Category: "Web 3.0"

Web 3.0 Predictions

Definitions

  • Social networking - The use of technology to connect people.

  • Web 3.0 - The next generation of the Internet.

Predictions

  • Ads - Advertising (like the Google ads on this site), will continue to get more and more engaging. Tools to create these ads, particularly interactive ones will become very powerful and popular. The objective will be to draw site visitors into the ad, and to a different site. Bland text ads will be the equivalent of generic product packaging.

  • Content sharing - This will remain strong, allowing people to post material for others to access. The difference will be in the reduction of comments. Ratings are a good way to allow a site to self-police content, but comments are often of little to no value.

  • Kids - Kids will follow the latest site with games and entertainment, as long as it stays fresh. Their loyalty will be very difficult to maintain as they age out of material and as new sites come on line. For that reason, youth oriented sites should consider the member life cycle, identifying where to attract new visitors from and where to spawn them to. Companies will begin to adopt a cradle to grave approach, probably through partnerships.

  • Marketing sites - Sites used for public relations/marketing will remain strong, because they offer information of value.

  • Partnerships - Web partnerships will become active, allowing people to move within a sphere of content, seamlessly.

  • Social networking - Will be replaced by more resource oriented sites as people realize that connecting over the internet is actually very isolating. Much of the intent of social networking is to share information, however there is a wealth of information already available. Success will be sites that transition gracefully from open, ad hoc media into the organization of user-contributed content that better supports the site visitors. Improvements in search, content organization, automation of content management, and information professionals will be key. Point systems that don’t translate into tangible benefits will not be successful.

  • Web 3.0 - Just a buzzword, means alot of different things to alot of people. The web is too diverse to categorize or assign version numbers.

  • Web applications - Applications will rely increasingly on frameworks like Zend. The demand for more sophisticated sites will necessitate the use of frameworks for better quality in a timely manner.

  • Web sites - Web sites will continue to become more polished. Site visitors will expect seamless application integration and advanced features. Simple HTML sites will be replaced by applications that are easy to manage.

Converge - dojo panes - AJAX iframes ...

I wanted to break my page into 6 content areas, with 5 where the content could be directed by one, and from cross-links from the other.

I pursued iframes, but the site architecture didn’t work well with it. I tried dojo’s content panes and was really impressed. In addition - these panes allow delivery of standalone HTML, while applying the page’s CSS. The integration is very simple, and polished, and extending the micro page to a full page would be easy. They also resize, so the user can adjust the page to meet their needs.

One interesting note, if you would like the panes to scroll, load the content in at page load time. Works great!

Use the Cache - Micro page overhead can be overcome with the browser cache

Although frames and iframes may require duplicate requests, most browsers will cache .js, .css, and .htm/.html files. This virtually eliminates the redundant request overhead, while still allowing a rich interface constructed from a page of micro pages.

This approach also avoids the complexity of AJAX/JSON. Done properly, it is completely transparent to the site visitor.

Frames and IFrames

Using frames and iframes to support web 3.0 pages is a great way to simplify the architecture, and avoid the complexity of AJAX. It also makes implementation of a CDN easier.

There are many ways to provide graceful search engine indexing of the pages - using Google’s site maps, Apache rewrite rules, and other creative approaches. Imagine the rich pages you could build, easily. Augment it with sophisticated browser caching and you can greatly speed the pages and reduce bandwidth requirements.

This also supports the idea of micro pages mentioned earlier.

:D

The Value of Web 3.0

The value of web 3.0 will be in its content, not in the technology to deliver it. To succeed, a company must make extremely efficient use of techonology for delivery, and focus on valuable content resources (people).

As with everything, the web is becoming increasingly specialized. Pure social networks that are intended to serve as resources will be replaced by managed content systems where the bulk of the material is posted by professionals and site visitors will offer supplementary content.

There are great opportunities for building sites of user contributed content, but the users should be qualified, and they should be rewarded with some benefit. An example would be a teachers’ system. Teachers (who are intelligent, resourceful, and creative) can share materials with other professionals in the education field. Their contributions can be rated, and those ratings can be used to offer items of value. For example, gift cards to stores that offer products they may appreciate - either personal or professional. In this case, the producers and consumers are from the same population. Another module could be to have medical professionals offer content for the general public. These are just examples.

The platforms these are built on must be extremely robust. The software itself is actually of limited value - it is only important to deliver the content, but that content must be protected, and preserved. This requires a careful storage architecture that should be portable.

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