Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Forget Web 2.0 it's Web 3.0


Web 2.0 doesn't needs any introduction. What's most exciting to know before you could digest Web 2.0 is that there is Web 3.0 which is now ready for you. And this one's much bigger than the previous versions of the world wide web.

By Web 3.0 I mean that birth of such applications which will result from the existing applications or websites. API's serve as a key to build or use such facilities in the new websites. The Web 3.0 has it's root embedded here. Web 3.0 is a newer version of www where the websites are built using API's of the already existing websites. These then become the web services. These Web 3.0 websites will work on the basis of scraping and mash ups. Existing websites can be scraped to create of new websites. Or simply a mash up of all these websites and their power harnessed through API's will be used to develop such a Web 3.0 based website.

So now for creating a website, say a photo album of your favorite movie stars you can use API's provided by an Image search engines such as Flickr to develop a website which provides the best and the latest images on your website. Now you can use this and such API's to create a variety of exciting collection of images in your web album and further put a Google Search API to make those images searchable in your website. Now just imagine what it takes to create such an application i.e. web album. You need to cerate a small search engine, you need to continiously index and and put images of all your favourite stars and upload it to your website. Plus you also need to to edit and customize the shape and size of the images according to your website. You also need to have an Admin Panel in your webiste where you can carry out these activites as frequently as possible. Doesn't it seem a cumbersome task as compared to using API's to configure and develop an application within minutes. You can simply use the power of Flicker through it's API to search and present images of your actors or actresses link by link on the pages of your websites. You can further use Google's or other search engine's API to create a website which also provides latest news and gossips related to your stars.

So finally we understand a web 3.0 world wide web as a collection of websites build on the API's of already existing websites which are itself applications. Like Yahoo Search, Google Search, Flicker, Amazon API's, Pappal API, Google Maps API's for developing mashable applications on the fly. You can also use some of RSS technology based API's to customize the kind of information you want to display it in your website. Scraping the world wide web for the information, gaining access to the other websites database to use that data in your website and create web applications is all what Web 3.0 all about.

Web 3.0 is embarked by the breakthrough technology of creating a www which is more search able organized and machine understandable. This is creating a semantic web. Now Google and other search engines would be able to search more precisely and faster than ever before,and perform much intelligent searches. developing a semantic web is based on creating XML tags which provide information, these will serve as metadata to the already existing data. It would let the machines to understand the exact data which is required by the user and filter out the unnecessary ones. Making the data readable by the machines also helps machines to categorize and sort data on their own without much of human intervention thus, making searching and organizing the web faster and more accurate.

Experience the Web 3.0 symbolizing application offered by Yahoo.
pipes.yahoo.com and mash up the whole world wide web. Experience the power of API's and use them to develop your applications today.

You may also like to gather and downloadable API's to develop your own web application based on these API's and have it hosted as any other websites.