Web 2.0 - there's just so much stuff out there!

For me, the past ten weeks have been a roller coaster ride of emotions. From anxiety, frustration and disappointment to excitement, curiosity, enjoyment and numerous 'wow' moments, the time spent in this course has truly been a rewarding educational experience. Being immersed in Web 2.0-based learning and performance concepts and tools at first took me well out of my comfort zone of usual online activity, but now I can say that it was truly worth it. I am still amazed by the number of tools that are out there in cyber land. In fact, when folks reference almost any technological idea under the sun, we often joke that "there's an app for that!"  Funnily enough, we really not that far off.

With over a million apps on Google Play and over 900,000 on Apple's App Store, you can imagine that quality will not always be the watchword. I notice too that we casually throw these figures around like they're no big deal, but according to my calculations if you use or experiment with at least 270 apps every single day of your life, it will take you roughly ten years to get through 1 million! And what's even funnier is that by the time you get through that million, there will probably be at least a million more new ones. So remember that whatever crazy electronic concept you might think of, there's probably an App for that already, or one in the making.

Also, with so many apps, I can appreciate why the Web 2.0 environment is frequently being reshaped and re-tooled. In fact, it is against this backdrop that I expect to be learning about new concepts, developments and tools long after I've completed this course. There's just so much going on out there that you wouldn't believe that just ten years ago, the Web 2.0 platform was only being conceptualized and developed.

All of this leaves me wondering what the next ten years will look like. Maybe there's an app that will predict or estimate what this will look like! The talk of a Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web has not fully taken off yet but maybe it will in the very near future. But there's also Bitcloud that wants to replace the internet and the initiative by CERN (known as the Worldwide Grid) for an unfathomably fast internet. To add to all of this, there is also the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Internet of Everything (IoE) which all makes you curious about how these platforms will change the internet's technological landscape. Again, you just have to wonder, what's going to be next?