333) What is Web 3.0

(Mini aside - I'm staying at my friend's hotel room for my last couple nights in Austin. Instead of eating out tonight, I opted to come back and spend some time with my laptop and room service. SXSW has been great beyond words, but I am so exhausted. The Interactive part of the festival ended today, so tomorrow will be my chill out in downtown Austin day. Hoping to find and snap some street art, and other Austin oddities.)


6th St., Downtown Austin.

Quick note: If you want a peek at what I've been up to in Austin, you can visit my other blog, nataliefoundit.

I heard a really interesting (worst. word. ever.) talk by Reid Hoffman, the CEO of LinkedIn. He discussed Web 3.0, and his vision of what it will be. A couple points that stuck:

1) We are inventing and creating the future. Back in the 50's and 60's, we envisioned a Jetsons future - flying cars, robot servants. But just because we don't have either of those doesn't mean we're not in "the future." Instead of flying cars and robots, we entered into an information future.

2) Web 1.0 was about searching files anonymously. Web 2.0 incorporated our real identity and relationships. As a result, we started generating massive amounts of explicit (profile info), implicit (I signed onto Facebook X times today) and analytic (trending) data. Hoffman believes that Web 3.0 will answer the question - what are we inventing out of that data?

3) One of the barriers to Web 3.0 is privacy. But instead of an Orwellian dystopia, Hoffman is more wary of a Huxlian Brave New World. Because we're generating all this information, it becomes harder to discern truth from falseness, harder to quality control. And there's a ton of it. The fear is that due to information overload, we will be reduced to just holding onto our own opinions.
This was really powerful to me - I'd never thought about it that way.