Web 4.0 vs Web 3.0 vs Web 2.0

The amazing thing about technology is it's momentum. 2 posts ago, I posted about Web 2.0 and RIA . But I don't want my app/site worth an archeological dig when I finish it. So I decided to look forward to Web 4.0.

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

1. Personalized mashable applications, from subcomponents of different web 3.0 apps
   
2. Define the rules for making the relationships
3. Automated information collection agents
4. 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).

3C = Content, Commerce, Community |
4th C = Context |
P = Personalization |
VS = Vertical Search

But for me pictures are worth 1000 words. (So was year 2000, y2k worth 2 pictures?)

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.

Multilingualism, Rich Internet Applications, and the art of Web 2.0 programming

Several programming languages ago the rules were simple: For kernel level go with C/C++, and for visual applications there were some open source GUI libraries.

When I started looking around for an appropriate language to develop my own Rich Internet Application (to be on the list of 'me too' web 2.0 apps), I was overwhelmed by the choices.

When web programming was in the blooming stage, HTML was the uni solution. Then came SGML, Java, Flash, XML...and the list never stopped growing. While I am glad for all these technological developments, I feel we are reaching a stage where the evolving of the programming environment looks like the evolving of the natural languages on earth:totally segmented and compartmentalized.

For me, the choice of language should meet all the requirements below

1. It should be both installable, and also easily portable to web (or vice versa)
2. There should be lot of open source widgets available
   
3. If I have a cluster or other parallel environment in future, it should leverage that automatically, or using minimum programming (using addons)
4. Security should be inbuilt

Of course all the above are the basic requirements of web 2.0.

For now I decided on Ruby and Ruby-on-Rails (I am not sure if Ruby satisfies the above conditions..not yet).

For list of other apps, take a look at the links below.

• "An A to Z for the RIA Era"
• Programming language Popularity

Please post in comments if Ruby is indeed the ideal choice.