For context, I heard the term “Web 3.0” be used for the first time for everything being put on the blockchain. Then, it reminded me of a post on Mastodon saying that the fediverse is Web 3.0. After that I looked it up on the internet, and the definition included A.I. with crypto.
So I’m wondering, what is actually Web 3.0? What does it mean to you? Or maybe is Web 3.0 just another attempt at making investors pay up?
“Web3” is the crypto stuff. “Web 3.0” is federation.
Obviously, no one has a trademark on these names, anyone could make up a meaning, but yeah, these two definitions/names exist already.
They’re aspects of the same thing: decentralization/federation. The idea of Web 3.0 is to transition from massive centralized services to distributed federated services. The Fediverse is on the social media side of things (displace entities like Facebook), crypto is on the finance side of things (displace entities like Bank of America), NFTs are supposed to be on the distribution side of things (displace entities like Ticketmaster).
One of the most distinguishing features of “web3” is the sheer level of handwaviness surrounding it. While you can find no end of press releases, crypto evangelists on Twitter, and venture capitalists extolling the virtues of web3, you will have a much harder time finding any definition that’s not so full of buzzwords that it becomes meaningless. That’s because “web3” is first and foremost a marketing term.
You’re almost there, but not quite. Web 3.0 utilizes the latest in dismount tech, effectively smartenizing the turnrolls of the planet’s greatest minds, and capsizing the status point of the giant elf companies that squeeze the enrichment of the NAaS pools that all savvy consumers would thrift towards. By incentivizing the output of polarific content, the margins in the ACK requests are distributed into reproducible hedge mazes that are tanked to the fill with brill chum.
It’s a buzz word.
Web 1.0 is just websites. They envisioned everyone had their own web site to blog on. Geocities, ISP hosting, web rings, link aggregators, and simple human curated search engines. That kind of thing.
Web 2.0 basically meant APIs. You could stitch a weather API with a map API and make a weather map app. This kind of came true, but it wasn’t as free and open as people hoped for.
Web 3.0 is supposed the intersection of the web and distributed apps. Think games on the block chain like crypto kitties. It’s mostly been a flop since blockchain based decentralization is slow, expensive, and difficult for users. That being said there are successful use cases like online wallet management and distributed exchanges (defi).
To add some more detail about Web 2.0: it was a term that came after the dot-com crash at the turn of the millennium. There were a bunch of people saying the web was dead, the Internet was a fad that was dying, the bubble had burst and it was all over etc. Tim O’Reilly (of O’Reilly Books) came up with the concept of Web 2.0 to illustrate that the web wasn’t dead and that it was still an evolving and vital thing. There’s a lot more detail here: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html
The definition I learned for web 2.0, as it was happening, was a shift from static web pages generated all at once on the server and delivered to the client whole, to using Ajax with in-browser Javascript dynamically changing already-delivered pages with back-end XML calls.
Originally communication on the web was one directional, server to client. Web 2.0 meant active web and bidirectional communication. Hence, web 3.0 is a threesome.
It’s a meaningless term for web developers, just as Web 2.0 was. It’s supposed to mean decentralized services and it was sort of hijacked by crypto companies for marketing purposes. Blockchain isn’t a particularly useful technology outside of its niches of cryptocurrency and gimmicks (like NFTs or whatever) and isn’t used by 99% of web projects. (There’s no Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. blockchain, after all.)
I’ve been a web dev for decades now and to me, Web 1.0 was basically the era when people posted their own content on their own web sites. Web 2.0 was a marketing term used by social media companies to describe a new era where even non-tech savvy users could post content on MySpace, LiveJournal, Facebook, etc. There was no major tech advancement. Web 3.0 is supposed to be an era where even average users can take advantage of decentralized services. Again, nothing major tech-wise.
In terms of actual technology, there’s been significant shifts like CSS 3, HTML 5, ECMAScript 6 (JavaScript’s standard, which has evolved a lot recently) and others. Server-side web tech has also changed a lot over the years. Most web sites probably still use PHP — Wordpress is surprisingly ubiquitous — but NodeJS, Ruby, Python, and other languages have had major advancements. Those (and several others) are the ones actual web developers cared about.
TL/DR: Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 are just marketing terms with vague meanings to describe shifts in web culture, not web technology.
