Invisible Web

Been pondering what the 'Web' is today. Over the last 15 years, it has morphed, grown, changed, evolved into something that is really beyond the web.

As defined in Wikipedia, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web WWW]: The World Wide Web (or simply the "Web") is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents that runs over the Internet. With a Web browser, a user views Web pages that may contain text, images, and other multimedia and navigates between them using hyperlinks.

But to see the 'web' of today, it's much more than that. It has enabled/spawned things like Second Life, blogs, facebook, youtube, mash-ups, etc. etc. etc.

But what are the common themes? Where is it going and where will it be in 10 years? One overriding current in the present/future web (and technology in general) seems to be the consumer aspect. Most innovations are being driven by these massive social and end-user experiments and they gradually seep back into the corporate arena (there are many examples of this from IM to mash-ups to blogs to open source to eBay to wikis to rss to Second Life).

It seems these massive dynamic social networks that are enabled by the web are what's driving a lot of the new technology and behaviors. Perhaps this 'Social Web' is a theme. I think it is something that needs to be understood, and especially in context of enterprise computing in which the slow uptake by 'stodgy' businesses can certainly impact their ability to compete in tomorrow's landscape.

Beyond the social aspects, it seems that we are starting to see the 'structure' of the web (links, pages, protocol, device) disappear with the content and the interactions becoming the dominant visible feature. This is a good thing, when the technology starts to disappear and the functionality becomes the dominant feature. I'd refer to this as the Invisible Web -- it's the infrastructure and all of the various technical underpinnings that enable this new, emergent types of interactions to take place. Note that I use invisible web different from 'dark web'.

So perhaps an evolution of Webs could be:

- World Wide Web
- Data Web
- Transaction Web
- Semantic Web
- Social Web
- Web 2.0
- Invisible Web

With the invisible web, it's not the pages, the links, the data, the network, the device, that are the driving visible features. It's the interconnected, free association, anywhere, anytime type of interaction that is enabled that is the dominant feature.

Kipp