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Thursday, February 15, 2007
Say hello to Web 4.0
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Web 2.0? What about Web 4.0? No, another hiatus from blogging hasn’t left us loopy.
ZDnet’s Dan Farber picks up the discussion this week of where some people believe the Web will go over the next 25 years. He focuses on Nova Spivack of Radar Networks who outlined his vision of the future.
Web 3.0, explained here last summer, has garnered a lot of attention. Essentially, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Internet, and others are developing the “semantic Web,” essentially a means for databases to become “smarter” and more interactive with each other. So we’re talking about new ways for users to take advantage of the data stored in all kinds of databases.
OK, so what’s Web 4.0? Spivack doesn’t like to get bogged down in numbers. Web 3.0 is still a little fuzzy. However, Spivack features a chart on his blog showing a steady track from the “semantic Web” to Web OS (a Web-based operating system). Farber tries to explain: “The WebOS implies that machine intelligence has reached a point that the Internet becomes the planetary computer, a massive web of highly intelligent interactions.”
Farber also quotes futurist Ray Kurzwell who believes that by 2029 the WebOS will be on par — or better — than the human brain: “By that time, intelligent machines will combine the subtle and supple skills that humans now excel in (essentially our powers of pattern recognition) with ways in which machines are already superior, such as remembering trillions of facts accurately, searching quickly through vast databases, and downloading skills and knowledge.”
Who knows how accurate the futurists may be? In any case, it’s an intriguing discussion.
