Since Web 2.0 has been defined to death, and just about everyone under the sun has had a good old time debating what it means, I've decided to leave it alone and let it die.  In fact, I don't really care about it any more.  I have my own ideas about what Web 2.0 means and I'm not very likely to change those, but that's not the point of this post.  I've seen the future, and it's not Web 2.0, it's something beyond that.

There's a revolution coming to the World Wide Web.  It's going to build on the concepts that have come from Web 2.0, but at the same time expand beyond that.  It's going to provide an infrastructure to democratize information, and it's going to shake up the entire Internet; it's just a matter of time. 

I'm going to call it Web 3.0 just for the sake of talking about this concept more efficiently.  I had originally titled this post "Web 3.0", until I took a look at Tech.Meme and saw the firestorm around O'Reilly trademarking the "Web 2.0" term.  What a mess, they are going to lose a ton of credibility over this.  What's the point, are they really hurting so bad for money that they have to resort to trademark squatting?  Do we really need more bottom-feeding lawsuits on the Internet?  Do we really need a bazillion MORE pointless blog posts debating this term that's already been beaten to death like a rented mule?  Shame on you O'Reilly, you just made me waste 2 minutes of my time ranting about this and re-titling my post.  I wonder how much of the world's collective time this idiocy will waste in total.  Anyway, I digress.

Web 3.0 will be built on a few key emerging technologies:

1. Open Standards.  Microformats are just the beginning.  There aren't many of them, and they aren't cohesive enough to be useful.  Yet.  Within the next couple of months to a year they'll start being pervasive enough to fulfill their promise.
2. Live Clipboard.  The ability to transfer rich data around on the clipboard is a powerful thing.  If you spend some time with it you'll see why it's so important.  It makes transferring rich data between applications, networks, and people as simple as copy and paste.  I can't wait for an IM client that supports this, I think that will be the "Aha" moment for many people.
3. Structured Blogging.  This is another technology that's still in its infancy.  Microformats are the lever that will cause this to pick up steam.  Imagine embedding contacts, events, and lots of other meaningful data that people can actually use in text.  Instead of linking out to posts like this, you'll be linking to actual things.  Instead of linking to Mike Arrington, his profile will popup with the address for his blog, along with his public contact information.
4. Decentralized Synchronization.  HTTP won't go away, but it won't be the standard way to share information.  Instead, data will be synchronized by a peer to peer network most likely built on BitTorrent.  There won't be single point where a feed originates from, but you'll be able to receive feed updates from the peer to peer network.  M. David Peterson has come up with what I believe is an elegant solution to securing decentralized feeds, which will be an important catalyst for making this network actually work.
5. New search engines.  Current search engines are primarily built around HTML as the primary authority for content, however HTML is deeply flawed and is really only good at displaying formatted text.  Once structured blogs and decentralized feeds take off, a new type of search engine will be needed that sits on top of the peer to peer network and filters out relevant information.  I would envision this to be something like Sphere or Technorati.  This only underscores my prediction that Google is in trouble.

Web 3.0 is about creating a richer World Wide Web.  It fulfills the promise of open standards, social software and peer to peer networks.  Web 2.0 hints in that direction, Web 3.0 gets there.

There isn't any Web 3.0 software built yet, but from conversations I've had with a few people, and what I've been working on myself, I know that it's being developed.  More details to follow in the next few months...