If you think you’re spoiled now by all the benefits of Web 2.0 — social networking, posting and reading product reviews, blogging, watching TV on Hulu, visiting with friends on Facebook, getting a laugh out of YouTube, getting breaking news on RSS feeds, tweeting from your cell phone — wait until you see what Web 3.0 has in store.

Web 2.0 is a social experience that enhances collaboration among people — an interactive dialogue wherein you can get information and have your say. According to experts, Web 3.0 will be a personal assistant using software agents that not only “get” you, but understand the context of your search and the sites they’re searching.

Currently, search engines don’t understand your search — they simply look for keywords and you’re left to sort through the hits to find relevant sites. One stage in the development of Web 3.0 is what web founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee calls Web semantics — wherein information is understood by computers (not just humans, as it is now) and software agents perform tedious tasks on your behalf.

For example, today if you want to go on a vacation, you visit multiple web sites, entering search parameters and cherry-picking for the best deal that most appeals to your tastes. When you want to go out for dinner, some live music and a movie, again you search multiple sites looking for what you like and what fits your schedule. Web 3.0 would do all of that for you based on a sentence you would type in your browser, the software agents’ understanding of your preferences — based on your user profile — and the agents’ ability to understand the context of the pages it visits. The beauty of the 3.0 process is that the more you use the browser, the more it learns about you and is able to really hone in on what you’re looking for.  With Web 3.0 you could type, “I want to go somewhere warm with my husband for under $3000” or, “I feel like listening to jazz, eating Thai food and seeing a documentary” and Web 3.0 would pull together options for you and a Google map to help you get there. Looking further into the future, experts expect computers to be able to communicate with other machines — lowering the volume on your stereo when your phone rings.

From a business perspective — if you’re not providing online context today with Web 2.0, you’re going to be woefully behind as Web 3.0 takes baby steps forward. You need to feed the machine — quite literally — building a well-defined context that appeals to the varied customer profiles you’re targeting. In Web 3.0 Jack and Jill could enter the same exact search sentence on the same search engine and come up with very different results — based on their user profiles. Search will be custom-tailored.

So now’s the time to hone the content on your site, continue to refine it according to customer profiles, put yourself out there on YouTube, Facebook Twitter and Flickr, and work to define and redefine customer profiles. Customers don’t care about you — but about what you can do for them. If your Web 2.0 messaging doesn’t address customer need, and doesn’t do it for a variety of customers, then you’re missing the Web 2.0 boat. Worse yet, you have very little context for Web 3.0 to draw on. If your customers don’t “get” you know — in an online environment designed to enhance human understanding — then the software agents of Web 3.0 will be just as lost.

The future is one in which machines will converse with one another in order to make our life easier. They’ll read and understand keywords, web text, Facebook and Flickr tags, blogs, tweets and more. And they’ll do it based on the user’s profile preferences. So build your story — create context — now. The 3.0-day the Web-ready drill you manufactured comes looking for your online Web 3.0 masonry-drill bit specs and can’t “find” you on the Web is the day you drop off the 3.0 map.