Moving towards Web 3.0

I was hosting a dinner party the other day and was surfing through various online recipe sites for vegetarian delectables, perfect for a pleasant February evening and serves Indian tastes. Too many parameters even for the most intelligent search engine? Well, after several tedious attempts, I did manage my way through the deluge of information Google threw at me. However, it just made me realise that even while we say that “everything is out there”, nobody wants everything. We just want what is relevant !! And that is perhaps what will be the next stage of evolution for the social search media. For many of us, this next tide of change is Web 3.0.From web 1.0 which was monologous, to conversation based web 2.0, we are gradually stepping into a contextual web 3.0. The next step will perhaps enable web to “understand” data rather than simply carrying out robotic functions. So instead of being just a rational and objective source of information and data, it is said to evolve into a subjective and intuitive mirror of the real world. And hence, if context becomes the key, it would mean that the whole web 3.0 revolution would then be quite data centric. If you think about it, we already are moving towards a data driven world where we constantly keep sharing data to search engines, social media platforms and other sources, which defines our online self. Right from the facts you would willingly share to the statistics generated in the background, your online self grows based on both the implicit and explicit data. The next wave of evolution will focus more on the use of this data. It would now apply meaning to the data from each source.
So how will it change the scope of marketing? Online space has given way to targeted communication replacing mass messages. If relevance and focus are the key characteristics of Web 3.0, marketing would perhaps be more focused than it ever was. With the exact profile of the consumer in hand, the communication would be target-sharp rather than a loose ball thrown at whoever hits it. This would give way to more innovative solutions of connecting with the consumer directly, instead of reaching them out through influencers. Contextual searches and delivery would also put a renewed focus on content. This would essentially mean that the reader would have relevant and quality content and searches, something we can already link to the changes taking place in the search engines (our earlier blogpost on penguin panda updates talks about it in detail).
In the end, it is all about web with increased intelligence, capable of looking at the bigger picture. So when a story is out there, it will be checked for its authenticity and quality. For the consumers, things will be far better and for the marketers, well…they would have to create new and better ways of telling their story. It is probably a win win for everybody.