As some of you may know, I recently joined the staff here at Deep Thought, so I figured it was probably about time I actually posted something.  You’ll be glad to hear that I signed a big contract with lots of zeros.  Actually, now that I think about it, it was all zeros… I’m not sure I did that right.  Anyway, I suppose it’s too late now, so we’ll just forge on ahead.

You may not be aware, however, that I am the possessor of some amazing and freakishly accurate abilities when it comes to predicting the future.  I am also lazy, and breaking out the old crystal ball is an easy way to write a column since I don’t have to do much except scribble down what I see.  With all the talk recently about Web 2.0, I decided to turn my prognostication skills in that direction and give you all a sneak peak into what its successor, Web 3.0, will hold for the Internet and the technology sector in general.  Let’s have a look.

• Like the ancient Romans, retro kitsch will invade the world and many web pages will be almost entirely constructed of in-line text.  Porn will be drawn in ASCII characters.  Sadly, these pages will still be more bloated and take longer to load than ever.
• Out: Bright colors and glossy, mirrored surfaces.  In: Pastels, and icons so faded you can’t tell what they are.
• Security improvements will cause spyware authors to give up and begin a concerted effort to personally rummage through the trashcans of every American while dressed in giant raccoon costumes.  They will begin with 87 year-old Erma Baumgartner of Terrace Hills, New Jersey for no apparent reason.
• Short videos of men getting hit in the crotch with various items to comedic effect will continue to account for nearly one third of Internet traffic.
• Amazon.com will declare that their Unbox media download service was not actually a horrific failure as presumed but was, in fact, the cornerstone in their new platform to abandon profitability and return to their roots as a money-hemorrhaging corporate sham.
• Advances in technology will allow dating sites to branch out into such fields as e-matrimony, electronic bickering, and online divorce proceedings (now featuring Division of Assets Calculator!)
• Scientists will perfect the ability to transmit pizza molecules across fiber optic cables, virtually eliminating the need to ever interact with another human being again.
• The popular video game World of Warcraft will spawn an even geekier sequel called World of Wall Street.  Its virtual stock market will, thanks to millions of people with no lives, greatly outperform and eventually cause the collapse of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
• Ironically, lawyers will be outlawed by a Constitutional Amendment that will receive historic levels of support from a generally apathetic public.  This will not be related to Web 3.0, but I figured you would want to know.
• Unable to find a suitable successor, Steve Jobs will leave instructions upon his death that his body is to be zombified and returned to its post as CEO.  Subsequently, Apple will develop its own set of Web 3.0 tools and standards that are incompatible with anything else.  It will also release the first version of the Online Reality Distortion Field Generator, which will later take over keynote presentations from Steve Jobs’ reanimated corpse.  Consumption of human brains at WWDC will fall drastically.
• Not to be outdone, Bill Gates will renege on his earlier promises to donate his vast wealth to charity, and will instead construct a multi-billion dollar underground facility to freeze his remains and discover a cure for death in the hopes of giving the semi-deceased Jobs his final come-uppance.
• Microsoft will miss out on Web 3.0 entirely, but will later declare that this was only because it had been secretly working on Web 4.0, which it will gladly show you sometime later.  It will also claim that Web 3.0 was stupid anyway, and that internal studies suggested its customers were not interested.