Forget Web 3.0, Welcome To the Now Web

After reading tweets by Chris Brogan (who’s tweet I can’t find now) and Mack Collier about Robert Scoble’s post on Web 3.0 (and whether FriendFeed is the best example of the coming webolution…my vote is no, if anything, I’d say Facebook is, so far) I started thinking about our habit of naming things.

Each time the web starts changing shape, we feel it needs a new name. Sure, why not! After all, it’s nice being able to differentiate Yuppies from Hippies, right? Or, oh wait, some of them are the same people and have they really changed that much inside?

But people cling to names. It doesn’t matter that a better title for Web 2.0 would have been the social web, it is and likely always will be, Web 2.0 and in the future, people will scratch their heads and have to look up what made Web 2.0 different that say Web 1.5 or why we suddenly went from just being on the web to giving it a name in the first place.

I for one am grateful that I don’t have to get a new name every time something about me changes. Can’t you imagine what life would be like?

Friend walking by: “Hey Teeg! Why isn’t she answering?”

Other friend beside them, “Oh, she’s not Teeg anymore, she’s a couple years older and has some grey hair, so now she’s Teeg 2.0.”

But, if we have to seriously rename the web, you know, the place where many of us come hang out every day and it changes because we influence in by what we like, use, want, need…if we really have to give a new name because it’s changed yet again, may I suggest the Now Web?

At the least, 1000 years from now, when some alien culture is studying our records, trying to figure what these humans were like, they won’t have to wonder exactly why we changed the name of the web yet again to still another number that really didn’t explain why a new name was needed in the first place.