The 'Web Squared' Era

[Commentary] Web Squared is less a new direction than an exploration of what becomes possible when the building blocks of Web 2.0 (such as participation, collective intelligence and so on) increase by orders of magnitude. There's also a qualitative change happening as the Web becomes more closely integrated with the real world via sensor-based smart phone applications. Web Squared is another way of saying "Web meets World." The first generation of Web 2.0 applications harnessed the collective intelligence of users typing on keyboards. Whether it was links and clicks (Google), articles and edits of shared knowledge (Wikipedia) or votes (Digg), the application was driven by explicit human actions. Five years in, collective intelligence applications are increasingly driven by cascades of sensor data being thrown off by devices, often without explicit human intervention. Today's smartphones contain microphones and cameras, as well as motion, proximity, location, and direction sensors. They have their own eyes, ears, and sense of touch. Revolutionary new applications connect those senses to cloud databases and programs running on massive server farms. Where the Web Squared world gets really interesting, though, is when applications use all the senses of a device, coordinating them much like the human brain coordinates our senses, to draw conclusions that would be difficult with one sense alone.