Last week I touched on the topic of the future of the Web - today, a few more prognostications from prominent players in the field. In a recent guest post over at TechCrunch, Salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff talked about his vision of Web 3.0. In a nutshell, it’s a vote of confidence for a paradigm shift from Software-as-a-Service to Platform-as-a-Service.

“The new rallying cry of Web 3.0 is that anyone can innovate, anywhere. Code is written, collaborated on, debugged, tested, deployed, and run in the cloud. When innovation is untethered from the time and capital constraints of infrastructure, it can truly flourish.”

Sounds good, especially for developers. However, to put it all in perspective, platform-as-a-service is exactly where his company, Force.com, is heading. There’s a fine line between prediction and self-promotion, so it’s best to take his views with a few grains of salt. Tim O’Reilly left his own comment on Marc’s post:

“Hmm — if web 1.0 was the web as content, and web 2.0 was the web as platform, how exactly does web as platform count as web 3.0? When people ask me what might qualify for the 3.0 monicker (assuming you want to go there - Web 2.0 was a moment in time, a way of saying “the web ain’t dead” after the dot com bust, not a version number), I say the one thing that might qualify is the rise of cloud applications that are primarily experienced on (and driven by) mobile interfaces.”

Lastly, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo came up with his own take:

“Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.”

Think Digg or YouTube with censors to snuff out “low-quality” content - a clash of values and aesthetics. It’s not surprising that the founder of a human-powered search engine would look at Web 3.0 as people-driven instead of technology-driven. What we see is often what we want to see. As with Bill Gates, history will either vindicate him, or…

After O’Reilly’s vision of “Web 2.0″ spread like wild fire, I suppose it’s inevitable that people would begin to speculate about what would come next: Web 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, and so on, ad infinitum (or ad nauseam?). Whether you view it as a purely marketing term or as a useful label for the zeitgeist, it seems these catchphrases are here to stay, for better or for worse. That is, until we can improve on the terminology (and please let it be sooner rather than later). Ideas, anyone?