Great piece on the Implemented blog this week about Web 3.0. Essentially, the piece tracks down lots of different definition of Web 3.0 that are floating around the web and sorts them into four main categories:

1. Semantic Web
2. APIs and Web Services
3. Mobile Web
4. Implicit Web.

The Semantic Web category seems to be the one getting the most buzz, and the one most people seem to think of when they talk about Web 3.0. But it is important to note that there are at least as many definitions of Web 3.0 as there are of Web 2.0 (in part because no-one really coined the phrase in the way  Tim O’Reilly did with Web 2.0). It was always an obvious step to start talking about Web 3.0 as soon as the Web 2.0 term got any traction, but inevitably it just became a buzzword to talk about all the next developments on the web.

I think the Semantic Web - the idea that computers will be able to go a step further in making connections between people and things on the web than they can at present based on various tags and other metadata - is the most compelling of these various ideas and so is deservedly at the top of the list, in that it involves the biggest change from the way the web works today and so provides the biggest step forward in terms of what people can do with the web.

The Web Services and Mobile Webs described in the post at Implemented feel like enablers or corollaries of the semantic web, and are in fact very much part of Web 2.0 as well. And the Implicit Web described at the end of the post is either an extension of the Semantic Web or the flip side of it - it’s still about computers deriving connections that are not explicit, but this time based on user behavior rather than tagging in web pages. As such it’s also an important part of Web 3.0 but probably secondary to the Semantic Web.

The post ends by discussing a few other views, including one that’s time-based. This is interesting but it really doesn’t make any sense because the various generations (to borrow an analogy from the mobile world) of the web co-exist at any particular period in time. Right now we arguably have Web 1.0 and Web 3.0 sites living alongside Web 2.0 sites and that’s likely to continue for a long time. The lines are very blurry indeed in the meantime. The term Web 3.0 is in some ways therefore even less useful than the term Web 2.0. But what we’re really talking about is how to make the web better, and what the components need to be, and that is a helpful discussion when it’s revealed by sweeping away the jargon.