The World of eCommerce

Web 2.0 vs Web 3.0 March 18, 2008

The emergence of Web 3.0 is become more of a real proposition, with mixed reactions. For those of you not in the loop, here’s an insight into Web 2.0 and 3.0…

Web 2.0 was the “second generation” ways of working within a web environment. Many websites have historically been a set of pages and these pages link to each other, exchanging data via URLs and QueryStrings. Use of frames, forms and server side scripting gave the user the passage from the start to the end.

Web 2.0 is all about exposure of data and seamless transition of data. These two points can be illustrated by RSS feeds and Ajax respectively. Web 2.0 is commonly become the standard that uses XHTML as a code-base and a CSS stylesheet to control the layout. Ajax allows Javascript to grab data real time. Throwing in terms like XML and DOM complete what’s it’s all about.

There are many examples of using Ajax in the net at the moment, where a user requests pulls data from a server and changes what the customer can see without refreshing. Web 2.0 also has adopted the “social networking” facade which allows more interaction from customers with user comments, blogs, forums and member networks.

Designers have also adopted this and the new BBC site is a combination of all things 2.0…

So what is Web 3.0. Well, it’s the next evolution in the web and masterminded by Google. The idea behind this is that there will be a central repository of services. Websites will be able to work with third party systems seamlessly.

You may already see this working on some sites that use post code lookups and find my nearest stores. It’s basically have an interface to the many existing tools out there. Google has been busy creating libraries to do all sorts of things, and even now you will be able to integrate your web site real time with services such as Google Maps and Google Calendars. Soon there will be more… but the question is how can this help an eCommerce site?

Web 2.0 didn’t give as much, but as on offset to the website, you could do snazzy little “basket additions” etc using Ajax if required.

Web 3.0 promises to give much more to the eCommerce arena, with integrated services and libraries of web services continually becoming available. Google being the pioneers and many other services from payment gateways, social networking sites and of course Microsoft, soon the world of Web 3.0 will be your oyster.