A new type of Internet is on the horizon, far more powerful than the one which lets you link up with your friends or watch a video uploaded by a stranger.

Facebook, YouTube and the other social networks and blogs that fall within the scope of 'Web 2.0' may be beginning to penetrate the mainstream, but to those who see the web in 2020 and beyond, they are but a pixel in a much larger picture.

In a little over a decade the web will be able to connect every aspect of our digital lives - be it a website, an e-mail, or a file on our PC - to every other aspect. It will know, for instance, when you are typing an e-mail, what the subject of the e-mail is, and be able to suggest websites and books as well as documents, photos and videos you have saved that may be relevant to that topic.

It will be achieved by virtue of the inherent 'intelligence' in the underlying architecture of the Internet. In other words, the web is becoming smart.

Broadly speaking, Web 3.0 refers to the attempt by technologists to overhaul radically the basic platform of the internet so that it 'understands' the near infinite pieces of information that reside on it and draws connections between them.

If Web 2.0 was all about harnessing the collective intelligence of crowds to give information a value then Web 3.0 is about giving the internet itself a brain.

A prime example of a Web 3.0 technology is 'natural-language search', which refers to the ability of search engines to answer full questions. In some cases, the sites that appear in the results do not reference the original search terms, reflecting the fact that the web knows.

According to specialists who develop natural-language technologies, engines read every page of the web sentence by sentence and return results by drawing on a general knowledge of language and what specific concepts in the world mean, and their relationship with one another.

It's not just search capabilities that will be overhauled in the web of the future, however. Another Web 3.0 idea is 'open platforms' - a website or device, like a mobile phone, should be able to accommodate whichever features or applications its user wants. Some of the world's largest technology companies - Nokia, Apple and MySpace - all made announcements embracing the idea of open platforms, suggesting that the web will become a place where much more mixing and matching of different services will be permitted. 

Alongside this will come more mature virtual worlds, or what some have started referring to as 'immersive environments'. This means that the web is going to be a much more immersive and a much more multi-dimensional environment.

In conclusion, what we mean by 'Web 3.0' is that major web sites are going to be transformed into web services - and will effectively expose their information to the world.

The implementation of various technologies regarding Web 3.0, such as artificial intelligence, and 3D environments, will also create new and exciting opportunities in the field of web development, and the web development community.

The transformation will happen in one of two ways. Some web sites will follow the example of Amazon, del.icio.us and Flickr and will offer their information via a REST API. Others will try to keep their information proprietary, but it will be opened via mashups created using services like Dapper, Teqlo and Yahoo! Pipes. The net effect will be that unstructured information will give way to structured information - paving the road to more intelligent computing.