I recently read an article on Techcrunch on how web 2.0 had undoubtedly made an impact, but had yet to truly make money. From my stance they is really one way to make money on the web, which is through advertising (paid subscription services are dying). This can either be done through a simple banner ad, or something that can more easily be deemed a qualified lead or referral. Ads will always be there, but if web 2.0 is to start making money it must be on improving the measurement and throughput of qualified leads.

Without going into too much detail on referrals and qualified leads I’d like to mention a great example of this, mint.com. Mint offers a great free service of managing your personal finances. Throwing out security and sharing your data (another time another place), they do a great job of categorizing and monitoring your finances. In exchange they have access to your spending history. So you give them your spending history, in exchange that have hundreds of thousands of peoples data, such as what credit card you use, who your cable provider is. With this mint does what I believe is a good job of generating referrals, but telling you how much you can save by switching from Internet provider A at $60 per month to Internet provider B at $30 per month. They’re not just giving ads for the sake of it, they’re giving me something that I would actually want.

Does this lead to higher or lower revenue? We’ll this I’m not sure of, but with regards to advertising, feel this is a more better fit for a user. I only get things that the service provider thinks I want not what they think they can sell me. As we reach more of the semantic understanding of the web I believe this will prevail and make web 2.0 more profitable, but it cannot be done with web 2.0 alone.

As I’ve become more or less a web 2.0 whore. I’ve also had a great interest in web 3.0 and what it will fortell. Most believe natural language and the semantic web will play a large role in that. And while it will that will not be the end result of web 3.0. While web 2.0 included AJAX and Flex, that really doesn’t fully encompass what they are. Web 3.0 to sum it up most simply will be about reducing the noise of the web. While I can take very little credit for this idea as I have heard others say the same or at least similar things, there is an interesting side that I believe most have not thought about.

You see, in order to reduce the noise of the web you have to know about me and what I consider noise. In order for someone to do this we have to be willing to give up information about ourselves, some of which people consider private. I still recall a conversation which I posted on a few days ago about users not wanting to give out their private information. I believe this attitude is very quickly becoming old hat, while there are individuals that will stay this way for several decades as a collective whole it’s a fleeting attitude. I think for example of mint.com which I willingly give all of my financial account information to in order for them to simplify my life. Instead of a massive collection of emails and notifications I get summarized views from them. While there still is the chance for noise as I could receive text messages about every transaction that happens, I have the ability now to filter that noise.

Noise is something that some people love, take scoble for example who loves having hundreds of twitter messages fly across his screen every few minutes. Though for the vast majority to reduce the noise to allow us to accomplish more in a day, but also have more time to enjoy it will be the key to the future of the web.

I’ve talked with some that believe that government policy will come after people start to become too open with their information. My perspective is that as long as there are safeguards around that information then there will be little barriers to users giving it away freely very soon. But in truth only time will tell at how well companies and products can reduce this noise and truly learn about a user, and if there will be regulation preventing such improvements.