The Web is Expanding

Today's ThinkerNet has a post of mine on "a closer look at the expanding Web." It is a summary of my recent thoughts on how the Web is evolving.

In the post, I discussed four simultaneous trends of Web expansion---in the physical world, in the computational world, in the network communication world, and in the financial world. Based on the discussion, here is a few more thinking of the topic I want to share exclusively with the Thinking Space readers.

(1) Mobile computing could only be more and more popular in normal Web users' regular daily life. The data transmission rate through wireless network will increase tremendously in the near future. It represents a great opportunity on investing wireless communication. It might also mean that we are looking for a "healthy" bubble of wireless communication (as if the bubble of the optical network) so that eventually normal users could have cheap but also fast enough wireless connection everywhere.

(2) User-centered control gradually becomes an essential issue. In the physical world, we will have more variety of computational devices; in the virtual world of the Web, we will have many more choices of Web services. The merge of the two trends demand actually one common thing---enhanced user-centered control. The question is, however, how we may really approach this goal.

The only right solution in my mind is to turn the site/service-centric Web 2.0 structure back to the traditional user-centric Web structure we had experienced before Web 2.0, but certainly it would be at a higher level. It thus immediately means a brand new stage of the Web, i.e., Web 3.0. We need to build up a new form of online individual that matches the requirement of the new age. Human mind management services such as Imindi (or services like it) would be a critical component in this new identity formation process.

Coincidently, Trend Adams posted an article about randomness and user-centered control today. I would recommend that article to be a complementary reading to this post.

(3) Mind reading devices have great potential into the future. This research is still at its very early stage. By the trend of Web evolution, however, this type of devices seems inevitable in our future life.

(4) From the financial point of view, mind asset is in its process of formation. I have discussed this issue many times at Thinking Space.

In short, the Web is just becoming more and more exciting.