Well, I’m not exactly Carnac the Magnificent, but let’s face it, while web 2.0 has brought some fun and excitement to our world, it’s only about time that the next big thing comes along. After all, web 2.0 is technically about 4 years old anyway.

Yep, I’ll miss realm of social media, wikis, folksonomies, and widgets. I’ll cherish the bubbly design associated with web two-oh – the starbursts, mirror reflections, beta labels, and big text – all the good stuff. It really has made the web a better place, but it’s time…

What can we expect as we transition to the next generation, Web-3-G if you will?

Design – Oh, how I love the use of gradients. They make my eyes tingle with delight and I’m glad that they’re the initial design feature of our new web. But you can forget big and bubbly, it only means a large bottle of cheap champagne with web 3.0. I’m envisioning something sleek and sheer. Transparent 3D web imagery will fully exploit our hyper fast graphics cards and 30 plus inch widescreens.

Interface – QWERTY? So 1860’s. Point and Click? So Xerox Parc. While we’re not quite ready for mainstream visual navigation or telepathy for that matter, I’m a firm believer that voice navigation will become increasingly prevalent with rapid improvements taking place in voice recognition. Might lose your voice from all the talking, but you can forget about carpel tunnel and health warning labels on the bottom of your keyboard (made you look).

Applications – Hooray, more mashups! Seriously, as development continues to trend towards open source, collaboration will also continue to improve faster than ever. Further sharing of APIs also allow for practical intermingling of information, creating new and never before imagined possibilities for users. Don’t like your options? Just drag this site over to that one. Oh, and expect seamless integration between web and desktop too.

Search – Say goodbye to exclusive text based searching and tags. By the end of web 3.0’s lifespan, we’ll be searching by comparing images and media files. Drag a photo of your beloved pet Fido into the search bar and your photo sharing site will find all of your other images of Fido and maybe a few of your great aunt Bertha’s gigantic hairdo as well. Does the Radiohead song you’re listening right now remind you of that one song you heard the other day, but can’t remember who sang it? No problem – drag the Radiohead song to your audio search toolbar and you’ll have a list of the songs that are similar in no time.

Speed – Reed Hastings, the founder and CEO of Netflix is on the record explaining ever-evolving internet speeds by saying, “Web 1.0 was dial-up, 50K average bandwidth, Web 2.0 is an average 1 megabit of bandwidth and Web 3.0 will be 10 megabits of bandwidth all the time, which will be the full video Web, and that will feel like Web 3.0.” The speed boost will help with the web/desktop integration also.

Mobility – The best part? Everything will translate to mobile devices. Now that applications are being designed specifically to work with a plethora of new mobile devices, the most desirable features are able to be ported right to our take-along gadgets. And they’ll actually work and make sense this time around. Web 3.0, where the heck have you been all of my life?

Recently Google-ized web application GrandCentral promises to end the common geek affliction of “too many phone numbers”.   Just got a new iPhone, but not completely sold on the AT&T service yet and want to keep your old phone?  GrandCentral allows you to ring both phones simultaneously when someone calls and pick it up on the phone you’re using at the time.  Quite slick.

The way it works is this, GrandCentral gives you a new phone number, which you ideally give out to all your friends and your BFF Jill. You then enter your home, cell, work, mistress’ apartment, etc. numbers into the GC interface and it’ll ring them when someone calls your GC number.  Amazing, you say?  But wait, there’s more…

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