Web 2.0 Entrepreneur

Are we ready for Web 3.0?

• Posted by Tengku Zahasman on August 9th, 2007 filed in Thoughts, Web2.0, Technology, Artificial Intelligence


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I noticed that there has been quite a number of discussions over the Internet on the topic of what the future Web 3.0 is all about. Like the current Web 2.0 itself, it is predictable that the term “Web 3.0″ will never get properly defined as well, but the term will eventually be used and mentioned in numerous papers, documents and materials, in blogs and the mainstream media to describe web apps that exhibit some sets of characteristics, features and capabilities more advanced than that of the current Web 2.0. The question is, what kind of characteristics are we talking about here?

The truth is no one knows, and only time will tell. But some of the most notable implementations mentioned around the term “Web 3.0″ includes the following:

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence itself represents the future, so it is no surprise that AI is going to be one of the core implementation of the future web applications. AI is, in itself, a very broad field of study which consists of many distributed branches like Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Data Mining, Voice/Pattern Recognition, Probability Algorithms and Expert Systems. Although they sound complex, what these things do is basically trying to incorporate human intelligence into machines - or in our case - the Web. Some of the web apps around lately has already started using AI techniques in their applications. SpinVox for instance has such an impressive “Voice Recognition” engine that I’ve seen so far, and also Odiogo.com which does the exact opposite so elegantly! There are also plans to somehow “restructure” (see below) the Web as a database which can be “mined” to extract a collective human knowledge around the world. Since I majored in Artificial Intelligence back in college, the idea of implementing AI to the mainstream web gets me pretty excited.

Semantic Web

It doesn’t matter how many times I read about Semantic Web on Wikipedia, I will still have trouble understanding its concept as clearly. My understanding is that it tries to put the web information into an extensible sort-of way so that it can be “understandable” by machines (when I say machines, I mean computer programs) but at the same time can also be presented to human in a form that is described as “natural”. An easy example of this is RSS feeds, which have been widely used in content publishing. Today, the data that’s being published through RSS can be submitted to many different feed readers and websites. Web 3.0 may have higher ambition towards this by which the Web could even use, digest, understand, compare, and make decision based on all of the data being presented to them in certain formats. Semantic Web will turn the web into a so-called World Wide Database, realizing the concept of “intelligent web”. I could see that this is going to be closely related to the AI field above. Didn’t I mention that this is going to be hard to understand?

3D Technology?

This can be quite ambitious, but with the recent invention of multi-touch technology, realizing 3D experience on the web might be just around the corner. A lot of this takes the Web beyond web browsers and using the SecondLife project as an example. However, something inside me tells that 3D stuffs just doesn’t cut it for the masses. We’ll just have to wait and see whether 3D is going to be the next big thing in the future web.

Open Technologies

Web apps providing open APIs and using open identities (such as OpenID) for authentication mechanisms. This will allow multiple apps to be pieced together and distributed into many different platforms and gadgets. That’s probably what Eric Schmidt tried to convey to the audience when asked about what he thinks of Web 3.0 is gonna be about. And this may also be the reason why Facebook is kicking off this year with their extensible app API feature that they provide.

The video below shows Eric Schmidt’s attempt in defining Web 3.0 even though it was not entirely what I had expected. I was hoping that he would’ve at least mentioned “AI” :

The future is now!

• Posted by Tengku Zahasman on June 1st, 2007 filed in Thoughts, Technology


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Five years go, not so many people realize how much Ajax is going to influence the Web development industry as we see it today. In fact at one point I thought Javascript was going to die. Before Flash was invented, many people think the Web is a boring, dull world full of text pages and non-interactive static images. But things have changed drastically since then. If people who used to socialize using the Internet were once regarded as computer freaks, today they are called the “new age” people. Calvin Klein calls it “technosexual“. Thanks to the emergence of these two powerful Web technologies, the Web has become more alive and socially friendly even to the non-tech-savvy community.

Now imagine if in the near future, people will start developing Web applications using a new technology where users can manipulate stuffs in the webpage by using their fingers on a multi-touch screen monitor. Not only that, users can also upload/download files, images and videos from/to our thumbdrives or mobile gadgets by just placing them on the screen. Had you watched the movie Minority Report, you’ll know how cool this application is if it becomes a reality. Look no further, the future is nowhere but today. I say this after watching a cool video about a new product announced by Microsoft yesterday which is known as Microsoft Surface. Check out this video to see it in action:

While the technology of a multi-touch screen has already been invented years ago, it has never been designed to be as socially fancy as this 30-inch screen “coffee table” hardware. Looks like Microsoft is bringing this to mainstream. This new technology may not seem to be directly related to the Web application industry - or at least not yet - but I bet this innovation is gonna bring a huge impact on how we write Web applications in a few years to come. Imagine how many interesting things we can do when this technology is implemented on the Web. Be prepared for the next shift

Credits to TechCrunch and Smart-Machines