Beyond Web-2.0

A little over a year ago, I gave a lightning talk at the W3C Technical Plenary in Boston where I looked forward to what came after Web-2.0. The key insight underlying that talk was that the Web was now mature enough for us to build Web technologies purely out of Web parts. Web-2.0 is a result of applying the Web to itself and is therefore better thought of as Web(Web()) or more concisely, Web².

Today, we can build new web artifacts out of existing ones by aggregation (web mashups) and by projection (filtered views), and publish the resulting artifacts on the web by assigning them a URL. This leads to the insight that this web that is to come potentially consists of the power-set of all web content. These ideas, and their logical consequences are detailed in article entitled Toward 2^W --- Beyond Web 2.0 in the February edition of the Communications Of The ACM. You can also find a slightly more extensive blog I posted here.