Web 1.0: Way back in the year 2000, and everyone was trying to avoid the Y2K bug, every business was clamoring for a website of their own. Now, instead of advertising in the yellow pages once a year, or the weekly insert in the newspaper, business could create colorful, customized advertising letting every customer for miles around all of the goods and services you could provide them. Big businesses, local business, non-profit organizations, school, and even individuals created their own website and made a land grab in the world of the internet. Radio and television commercials that ended with announcers repeating the familiar jingle now had an additional tag line to "check us at www.mybusiness.com" Businesses no longer needed to name their business AAA Plumbing so they would be listed first in the yellow pages. Instead, they could build brand identification, name recognition, and depending on the service, reach customers that lived outside their normal geographic region. The world wide web had reached main street.
It is estimated that by April 2000, there were 15.6 million websites on the World Wide Web. The growth from there was exponential. According to CNN Technology, four years later there were more then 50 million websites and just 30 months later in October 2006 the number had doubled to 100 million websites. At the start of 2012, it is estimated that there are over 555 million websites.
Web 2.0: Although the name sounds different, Web 2.0 was the same World Wide Web, but rather to the cumulative changes in the ways software developers and end users used the web. In 2004, Web 2.0 blossomed and websites became interactive tools that allowed communication, orders, and information being exchanged between the business and the customer. Some of the more well known examples of Web 2.0 technology was blogs, wikis, mashups, social networking, and photo/video sharing websites. A business website was no longer a static page providing information outward only, but now a website was a tool that facilitated business, information, and collected user feedback. End users were no just as likely to create content as they were to consume content.
Web sites were re-designed and re-configured so web applications would expose their functionality so hat other applications could leverage and integrate the functionality providing a set of much richer applications. To put it more simply, businesses were able to open up the large amounts of data and customer information to more effectively share it across their entire business. Silos of information were broken down as websites with web-oriented architecture enabled a customer order made on a website to automatically, and simultaneously be shared with sales, accounts payable, warehouse and shipping, and the marketing department already working on the next sale. Web 2.0 brought efficiency to businesses and an explosion of data to be leveraged by the business.
Web 3.0: To many, Web 3.0 is something called the Semantic Web. It is a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the first World Wide Web. In essence, the Semantic Web is a place where machines can read web pages much as we humans read them, a place where search engines and software agents can better troll the internet and find what we are looking for. "it's a set of standards that turns the web into one big database" according to Nova Spivak, CEO of Radar Networks, one of the leading voices of the new age internet.
So how does that translate into mobile apps and smartphones? Each app is a software agent that can be designed to search the large database of websites and deliver the information that a customer is searching for to the computer in their pocket. Additionally, we can use data mining and GPS location to deliver even more finely detailed search information that is relevant to each particular customer. The same app can deliver different search results based on key information provided by the customer. Think of the change in advertising from the world of the 1960s Mad Men, if Don Draper could design one advertising campaign that was uniquely tailored to each individual customer. They would have been even more successful than they are now!
The other part of Web 3.0 that is part of mobile apps is the push notification that allows an app developer to be able to communicate directly to each customer. These updates can take a passive approach such as notification that a new version is available for upgrade to a more directed marketing message that a customer can download a coupon to a new feature is now available for use. For example, Shazam pushed a notification to me, and potentially all their customers, that I can now listen to the World Series and track statistics during the game. The other possibility is that this message was sent just to me as a baseball fan, and a different message could be sent to a 30-year old female who is a movie fan that the Academy Awards broadcast is available on this same app.
Web 3.0 is here, and the possibilities are endless.
No comments:
Post a Comment