Blog #8 Web 2.0

(Web Squared Technology)

'Web 2.0' is a techno-culture term that was coined in 2004. The moniker was born at an O'Reilly Media conference, and describes that the World Wide Web has now evolved into a provider of online software services. There is an ongoing quest to understand where technology is taking us; the milestone serves as an opportunity not so much to look back but to examine the landscape ahead. Whereas the advent of Web 2.0 marked a profound shift in the meaning of the Web, this next phase is less a new direction than an exploration of what becomes possible when the building blocks of Web 2.0 (such as participation, collective intelligence and so on) increase by orders of magnitude. The step is called Web Squared Technology. Web Squared is another way of saying "Web meets World."

An example of Web Squared is smart phones, which contain microphones and cameras, as well as motion, proximity, location, and direction sensors. They have their own eyes, ears, and sense of touch. Revolutionary new applications connect those senses to cloud databases and programs running on massive server farms. Where the Web Squared world gets really interesting, though, is when applications use all the senses of a device, coordinating them much like the human brain coordinates our senses, to draw conclusions that would be difficult with one sense alone. The Google Mobile Application for the iPhone detects the movement of the phone to your ear, and automatically goes into speech recognition mode. It uses its microphone to listen to your voice and decodes what you say by referencing not only its speech recognition algorithms but what it expects to hear you say based on the most frequent search terms in Google's search database.

In this sense, the Web Squared era is an era of augmented reality, arriving (like the sensor revolution) stealthily, in more pedestrian clothes than we expected.