Web 2.0

A really interesting article for someone like me -- not very tech-savy... A nice explanation of how web has advanced from its infancy (1.0) to something we're experiencing today (2.0).  A couple of points stood out for me:

1. Web as a platform -- that provides services to the people. Companies like google have already figured out a nice revenue model, and others like Facebook (?) in the process of it.
2. Data, Data and more data... Organizing and understanding it is probably the most critical problem that stares at thousands of engineers and researchers round the globe...  Much like HR, where the data is probably orders of magnitude less :)
   
3. No explicit software -- nothing resides on your disk. Everything (or rather most of it) resides remotely, and we users simply login and access it. I can't help but wonder how important bandwidth and security would become. As it is, I cannot remember my passwords for the different sites. 

This brought back my photo searching problem, and googling a bit brought me face-to-face with the Web 3.0 concept -- and how intelligent applications were a part of it, much like my semantic photo search problem. I'm glad that the problem is going to be tackled during the next decade, and looking forward to some interesting applications that result from it.