I am starting to grasp what the Web 3.0 could be like, or at least Web 2.5. After using Orkut (a Google spinoff) since its inception, I have started to use Facebook a couple of weeks ago. Hey, I like to think I’ve still got a social life, since I obviously don’t have endless evenings to waste in front of a computer.
The most fascinating aspect of Facebook, besides the obvious social networking, is the ability to use applications to connect it to other portals such as Googlemail, Flickr or Last.fm and to publish RSS feeds.
Facebook eventually becomes the place where one can gather all the information regarding contacts, taste and habits. It only lacks bundling with a blog, a chat protocol and -why not- a real mail service. There is however the possibility of going one step closer in that direction with the use of Flock, a free, open-source and cross-platform Web browser based on Mozilla Firefox, which has been developed with Web 2.0 in mind.
Flock features built-in extensions allowing it to connect to social, media sharing, blogging and bookmarks portals. As a matter of fact, I switched this blog from the Serendipity CMS to the more popular WordPress in order to be able to create entries remotely from Flock. The browser automatically detects embedded media such as videos from youtube and the likes. Video and photo streams can be directly accessed without having to process any HTML.
Flock and Facebook both combined both prefigure what Web 3.0 might be like. Incidentally, all these service tend to be cross-platform: their content and appearance can be handled through a hots of devices ranging from mobile phone to smartphone to PDA to personal computer. This is the kind of universality Sir Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he devised hypertext and the World Wide Web.
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