Web evolution has to have a purpose

Most recently at the Web 2.0 Summit, Al Gore requested that "Web 2.0 has to have a purpose." I believe, however, though it is hard to tell whether Web 2.0 must have a long-term purpose in Gore's expectation, Web evolution as a nearly ever-lasting progress has to have a purpose.

Web 2.0 may already have had a short-term purpose, i.e., to engage more regular users actively into the Web content generation. By this mean, this short-term goal has been fulfilled by all the Web-2.0 practices till now. If one has to ask whether Web 2.0 has a long-term purpose as Gore expects, he must first think of a question: how long could Web 2.0 itself last? In fact, many people have already predicted that the Web might enter its next stage (Web 3.0?) after this economic crisis is over. Hence it means little to assign a long-term goal to the short-term Web 2.0.

On the other hand, Web evolution will last long time. Likely the process of Web evolution may last as long as the Web still exists. For this long-term progress, we thus has to ask this question: what is its purpose? There must be a deterministic purpose for any event that lasts so long, isn't it?

The purpose of World Wide Web evolution is to realize the immortality of human mind.

This belief is actually another interpretation of the Postulate 2 of my proposed model of Web evolution. Moreover, it is the reason beneath what I tell the religionary side of World Wide Web.

In this world, some people use the Web to make self-interest; some other people use the Web for entertaining; the rest might just kill their time on the Web. But an in-depth reason that lead all of them onto the Web to do these things instead of being somewhere else is because they may eventually leave their trace of activities in this virtual world. Before the Web, we have billions of people whom we have no ways to check the existence. After the Web, the existence of any Web user is checkable, at least in theory, even if he has been passed away.

When our bodies are turned into ash and there are no evidences in the real world about our ever existence, the Web preserves our mind forever discarding how great (or tiny) the mind is. This is thus the realization of the immortality of human mind. This is an intrinsic desire of nearly every human being. This is why the Web is so attracting.

I can imagine quite a few readers might still doubt of this exclamation. The Web is still at its very early stage of evolution. We are going to watch how the evolved Web being more and more able to embody human mind in higher and higher quality. This quality incrementation is going to be the main thread for anybody to study the progress of Web evolution.