Google era), it is a many-to-many paradigm (search). Here many many persons need to access the information and all these persons want to access it their way. So a one-to-many tree paradigm does not work here.
In the web3.0 era, what will shape your need of information is your localisation. So a global search like on Google will not work. A Google search with localisation? Would work only if you know in advance what you are looking for. And if you type “review” because you are in a restaurant it will not work because reviews would not have the word “review” explicitely written on.
Google is brillant to search among a huge amount of website. But the Web3.0 will have to crawl much smaller bunch of data because these data are localisation relative.

So the Google of the Web3.0 would be a tag repository which will remember everything that has been said in that particular place and tag it appropriately.

Example:
That repository will remember that in that place (for ex. London, in the city at the Japanese Canteen) you have sent a review of their Chicken Teriyaki.
So that a new person going to that place and opening his portal page will see that in this place there are mostly reviews. He could Zoom on this tag and get the reviews.
If that person goes out and walk a bit towards St-Paul church, the tagcloud will then show new tags like “pictures” and “history” while proportionaly reducing the size of “review”.
The interface would be fully localisation aware and would not ask you to enter any text.
To achieve that, Web Semantic will have a great role to play to classify every new content with tags. Because when you will tweet “I love this chicken teriyaki”, you are not explicitely writting “review”.

All of this make me thing about a theory which says that the human memory cannot fit into our brain (in fact, where our memory is located is still an open question among the scientific community). Some information would be stored in our brain while other would be kept on objects (and other on a upper cloud that we all share and to which we can connect sometimes while sleeping or meditating. Which explains why certain person - mediums - can know your history without knowing you).
That’s the reason why sometimes when you see something it remembers you a lot of souvenirs.
Web3.0 is all about that. Is all about keeping souvenirs of what happened in a particular place.

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