Is there anything new about the internet in the past few years?

Just as the title implies I am starting to wonder if we have slowed in our progress of new applications for the internet. I was so surprised to read about all the “latest and greatest” applications for the web in the article Web 2.0 and The Cathederal and The Bazaar – both of which were written sometime ago and most of the Web 2.0 concepts were still the one’s the more non-tech savvy people such as myself would consider fairly new.

Admittedly we have made progress in the last few years in optimizing and seeing the real benefits of generating business opportunties at “the tail” with less trafficked sites; and also harnassing the collective intelligence thorugh open source models. The problem for me is that these papers were cutting edge at their time (before we say many of the colleberative web applications take off) but today they seem to summerize the state of affairs. Where are the articles talking about what’s next? These notions can evolve but what is the next paradigm shift – what is Web 3.0? I went on the internet and googled Web 3.0 and nothing very exciting came up. An article about advanced intelligent search and an article about collaborative software development that sounds like some of the open source discussion we’ve been reading about.

The Web 2.0 article talks about applications that work on multiple devices eg. IPOD, IPHONE and Apple Notebook or PC so maybe we should be looking to the mobile device world to be driving the next paradigm shift? I think we are starting to see the new hot apps actually driven by mobile technology – such as Twitter – and we’ll have to see how the mobile devices manage to drive changed in the online world.

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