The internet is beginning to fold in onto itself, everything is integrating with everything else, and content is becoming redundantly accessible – in a good way. Rss, PubSubHubub, Wave, the Twitter Api, etc. Twitter is a great example because it's open and almost ahead of it's time in that respect. You can get Twitter data in many different formats using intermediate servers and networks, and you can use 100's of interfaces and devices not just to read content but publish and interact with your account. This is happening all over the web, from Google Wave to self hosted WordPress blogs.

Web 2.0 was about web applications escaping the page refresh model, and having customized content aggregated for and pushed to you. The next big step moving forward is going to be about collaboration amongst users, which is going to skyrocket and permeate everything – if you think of Wikipedia as a seed the tree grown from it is about to release millions of spores, think social networks and comment systems everywhere, and other new forms of user created and collaborated content; and networks and web servers are going to collaborate with each other as well to make each other's content more available and redundantly rooted in the network. The integration between online and offline will be further refined so that the mainstream notion of connection is no longer binary, but rather a matter of time and network penetration. It'll be taken for granted that when connections are possible it will be made by the application and the user will be extracted from the process of managing or thinking about the connection.

You'll post to Twitter, if Twitter is unreachable the message will be queued while the application attempts a direct connection with your Twitter followers bypassing the central network until it's back online. Or it may push the message to a 2nd server, which will queue it up to be synced when Twitter comes back online allowing you to power off your device. The same way we use graceful degradation in web design, we will adopt and apply the practice of graceful degradation to Networking.

Web 3.0 will be coloured by independent video and audio content and all that goes with it as a result of technology becoming cheaper and improving quality; and dinosaur mindset, ill-equipped organizations like the RIAA and traditional tv, news, and print networks having to open up or face a painful collapse. But the essence of Web 3.0 will be about collaborative abundance and ubiquitous-automatic-self healing-graceful degrading networks. Web 3.0 will also be about the soft walls of compatibility, language and connection dissolving.

Web 4.0 will be about hard walls dissolving. If you think of the mobile web browser as the seed – our phones, our desks, our wallpapers, the solar panels on our roofs, our cars, dishwashers, fishbowls, and house plants will be tightly integrated into the network. There are lots of products out already that do all of the above, but a mindset of the masses will need to be adopted of, "Well why shouldn't I have the time left till my dishes are ready, or the pH balance of my fish bowl accessible from my phone/laptop/bedroom/car, why shouldn't all my relevant data be pushed to me live wherever I am, and why shouldn't I be able to respond to the event using whatever interface I have handy?"

Web 5.0 will be about redundancy of the physical nodes in the network. Having an instant message conversation with your neighbour won't require a round trip to your ISP. You'll just connect directly via the networking equipment local to your devices, homes, or apartment buildings. The physical network will adopt graceful degradation. If your iPhone switching from WiFi to 3G as you walk down the street is the seed – You'll be stuck in traffic out of cell phone range and instead of having no signal as it tries to ping a tower your device will connect to a device in the car behind you etc. in a relay to the central network, or bypassing the network entirely if the destination can be reached before or without the central nervous system of the network. This kind of ad-hoc relay tech is already being worked on by Cisco and others.

The web is the backbone that will provide the content, integration, and the motive to move through these cultural and infrastructural changes. Those that say Web 2.0 is about mere gradient designs, html specifications, and tags are missing the point. The web n.0 naming convention is about cultural shifts centered around the use of the web, and the 'web' is really just an affectionate term we use for an array of networking activities as they all become integrated with each other. www is now just another subdomain of the web.