Can websites think?

One of my good friends has come up with an amazing website called zootout.com. You can get on the site and find information about the places to eat out or, as the site calls it, “zoot out!”

Okay before you start to think that I am being paid for this blog let me tell you why I began with zootout. This blog is about an invogue term – “Web 3.0”. And it will be easier to relate to everything, including the title of the blog 😉, as you read on.

We all know, Web 1.0 was when we had hotmail accounts (I still use my hotmail account btw 😊) and altavista was the best search engine around. Although people still argue that lycos was much better. Precisely, websites were all static and a place where information was stored for users to READ. Also, Yahoo Messenger was the coolest thing around. It was the most popular chat engine where people could actually share messages real time.

Then came Google, the big daddy of them all with an all new and improved search algorithm. Myspace gained popularity and Facebook wasn’t much behind. I believe the popularity of online chatting paved the way for the idea of how websites need to allow users to READ as well as WRITE. This was the dawn of Web 2.0 also known as interactive web. Or as we know it today, the social web. From static HTML websites to websites that allow instant sharing of text messages, photographs, videos and what not, internet has come way too far. Include the hundreds of billions of apps available online and you are bound to lose path of where we are going and how would Web 3.0 look like?

Web 3.0 is sometimes referred to as the “intelligent web” which I believe is absolutely apt. So users still READ and WRITE while the websites do the THINK part. If you think e-commerce websites are already doing it by suggesting products based on your recent searches or google is already doing it by giving you real time search suggestions as you type, voila, you are right! Websites today are tracking more user activities than ever (cookies, anyone? 😎) and finding inferences on how to keep the users engaged by doing the THINK part.

But as we delve deep into Web 3.0, we would understand that this is only the beginning. Let’s look at two scenarios below,

Scenario One – Friend’s Birthday

Its the birthday of one of your good friends and you come to know of it when you login on facebook. So you decide to send him a gift but since you guys have not been in touch for quite some time and live in different cities, you don’t really know what would make a good gift.

Thanks to Web 3.0 powered facebook, when you wished him on his wall, facebook also gave you gift suggestions. The gift suggestions are based on your friend’s activities, what all he has ‘liked’ on facebook, what he updates his status mostly about and where does he like to hang around. So now that you know what to gift your friend, you can simply select the product and with f-commerce (facebook’s version of e-commerce) you can make the purchase.

Not to mention it is shipped directly to your friend’s house with your custom birthday message 😊

Scenario Two – Dining Out

Later that day, you decide to dine out but aren’t sure of what to eat and where to go. Normally you’d google the nearby restaurants (or use services like Zomato) and google, being the smartass it is, has been saving all your searches. So tonight, when you are in no mood to search, you rather ask and let google do the THINK part.

Your search does not look like, “burgers in Bangalore”, it rather looks like, “what should I eat today?”

Based on what you have been searching on google, the results will be separated by options like,

• “Food you have not had in a while”
• “Food you have never tried”
• “Food available nearby”
• “Food you had last time”
• “Food you mostly have”
• And maybe “Food your best friend likes”
• “Food your friend is currently having” (which is again based on user activities social networking websites)
• “Food you should have based on your health goals”
• And the opportunities are innumerable!

We will definitely see more features on these lines as Web 3.0 creeps into the most popular websites. Not keeping this blog too long, I will end it here but would love to know what you believe web 3.0 will be like?