"All your information will be connected, searchable, organized and manageable wherever you are. In many ways it will bring the Web to you instead of you having to go to the Web. Web 3.0 means the third generation Web, and I think that's what the next 10 years will be about," he said.
Web 3.0
If Web 2.0 put users at the center, Web 3.0 is about an infrastructure that will give them new possibilities. It would be impossible for two geeks in a coffee shop to find the immense processing power needed to create the semantic Web. But not for Google.
Spivack, however, believes he has stolen a march on the giant.
"I think we're building something equally big right under their nose. They're too busy running Google. We've discovered a goldmine in their own backyard," he said.
The ultimate vision of Web 3.0 is of a collective "global mind" which increasingly resembles the human brain. Every person on the Internet will function as its consciousness, from whose chaos will emerge cohesive patterns of thought and decision, perhaps even a sense of "self."
When the first Web was born in the 1990s, the typical home computer was used as a toy to play games and coffee shops were places where people went for coffee. Most of the young gunslingers in Ritual Coffee Roasters were yet to start high school, still less dream of "flipping" for a billion dollars. Today, concocting businesses from their laptops, reordering the way people run their lives, they are living proof that the pace of evolution is accelerating.
For users, the Web's opening phase allowed us to look at text on a screen, maybe with static pictures -- it was about information. Now it's about community, making our own content and sharing it with others -- text, audio, movies and more.
And 10 years from now? In the cascade of ideas even the Google boys begin to look like old hands and the only question for the money men, their dotcom confidence restored, is whether they can keep up. The question for the rest of us is where are we heading, how we will use the Internet, a never-ending exercise in the art of the possible.
And it will have begun here, in the valley, where optimism about progress is undimmed and everyone is potentially something.
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