A lot of bloggers and "industry experts" have tried to define or declare the birth of Web 3.0, and so far, I haven't bought it. However, with Facebook's announcement of their new API "Open-Graph", I finally believe we have seen the beginning if the real Web 3.0. I believe this for two main reasons: First, it will intimately change the structure of information on the Internet. Second, it will be a self-motivated change driven by market demand simply because people will want more of it. What excites me the most is how it will change the market and the way we do business online, and in real life, forever.

A Brief History of Web 2.0

When the Internet first started reaching the masses, websites and content was sorted by categorization. Yahoo first made a name for itself by it's "catalog" of websites where millions of websites were grouped into easy to find categories. This worked for a while until the massive amount of information and content coming to the web became impossible, both conceptually and due to lack of man power, to keep in neat and tidy categories.

Two solutions became popular, and later the standards, as the new ways of handling all the data on the web: tagging and user-contributed/collaborative content. Tagging, manually and automatically with keywords, allowed us to quickly dump content onto the web and then call it up later in whatever context we needed. By opening up websites to be collaborative, websites became large hubs of useful (more or less) and rapidly updating content. So was born Web 2.0... it gave us blogging, social media, sites like Wikipedia, and made keyword-based searching (Google) our primary method of navigating the Internet.

So Here Comes Web 3.0... And Facebook is Leading the Charge

In all the speculation over what Web 3.0 is, I think is always came down to one question, "What is a better method of surfing the Web than keywords?" Digg, Technorati, Reddit, and the like have all started to answer that by developing social-surfing, where content across the web is propagated by the recommendations of others based on common interests. However, they have lacked the popularity and common acceptance needed to revolutionize the Internet.

Facebook has seen the solution slowly emerge as it has grown, focusing on people first and content second. While having strangers on the Internet sharing content may be nice, having friends and family share content is golden. Even now, Facebook has already begun to surpass Google as the preferred way of experiencing the Internet. With the announcement of Open-Graph, Facebook has introduced the technology that will push the Internet over the edge into Web 3.0, and crown social connections as the new form of surfing the web.

What is Means for Your Business - SEO is Dead! (Well... dying anyway)

Up until now, the Internet has been a bit awkward for business. Optimizing websites for search engines, like Google, has forced us to use campy and inhuman verbiage, absurd business names, and whore ourselves for links, all in the hopes of appeasing the gods of search engine rankings. Web 3.0 means that the human element will now have a more powerful place on the Internet for business.

Open-Graph will allow websites to incorporate a myriad of social features at all stages of user interaction. Communicating with your visitors, getting to know your visitors, and having your visitors spread the news about you online will become more and more like a real life store front. Of course, having Facebook as the "mothership" of this revolution is a bit scary. We can only hope, and reasonably expect, that other companies will pick up on this new direction. Just like Facebook wasn't first to social media, I don't think Facebook being first now means it will be the best in the end.

Just like real-world businesses have always grown best by word-of-mouth evangelization, now that method will return as the best way to grow your business online. Making genuine connections with your online customers will become so much more important than how well you rank for a couple keywords. Businesses who like keeping a distance from their customers will be the biggest losers, while businesses who love connecting with their customers will be the biggest winners.