Ok, I know, Many have gone before me and came up with a definition of Web 4.0. I could add a ton of links, but won’t. This link will do:http://www.google.nl/search?q=”web+4.0″. Check that out, but read on first…

Let’s start the counting. Web 1.0 was the original web. It’s still alive and kicking today, don’t worry. This is the web where those with either money or a geeky mind could put content online for you to read. Read-only, unidirectional web. If you wanted interaction, you would have to use other protocols than HTTP on which the web is build. Use ICQ (still alive!) or e-mail or IRC (Yup, I’m that old…). There are the egroups (now Yahoo) and some bulletin-boards (that’s what BB stands for remember?) but that was it. It would take Web2.0 to get to a Read-Write web. Thanks to Ted Lessig for letting us know that! How about http://youtube.com where you, yes you, can create and publish your content. How about blogs, how about social websites where you create your content on your profile. How about http://flickr.com and http://picasa.com. That’s Web2.0.

Web 3.0 is also called the Semantic web. What’s that all about? Well, semantic means meaning. A word is just a couple of characters until you give it meaning. Semantic web is all about letting applications and service understand what the content means. This in turn allows for real data-portability and interoperability since different websites could understand the content coming from other sites. You could ‘take your content with you’ when you go to another site. Would be nice ay? I sign up to ‘socialnet2.com’ and my friends and profile information from ‘socialnet1.com’ are already there… A simple example of semantics is tagging. The problem here is we have to manually attach the meaning to the words and different people may give different meaning to the same word. A good example of this would be the word Cock. It’s an animal right?.

Semantics is important to allow for better searching, or if you will, better finding. Semantics are important for exchanging information and tying services together. To create better services like mash-ups, but without the need for specific knowledge about specific APIs and a lot of proprietary programming. In fact, to really make Web 2.0 come to life, we would need web 3.0 first. And the same dependence is applicable to what I call web 4.0.

And remember, Different people mean different things when they say Web 4.0. So I repeat that this is only My Personal View and not necessarily the truth. It could well be that other people give other numbering to the same concepts. (are you still here? ready for the secrets?)

Web 4.0 is the web that extends to the real world. It’s the web of things. where your house becomes part of the web, and your car. Where your body becomes part of the Internet. Where you DM your Thermostat using http://twitter.com to turn the heat up because you are home early. Where the refrigerator orders milk when it notices it’s running out. Where your car checks the Google-Calendar of you and your garage to make a service appointment and where your general practitioner is notified of changes in your glucose-levels in your blood automatically and remotely. It’s the web where a seat in a plane is automatically registered when the location in your google calendar is remote and a taxi is already waiting to pick you up, without you even thinking about it.
You can easily see that almost all technologies are already available You can easily book airplane seats online, you can remote control your house-alarm system, you can order a taxi at the airport without using your phone and you can read what products are sitting in your fridge with a simple bar-code-reader. We have web-cams, arduino boards, ip-based thermostats and light-switches, we have health monitors that ip-connect and we have lots of web applications. In fact, we have lots of open standards to use. The only thing missing is the interoperability of all these services and standards. It doesn’t happen yet or happens on a very small scale with a lot of – alas – proprietary API and Programming stuff…..

There is one more thing the web 4.0 would definitely need. Since all this web 4.0 stuff is running on electricity, we would need greener alternatives to oil (with which we make plastics and electricity and heat and transportation) and lithium (which is running out quickly and needed for batteries) and gas (which we burn up like crazy) and lots of other pollutants… We would need energy efficient appliances and gadgets and we would need to harness the free and clean(er) energy from wind and sun and waves. We would need cleaner fabrication and a more equal sharing of wealth, we would need eco-awareness and local production to limit transportation needs. We would need an ‘Economy of Less’ rather than an ‘Economy of More’. But that’s a different post I’ll write someday…

So what’s your view on the Web 4.0, Would you like to live in such a world? Can you come up with more examples? I hope you like this post and don’t hesitate to comment on it!