The Unfolded Web

People all over are talking about the end of Web 2.0 in favor of a new, distributed network of information. Some people even suggested that we should start building a Web 3.0. What are the main characteristics of this new paradigm? Here’s a short list:

• easier and cheaper, on a  BusinessWeek article by Stephen Baker
• giving meaning to data, on a NY Times article by John Markoff
• much more useful than Web 2.0, on a blog post by Nick Carr
• the semantic web, on a blog post by Rod Boothby

Put simply, the new Web will be easier to the end-user and will make meaning out of data distributed across multiple services. More recently, an article by Bill Thompson on The Register caught my attention. Quoting the author:

We can start to build hybrid applications that use modular code and distributed services, some local, some remote.

True. We can do it right now. Web Services are widely available and everybody is starting to deploy them. RSS and other syndication formats are now mainstream. This means you can easily consume remote information and also produce it using remote scripting. But is this new Web going to kill AJAX and all the goodies that were developed in recent times? Not really. Quoting Anthony Cowley from the Arcadian Visions blog:

The truth is that the future of the distributed-computing web (aka the unfolded web) may well be developed as an extraction from the Ajax-based interface distractions of today. The key to this progress is the growing division between the back-end and front-end necessitated by people’s desire for today’s dynamic interfaces.

This new Web is all about having access to data and being able to manipulate it and presenting using a variety of interfaces. It’s about being able to separate layout from content. It’s the Unfolded Web.