For the last few days, I was on sort of mountain retreat (it wasn’t really that glamorous), during which I listened to a LOT of podcasts and a lot of audio books and audio book summaries.

One of the most interesting and entertaining things I listened to was Bruce Sterling’s presentation from one of those goofy O’Reilly conferences.

Some of you may be aware of my nascent efforts to ridicule the Web 2.0 hype while provoking some actual thought about what the future of the Web might look like. Bruce Sterling expresses very well some of what irritates me so much about “Web 2.0” and also quotes extensively from an interview with Alan Liu, author of The Laws of Cool, who is highly critical of “Web 2.0” as a way to describe the current state of the Web. This is all great stuff.

Another main topic of Bruce’s keynote was the idea of “The Internet of Things” — the term he uses to describe a future time when physical objects are tied into the Internet. The standard example used to explain the benefits of this is “imagine using google to find your shoes in the morning”. Bruce says that he thinks it will take 30 years for the “Internet of Things” to truly arrive. I disagree. I predict that it will take 1/3 as long. I suspect that even my estimate is too pessimistic, though. I also predict that it won’t be google that people are using, but something much better.

As some of you might be aware, I’ve been planning a conference which will hopefully take place in Sacramento sometime within the next 12 months. The basic idea of the conference will be “Ideas (mine in particular) about the future of the Web, and also ridiculing the concept of giving version numbers to the Web”. The name of the conference is Web 8.0.

While thinking about what I see as the steps between now and Web 8.0 (and beyond), I’ve come up with a few different theories about what makes the Web change and I’ve tried to oversimplify my ideas so that they’ll seem brilliant enough to warrant a conference. Well, the problem now is that I have a few theories that all seem fine, but what I need is a single theory that’s so simple that the people who think “Web 2.0” means anything will buy it.

In very short and simple bullet points, here are my current theories:

1. Every Web version is a reaction to the previous one.
example: “bottom up” Web 2.0 is a reaction to “top-down” Web 1.0

2. Web versions happen when people stop worrying about the things they worried about in the previous one.
example: Ruby on Rails, the programming language of Web 2.0, won’t work without cookies.

3. Web versions happen when people start adopting the technologies they made fun of in the previous version (but give them new names)
example: everyone is using “Push” technology now. Just don’t tell them that.

4. Web versions happen when the technology advances beyond the understanding of the previous versions’ creators.
example: some knowledge of shell scripting and apache just won’t cut it anymore if you want to develop serious Web apps.

So there you are. By using any one of these theories, you can predict the next several “versions” of the Web. I’ll post more theories as I come up with them.