TECH: WebSquared a smarter web beyond Web 2.0

We are now in a post-apocalyptic Web 2.0 world where the soil is finally nitrogen rich again and seeds are being planted or begining to sprout and lean towards the Sun of innovation.

Personally, I do like the moniker WebSquared because it talks about taking it to another level or dimension not just to another major or minor version of what already was.  I’ve cared more in the past year that we move beyond Web 2.0 than what we call it.

Obviously, We don’t need a snazzy new name before post Web 2.0 shows up – it’s already here!.

If you are like me, you are finally feeling the precipice of a new movement upon us.

Please take note, sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Yelp, Gmail, and many others have their orginal concepts and technoloies rooted in 2004 through early 2008.  It’s only in the last few months or year, have we started to see the rise of follow-on technologies & concepts that will define the next dimension of our web.  For example, Activity Strea.ms, Context Driven Goverment, PubSubHubPub, OpenID+oAuth, scableable non-RDBMS databases, Web OSes – just to name a few!

The primordial soup of WebSquared is so exciting that I have ’swimmers ear’!

Tim and John refer to Web Squared as ‘Web 2.0 Five Years On’ – I took the liberty of squishing the two works together (simply for better hashing/tagging).  I don’t want to put words with their mouths more than I have, so I’d simply prefer to give you releveant links to source material.  Draw your own conclusions and let’s have some townhalls (j/k) and spirited debate.  Let’s just all agree what’s done is done (great stuff no doubt – twice now infact) and move on to our collective technological futures.

First, Let me point you too one of Chris Messina’s great presentations that defines Web 2.0 (all available on SlideShare –> http://www.slideshare.net/factoryjoe):

• Chris Messina’s recent presentation (1 month old) “The Open, Social Web Workshop” http://www.slideshare.net/factoryjoe/the-open-social-web-workshop
• Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle: “Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On” –> http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/28/web2009_websquared-whitepaper.pdf
• VIDEO (embedded below) Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle explore their vision of where the web is heading: As we approach the six-year mark from the original Web 2.0 thesis, the trends are becoming clearer than ever. Once applications live in the cloud, the key to success will be harnessing network effects so that those applications literally get better the more people use them. But that’s just the beginning. Today we see that applications are being driven by sensors, not just by people typing on keyboards. They are becoming platforms for collective action, not just collective intelligence. The “data shadows” that people and things leave in cyberspace are becoming richer and deeper, and are being exploited in new ways. All this is adding up to something profound and different. When web meets world, we get Web Squared.”