There’s an interesting guest blog post by Marc Benioff over on TechCrunchIT, Welcome to Web 3.0: Now Your Other Computer is a Data Center, which my fellow twitterers have just told me about.

As a definition of web 2.0 Marc uses “anyone can participate” – which is certainly an integral part of what that term captures. Unlike some, I do think it’s a valuable term – a term encapsulating an event, a change in how we interact with, and build, what’s online. Collective intelligence, architecture of participation and so on.

To Marc, Web 3.0 is about “anyone can innovate.” Here’s a nice quote from the article: “The new rallying cry of Web 3.0 is that anyone can innovate, anywhere. Code is written, collaborated on, debugged, tested, deployed, and run in the cloud. When innovation is untethered from the time and capital constraints of infrastructure, it can truly flourish.”

Tim’s definition did include observations about infrastructure too: cost-effective scalability, services-not packaged software, remixable data sources, software above the level of a single device. I believe PaaS puts a new and novel spin on these things.

So my take on what Marc says is that web 3.0 is about taking this further, to allowing anyone to innovate and create systems in the clouds, liberated from the machine. You can innovate and others can do the infrastructure, the billing, the networking, the plumbing, the … As some of those that comment on the post say, this is not a complete definition – and I’d love to see more insight into what web 3.0 means to the consumer.

Yet, I do think we need a term for this event, for this change in how we interact (and build) what’s online, and “web 3.0” is it!

Regards,
Jon

Technorati Tags:
paas, salesforce, web 3.0