Web 2.5

It seems, these days we are moving on from Web 2.0 to Web 2.5.

Let me explain: When I started off in the Internet, some 15 years ago, things were nice and simple. You used a program called gopher to retrieve information. Later a new gadget called Lynx appeared. It was a browser for a new thing called the WWW.

For a while, things stayed there and remained pretty stable. Domain names were a real estate and you would go to visit sites, download email. Instant Messengers were becoming quite fashionable, too in the late 1990.

Next, Web 2.0 enabled near real time communications. The good old paradigm of polling email was applied to web content, so RSS made websites dynamical, as the content was subscribed to, and things were near real time. Rich media content encapsulated with the feeds made audio on demand podcasting and video on demand vlogging. The latency between something actually happening and it being recorded in some weblog went down to some minutes.

Well, we have arrived on the final frontier. Services like twitter.com now take the experience of blogging to the next step. It tries to join up the messaging capability of mobile phones with the web, and Instant Messagers such as AIM. Add to that services like twittermap.com and what you arrive at is a 24 hours daily caleidoscope of events as they happen.

Web 2.5.

Admittedly, most phones are still limited in their messaging capabilities, so Twitter is a text oriented service for the time being. But people to understand the power of linking to events and do live bookmarking with services like tinyurl.com.

Add to that the capability of RSS, or maybe a followup protocol that will enable pushing syndicated live content to browsers (which would be a logical next step, I am sure is in the making somewhere), we will arrive at Web 3.0:

Everything, everywhere, live and real time.

For the time being, going by what you got takes you to a different kind of live homepage where content is quite granular, rudimentary but real time.