Five Web Trends Into 3.0 (5)

5) Mind asset, formulating

The evolution into Web 3.0 is in the mean of not only computation, but also economy. That we appreciate Web 2.0 is not only because of the new technologies and the new services. More importantly, it is because What Web 2.0 produces has greatly stimulated the growth of the global economy. If there is an era of Web 3.0, it must show us its comparable impact on the global economy as Web 2.0 did. Hence there must be a trend describing the economic potential of Web 3.0. Such a trend, as I interpret, is the beginning of formulating the formally exchangeable asset of the embodied human mind, or the mind asset.

Web 3.0 is to Web 2.0 will be a marketplace to a social playground.

"Free" and "open" are the keywords of Web 2.0. Free user generated content and open platform/open API compose the foundation of the Web 2.0 business models.

In contrast, "paid" and "protected" will become the main melody of Web 3.0. The Web resource producers will no longer freely contribute their knowledge unconditionally. They will start to think what they contribute as private asset---the mind asset. In consequence, the Web service providers will no longer be able to distribute the user-generated Web resources unconditionally free either. They thus have to protect certain portion of their services, particularly the portion that uses the non-free user-produced resources, by charging the users when they consume it.

A preliminary example of this Web 3.0 style model is Apple's iPhone application store. The third-party iPhone application developers are the resource producers. Although some of them produce for free, many of them do not. As the result, Apple cannot freely distribute all of the user-generated resources since the company has to pay these non-free resource producers. Apple thus must "protect" this portion of the services from free distribution unless their usage is paid properly. By studying this iPhone business model from the view of Web evolution, we can tell that the Web is no longer a free social playground as Web 2.0 advocates. In contrast, the Web is becoming a super marketplace.

I would say that the iPhone model is just the beginning. With the evolution into 3.0, we will see more sophisticated and more profitable models utilizing the mind asset. But this type of business model migration is truly the most fundamental change happening underground. By witnessing more innovation of formulating new types of mind asset, we will eventually admit Web 3.0 being a completely distinct era of the Web in history!

Wrap Up

Very important, it is all of the five instead of any one of the trends that are driving the Web into 3.0. The following short list can thus be used to check whether a service is ready for entering the new era of Web 3.0.

(1) Is the service feasible to support the trend of home space converging?
(2) Is the service producing new type of Web resources and consuming the newest available types of resources at the same time?
(3) Does the data produced by the service machine-understandable?
(4) Has the service been ready to embrace the new data input matrix?
(5) Is the asset produced by the service exchangeable in market?.

If a service may properly answers all of the five questions, unquestionably it must be in Web 3.0.

Previous installment: Five Web Trends Into 3.0 (4)