On the road to the elusive Web 3.0 (something to do with semantics, meaning, and context rather than just data, links, and AJAX), core infrastructure is beginning to move from the edge to a center inhabited by companies such as Amazon, Salesforce.com, Joyent, and now Google with its new App Engine.
Call it Web 2.5, where the platform-as-a-service providers allow developers to create Web applications via the cloud and for users to consume them on any Web-connected device, anytime and anywhere. It eliminates what Amazon's Jeff Bezos describes as the "muck," the undifferentiated heavy lifting, such as setting up and maintaining servers, databases, storage, and networks.
It also leverages data centers from large players like Amazon and Google that were built from the ground up to support Web applications at huge, virtualized scale and with high reliability and relatively low cost. And, it creates potentially giant subscription-based revenue streams for the platform-as-a-service providers. They become utilities providing Web services to the planet and managing the high-value personal profile data.
Google App Engine, which was unveiled tonight at Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, offers similar capabilities to Amazon's EC2, S3, and SimpleDB services. Google App Engine is limited to using the Python language, Google APIs, and a relatively modest amount of storage, compute cycles, and bandwidth per day currently, but you can see where this is heading.
Google could parlay its search and advertising technology, market dominance, and its infrastructure prowess into a powerful engine that runs and monetizes thousands or millions of externally developed applications.
Salesforce.com provides a more mature example today with its Force.com platform. It allows developers to write applications, mostly CRM-oriented, in a variety of languages that can run natively on the Salesforce.com software platform and data centers.
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salesforce.com)
In many ways it is the Microsoft model--you need a subscription (license in the old days) to the platform to run your application. In this case, "run" means that Salesforce.com provides developers all the software and hardware services in exchange for a fee, which is based on specific metrics, such as Web services calls.
Rival NetSuite, as well as smaller outfits such as Bungee Labs, are seizing on the concept of providing complete cloud-based development and deployment platform services.
Microsoft hasn't yet shown its cards in the platform-as-a-service arena. Nor has the object of its affection, Yahoo. Microsoft has talked about SQL Server Data Services and the grand synchronization mesh, but it hasn't revealed any plans for an end-to-end hosted platform-as-a-service for developing and serving applications from the cloud. Mary Jo Foley has some insight on that topic.
Web 3.0 as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee is not around the corner, but it is busily percolating. In parallel, platform-as-a-service is evolving, the plateau of Web 2.5. When the two meet, Web 3.0 will have arrived.
Dave McClure is becoming the Web version of a streetwise ghetto talker. In his latest post, Dave makes some good points, amid the street talk, in his attempt to define Web 3.0 and identify the winners in the race to colonize the Web.
In his day job, Dave is an investor and adviser to Web start-ups, and the more mild-mannered conference chair for Graphing Social Patterns, and a co-chair of the Web 2.0 Expo, which takes place April 22 through 25 in San Francisco.
I agree with Dave that the entities managing personal profile infrastructure, such as user IDs, social graphs, and online payment systems, will have a major advantage in colonizing and monetizing the Web. In his post, Dave wrote:
Because the Future of the Web belongs to whomever controls Search, Content, & these 3 core infrastructure components:
1. User Logins & Passwords
2. Friend Lists / Address Books
3. Payment Systems
Messaging systems (email, IM, and SMS / mobile phones) are the largest aggregations of user logins. They also have implicit social graph data & targeted friend lists buried in their data stores, but they will take a little mining to get to. The#1 and #2 players in messaging are Yahoo & Microsoft, with Google & AOL duking it out for #3 (note: Gmail is growing a lot faster than AOL). Also, if you consider messages on social networking systems, Facebook & MySpace are also significant players. These two have advantages over the others, since they have already built out Friend Lists, News Feeds, Social Apps, & other viral mechanisms in a way that allows amazingly fast & efficient (if spammy) distribution of content. They will get better at it, but they still need to discover better ways to monetize, and currently Google is doing that best via search, and ecommerce systems like eBay & Amazon are doing it well via traditional online shopping & online wallets (PayPal, Amazon 1-Click). Apple is also doing a pretty good job via iTunes of collecting & storing payment info for millions of users.
Dave asserts that Microsoft (with Yahoo) and Google (with AOL?) are best positioned to capitalize on his version of Web 3.0. Facebook, which has many of the pieces, as well as News Corp. (MySpace.com) and Apple will be factors.
Young Man Intrigued by the Flight of a Non-Euclidean Fly, 1942-47
(Credit: Max Ernst)As I wrote in a post about the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo union, one of the key elements of the deal is the combined reach of users of e-mail, instant messaging and other communications services.
Having contacts and related profile data provides a hub--the personal profile infrastructure--for building out a social network that is sticky, precision-targeted and monetizable at planetary scale. Facebook and MySpace are trying to build it from the ground up, adding richer communications services to their social graphs. Microsoft and Google are focused on engineering the social into their existing large-scale communications services.
They are all driving toward a social and semantically rich Web. It doesn't need a name, but when it arrives it will be the third major phase of the World Wide Web, a web of relationships and meaning, not just pages and data.
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