Web 3.0: Elements of a Pub-Sub/Alert Web

In my opinion, the Web is getting to a breaking point because of information overload. Just think about the number of sites you visit on a regular basis today vs. in the early days of web. It is not that the Web has less interesting stuff today, but that it has too many interesting sites with too much happening with a growing noise to signal ratio. End result: we come back from a 2hr stay on Wikipedia/digg/youtube thinking we just wasted much of that time.

So, how do we fix it? The answer lies in getting the things we want, when we want, where we want (and nothing else).

This is the Push Web, Pub Sub web, Alertpedia, etc. Web 3.0. It is more proactive and personalized than Web 1.0 and will look as good as Web 2.0.

Here are some of the elements of a successful Web 3.0:

1. Open content channels: I think that the tools for this have been slowly gathering: RSS feeds, Atom, Yahoo Pipes, Channels (remember them?). I don't think we need to wait for the ultimate "semantic web", but some more specialization of these protocols will help. E.g., I like CAP (Common Alert Protocol), Geo RSS.

2. Usable interfaces: Geeks like us know and love RSS feed readers, but the Billions of regular folks are not as comfortable with them as they are with IE / Firefox. Agree? I feel that answer may actually be already here: Emails and Text messages. Or, someone will come up with a new Push browser. We don't want another Pointcast though.

3. Content manipulation / filtering: How to combine 10 feeds, filter the junk out of them, personalize them for my preferences? Yahoo Pipes goes a long way. More to be done in making it easier to use for regular folks and personalization. Plus, we have very little patience for an uninteresting email alert. So, the content filters have to get much much smarter.. dare I say semantically capable and intelligent.

4. User generated content: With the necessary digg-like quality management by peers, reputation systems, spam filters. Much richer in content filtering than Web 2.0. Read [3] above.

5. A scalable publish-subscribe server: Imagine a world where every piece of information is submitted to a googleplex-like server farm, the content is analyzed, extracted, filtered, and matched with subscriptions in real time, and alerts go out in real time. Imagine getting a real time google alert as soon as some web page in Tanzania mentions your name. That requires a serious scale in data volumes (which search engines have tackled) and speed (which no one has tackled well so far).

6. New protocols for publishing, delivering, and subscribing to the content efficiently, cleanly, in a REST-ful kind of way.

7. And, to get it all started, a Killer App for Push content. We believe that Alertpedia, Knownow, Pubsub are all worthy attempts towards that goal.

dharani

http://www.alertpedia.com - Previewing Web 3.0, today.

It's the time for travel and traffic alerts

We have just added two new alert categories by popular demand:

Traffic alerts: Get alerts when there is congestion / repairs / jam on your commute road during the times you pick.

e.g., email me when there is bad traffic on I-278 at 8AM. We will send you alerts during 7-9

Travel alerts: Get alerts when ANY airline announces a price cut between two US cities.