Peter Rip at EarlyStageVC had an interesting vision of the future of the web. Given that everyone has accepted the fact that the web will become the next application platform, a coherent vision of that web based platform stack will be extremely important for anyone in the technology industry. Year to date, web 2.0 had been focused very much application innovations (consumer services) but in the near term future we will quickly reallize that the current web architecture is not scalable for the type of end use innovations that we want to built and enable. As much as the current web development software stack went through rapid development and transformation(2 layer, 3layer, etc etc) the web stack (web services? has 2.0 replaced web services as a buzz word?) will too. Smart VC’s are now digging around for infrastructure plays which will bring technology savvy entrepreneurs back into the web 2.0 game (rather than just some MBA with some consumer services ideas). I believe (like peter?) that the next phase of “web 2.0″ will not be innovations focused on applications but the infrastructure, with GoogleBase kicking off the game. The middleware VC’s and entreprenuers who had been left out in the cold the last 6 months will reign again.

I do have one addition/modification/clarification on Peter’s vision of the web stack. I believe the web will continue to fragment and become even more distributed. Try as google might, I do not think the so called “data store” (current incarnation is just good old web pages) will consolidate but fragment even more. Instead, I think where companies can achieve leverage and or network effects is through owning the schema/meta layer. Specifically, some sort of web wide integration network might appear that can in real time, create meta data and schema out of unstructured content or normalize schemas out of structured content. Where significant scale in data throughput will be needed (read increasing returns) to generate these schemas automagically (Gbase is trying). The closest things right now to this is not webservices vans (like Grand Central) but actually vertical search engines and Google Search+Google Base. Google is already in the process of modularizing their search stack so they can make search simply an application service ontop of their platform. With meta data integration layer and datastores(GoogleBase) underneath.