Buzz word “Web 3.0″ has gotten a lot of attention this week. Calacanis defines the term as “the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.” Smith states it “will be a mobile web revolution.” Tim O’Reilly, the man who coined Web 2.0, comes in and helps clear up the mess. I mostly agree with him; the bottom line is that the next internet surge, Web 3.0 or whatever you want to call it, will only come when there is a radical change in the underlying technology — in my opinion, the hardware.

In the meantime, let’s stop defining Web 3.0 as an extension of Web 2.0, user-generated, platform, and all that jazz.

The First Boom

Let’s take a brief view at history. The first dot-com boom (1995 - 2000) started with the mass distribution of 56k modems in computers. The connection speed was just fast enough for rise of e-commerce. Media richness was limited to text and images, not yet fast enough for users to share in masses. The market overextended and people just didn’t need the same type of sites over and over again. Innovation was quiet for the next year or two.

The Second Coming

Then, from 2003 and on, the adoption of broadband sped up. Increased internet speeds powered companies to make applications that were not very practical in the past: video, rich social networks, and online platforms. This resurgance was coined Web 2.0 at a conference. The term basically identified a comeback of the internet, not necessarily any one type of technology or usage. However, few years have passed; the broadband market is maturing and we are again getting bored of the same types of sites over and over again. Mark Cuban claimed that “the Internet is dead.” The truth is that we are limited by the underlying hardware and platform.

(Broaband Growth Slows - image courtesy of GigaOm)

Nick Gonzales also has a a great post regarding bandwidth being the new limit on computing, for further reading.

The Future …

What we need now is a big upgrade in the infrastructure of the internet. United States notoriously lags behind in broadband. I would like to see speeds that allows you to access an external HD half way across the world, without much lag. Or maybe, the way is through mobile technology: using the iPhone as the next computer. However, with the telecom’s grapple of the wireless spectrum and Apple prohibiting open applications on the iPhone, I still think we’re a while away.

Sure, innovation will continue to occur, but I don’t think we’ll see a surge worth calling the next web until some major paradigm shift. The 700mhz spectrum anyone?

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