Ofcourse, I googled and surprisingly not surprised to face myself with 30 million results.
The earliest refernce to Web 4.0 from Google's first page of search results is the article Web 4.0: Start planning now by Steven Pemberton in 2006.
Here are my one line definitions about the Web x.0 (why do we have only x.0 and not 1.1, 2.8, etc): Key words, and my vision about web 4.0
Web 1.0 :
Information Collection Place, similar to books, and photocopies
Keywords: HTML
Web 2.0:
Interactive, apart from Web 1.0 information collection, a grouping and interacting place (In old world these are called museums, townhalls, bartering): flickr, facebook, Amazon etc
Keywords: RIA
Web 3.0:
Symantic, understanding the relationships and provide cross-content from multiple sources.(Again, in old world these were called private investigators, pychologists,..)
Keywords: Concepts, ontology
Web 4.0: My view
- Personalized mashable applications, from subcomponents of different web 3.0 apps
- Define the rules for making the relationships
- Automated information collection agents
- Complete replacement of having information on dektops/laptops
I will keep adding my vision to this list.
So, now let me point you to some sources that did a good job in explaining the differences (without putting me to sleep, yawn..!!)
Sramana Mitra defines Web 3.0 as
Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS).
But for me pictures are worth 1000 words. (So was year 2000, y2k worth 2 pictures?)3C = Content, Commerce, Community |
4th C = Context |
P = Personalization |
VS = Vertical Search
Paisano summarized web 2.0 vs web 3.0 vs Web 4.0 very well. Coming back to 2.0 vs 3.0 the figure below is how he summarized the differences. Thank you Paisano for making this so easy.
I encourage you to go to his blog for more on this topic.