Neeraj Kumar said…
everything on web is easily parsable, microformats. Now I can search for an auto mechanice who lives within 2miles of my zizpcode and has recommendation rating of 4.2 and above

This is exactly what I had said in my first message. See, this guy Neeraj doesn’t know that this sort of thing had been on the R&D agenda for over a decade now by researchers in the field of Semantic Web (SW) which is standardized by W3C. I seriously doubt if he knew that what he described is actually a hot topic in the Semantic Web community of researchers for over a decade now. The slow progress of SW is due to the difficulty in drafting of standards & implementing those technologies. The web-xxx fanatics don’t even know that these things are active topics in SW research communities and they are constantly being published in various peer review computing journals. It comes back to the point that I mentioned in my first message, is that if you’re a technology leader you would go ahead and implement these types of killer functionalities for your software and don’t worry about what others are doing, whether what your’e currently doing is web-xxx or not. The technology followers , such as the crowd who are awaiting the arrival of web-xxx (be it web 3.0 , web 4.0 , etc…) in which the definitions are defined for them by other enthusiasts on what they mean would linger around and wait and wait while their competitors are spearing ahead with new technologies.

If I want to implement a killer web application myself, I would make sure that I adopt the latest technology from researches which are publicly available. In this way, I am able to move ahead where my competitors who might still be waiting to implement what others defined for them, which may arrive years later. I am already far ahead by then.

I gathered that the enthusiasm about web-xxx is that most of the enthusiasts themselve don’t know of what is going on in the computing research communities.

Here’s something I wrote back when R/WW had their “What is 3.0″ competition:

http://sethop.com/2007/04/11/web-30-are-they-kidding/

There is no such thing as timescales for Web-xxx, Ben. The catch-phrase web-xxx is not an industry standards at all, exactly as been debated at Rod Drury’s website regarding the Microsoft submission of their Open XML standards. There is no consensus on what actually web 3.0, or web 4.0 features are going to be, all the talks on the internet about web 3.0 or 4.0 were different things, such as one author talked about a thing called vertical search engine (VSE) for web 3.0, WTF is VSE, I have no clue. I know different types of search algorithms, and I still have no clue to what on earth is VSE. The widespread use of those web-xxx terms were driven primarily by web developers, who thought that things like recommendation, personalization, web-search, social networking are all new cool things which are synonymous with the catchphrase web-xxx. These cool technologies were actually not new at all, they were already existed even before web-xxx was even born. The main reason for this is because the web-xxx are mainly driven by technology implementers who are followers and not leaders. These internet technologies, recommendation, personalization, were known all along to technology implementers who are leaders unlike implementers who are followers, because these things had been published and made available in research journals . I mean, they (web-xxx followers) see Amazon doing automated online product recommendation or Google doing the personalization and they jumped and say, wow, that’s cool, that is web-xxx, lets implement such functionality because it makes us web-xxx compliant. But Amazon, Google and the likes are not followers, they are leaders, since their technologies are based on R&D, ie, completely original concepts and not to follow any ones technology.

I think, that as progression to define what web-3.0 or web-4.0 are , then the difficulties would start to emerge, because some web-xxx proposals that I have seen on the internet are about functionalites that are very difficult to implement, such as Semantic Web. It has taken over a decade for Semantic Web communities to tackle this difficult task which was first proposed by Tim Lee, and it is very slow due to the difficulty. Web-xxx would only move forward if researches in other computing disciplines move forward, because I can’t see it possible that web-xxx proposing something , eg: Semantic Web, that is currently a barrier to researchers in the field to overcome its difficulties.