Last week I went to the Refresh San Diego meeting over at Platt College (here in San Diego), a gathering of web developers and search marketers. Bill Bonnefil from Digital Telepathy gave a good presentation of how their company works in terms of their creative process, how they "get stuff done". I had the chance to ask Bill a few questions about the future of the web and what the term web 3.0 meant to him. A lot of people laughed when I asked, one guy in the audience even commented:

I think I'll wait till they fix all the bugs and then go for version 4.0

(thought that was funny). Anyhow, Bill seemed to take the question seriously and started off by giving his idea of what 1.0, 2.0 and then what 3.0 means.

• Web 1.0 was the "one-way" interaction the user had with a web page. You view a web page... and that's really it, moving onto the next page.
• Web 2.0 is now the "two-way" intereaction a user has with a web site. You view a web page but now you can place content onto the site and see what others are doing, i.e. YouTube, myspace, facebook, ebay, etc. It's the people that build the site and the communities.
• Web 3.0 is the "two-way" interaction PLUS the site generating or comming up with new information based on past user information it already has already collected. Another way to look at it would be any extra logic or intelligence a web page can "mash up" in terms of, for example, offering suggestions on products other people bought from this site or what to do with your specific current stock portfolio now that you have X amount of dollars saved up... sort of a way for the web site to become "smart" and act more like a human would.

lets just hope web pages don't start getting too intelligent... I like my artifical intelligence non thretening ;)