Jennifer Zaino , Tom Dunlap
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — What is the future of Web 3.0? And what is it, exactly? Hundreds of technologists, entrepreneurs, marketers, and journalists pondered those questions today at Jupitermedia’s Web 3.0 Conference & Expo at the Hyatt Regency Hotel here.

One of those technologists is Tom Hughes-Croucher, technical evangelist at Yahoo! Developer Network. The key message that characterizes Web 3.0 is that it is open, said Hughes-Croucher — a lot like Web 1.0.

(For photos of the Web 3.0 conference, go to this Flickr.com page.)

“If you go back to the foundations of the web, a lot of it was university research, people experimenting, no boundaries, no siloing off of what they were doing,” he said. “Yahoo has its roots in those times.”

Where user-generated content was the hallmark of Web 2.0., Web 3.0 will be defined by having open collaborations around sharing and using data, Hughes-Croucher said at the conference today. Many at the conference echoed his sentiments.

“Web 2.0 was easy for businesses to go that way, because for them it was enriching, they were using user data to enrich what they had. Now it’s more of a conceptual change,” Hughes-Croucher said.

But it’s a conceptual change, he suspects, that businesses are more open to than they might have been in the past. That’s because they’re better able these days to point to innovations and tangible benefits that arise based on open collaboration. Consider Yahoo’s open experience. It has had open search APIs for some years, but it’s only recently that a change in people’s perspectives has brought on the blossoming of mash-ups and other web collaborations.

If there’s anything that can present problems to Web 3.0′s future, it is something that hasn’t been quite realized yet.

“Things like identity management are still a massive issue,” Hughes-Croucher said. Companies like Yahoo and Google have been taking steps towards giving people the ability to manage their own data, but overall the movement is going slowly. People have been talking about identity management for years, but “the vast spectrum of identity management technologies were never quite happened. It’s never quite got to the point where users get full, complete control of their data, and that’s important. We are slowly building towards it but not 100 percent sure on how to execute it.”

Hughes-Croucher notes that the efforts behind identity management need to be very collaborative. “Data portability is all very well, but only really so if everyone supports it, because the average user doesn’t have the ability to manipulate XML or RDF to import and export and those kind of things. We still haven’t accomplished it. It’s a very important task to set ourselves, because if we don’t take care of this, the more we open up, the more risk we expose people to.”

Other challenges to meet may come in the way of people in the development community struggling with some of the Web 3.0 development concepts around microformats or RDFa, for instance.

“There are some difficulties,” he said. For example, microformats looked great on paper, but developers didn’t necessarily see that there was much return on producing the structured data just so that someone with a Firefox extension can use it.

“But we’re finding as we work with them on SearchMonkey tools and giving them tangible results — for example, that if you use microformats your search result has more punch to it — that’s really motivation to look at structured data, to look at microformats, at RDFa.”

Should we even call this new world Web 3.0? Hughes-Croucher isn’t tied to naming an evolution of the web — he says he’d rather see people focus on the challenges to solve going forward. “But, if having a name helps rally people around that, then that’s great.”

Other topics were discussed at length today, including the future of advertising. Analysts David Provost lamented that too much of the conference was spent on using semantic web technology in advertising, or how semantic technology can improve advertising. Provost said that the message of Web 3.0 needs to be: “This technology will allow us to do things we’ve never done before.”

Further, he said the questions that Web 3.0 needs to answer are questions like these:

“How this technology furthers a corporation’s goals … [and] how does it fit in with your set of investments?”

In panel discussions, there was also much talk about how far the Internet has come in the past 18 years. Describing the wacky world of Web 1.0, Amiad Solomon, CEO of Peer39, focused on Ebay and Google.

Ebay’s first sale was a broken laser pointer, Solomon said, showing a slide of the item, “bought by a person who collected broken laser pointers.”

Some of today’s technical sessions could be a tad dry, although one I didn’t attend, “Death of the Relational Database?” turned into an argument. Opposing database factions squared off over SPARQL and other issues, according to a reliable source.

So today’s conference wasn’t just dry meetings about meta data, tagging, social networks, and business models. There was even some gallows humor.

“After Web 1.0 crashed in 2001, we learned from our mistakes,” Solomon said. “We instead went out and invested in the housing market.”

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