We're living in the age of Web 3.0, they say… But isn't there just one web, one internet? In fact, the global network has already gone through two massive transformations that we never stopped to think about while we were caught in their whirlpools.
The technologies of the day keep changing, and so does the relationship each of us has with the network, and with technology in general. We don't have a single second to sit down and make sense of what's happening, let alone dig deeper and analyze it.
And yet the web has gone through different versions. Let's try to look at its individual stages together with the researchers, in some attempt to guess what's coming…
No Sixes and Sevens
So, we start with a very quick introduction to the terminology. We've all heard of the versions of Windows—95, 98, 2000… before them 3.1, later 7… Today, thankfully, numbering in the software industry is a little more standardized, and that logical chaos is gone.
Every truly different, renewed version of a software product starts with a whole number—1.0. Then come the serious updates that change the functionality noticeably enough, and in those cases we go on to 1.1. If there's a slight improvement that few people will notice, 1.1.1 follows. The fourth digit is reserved for changes so small that users would hardly notice them—bugs fixed, minor inconsistencies smoothed out… In a word, the “fine file” has been run over it.
7/8
Some of the bigger companies choose to add something more recognizable to the numbering, but not everyone can really afford that. WordPress, for example—the platform that today powers a third of the websites on the internet!—names each new version after a famous jazz musician. And while that version is current, it makes an effort to promote the work of the chosen artist.
The Android operating system, for its part, names each new major version after… a dessert. I wonder what will happen when their imagination runs dry in this admittedly limited field.
Today's biggest online projects don't number their versions at all. The world moves so fast that changes to Facebook's design, for instance, happen constantly. What's more, some users get one variant while the rest get a completely different one…
And still: what happens if we try to fit versions onto the entire web, onto the vast and boundless internet?
Who's No. 1 Now?
This concept belongs to two people—the researcher Tim O'Reilly and the creator of the web himself, Tim Berners-Lee—and today it's considered a fairly widely accepted division of the separate eras online.
Let's go far, far back. A mere three decades have passed since the creation of the World Wide Web, and already everything is so different that it feels as if we're living in some kind of fairy-tale world…
Like any other software product, we assume there was a version zero—Web 0.0. It existed when the web was still just an idea and a subject of scientific research.
The period of Web 1.0, the first “major version” of the internet, is generally considered to run from its very construction, following the idea of Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, until 1999.
Back then the internet was something exotic, accessible to a chosen few, and built on technology that looks rather primitive from today's point of view. Many of you (35+) remember all too well the screeching, singsong sound of the modem connecting to the network through the good old telephone wire. And how a whole hour online caused trouble with the sulky neighbor you shared a duplex phone line with… anyone who doesn't know what a duplex line is shouldn't bother wasting time finding out now.
It was the boom of the internet cafés, which had a far more stable connection. There, for example, you only had to wait about a minute for a slightly heavier picture to download from a website.
One, Two, Three…
Web 1.0 is also called Read-Only, the internet for reading only, before things became interactive. Information “flowed” in one direction only—from the source to the recipient, from the site's creator to the user. And yet it flowed at full force, and so the information age was born.
Then suddenly LAN technologies arrived, and networks became far more sophisticated, faster and ready for instant communication. Somehow fittingly, this happened right at the turn of the millennium. The JavaScript programming language appeared and allowed everything to become interactive—every page could turn into a separate application with increasingly serious internal logic. Websites were no longer just pictures and text you looked at and moved on from, but full-fledged apps of the kind we'd previously had only offline. Enriched with the ability to talk, even on video, with people on the other side of the planet.
And suddenly it became clear that the world had ended up in the web of the web. Only the world itself didn't realize it, because it was intoxicated by what it had seen. The initial speechlessness at being able to write an email that would land a second later anywhere on the planet moved on to its next phase. People could now communicate fully, surf fast and get much more, and much better, content from the network. The second version of the internet arrived, together with the giants of its time—social networks, Google, everything that defines our present day.
5 for 4
And so we found ourselves in the era of Web 2.0. Technology suddenly shifted to accessible content and… most importantly, the user as a generator of content ended up at the center.
Before that, we visited pages to read news, just as traditional media produced it. Web 2.0 brought the time of what Facebook defines best—one user logs in to see what another has generated in an interactive world.
The same researchers believe the three main driving forces behind the rise of Web 2.0 were mobile technology, social networks and the cloud. With “smart” phones, we suddenly found ourselves with an entire computer of utterly unreal capabilities in our pockets. Social networks, meanwhile, abruptly let us step out of anonymity and become valuable online, not hidden behind nicknames and avatars but as our real selves. Especially once it became clear that we were on an equal footing with celebrities—starting from the same Instagram profiles as anyone who decided to photograph their breakfast or their cute baby.
And, of course, the cloud. It allowed any smaller company or successful startup that had earned enough trust to quickly scale up its online resources. Cloud technology overcame the limits of hardware and brought flexibility, scalability and far greater availability of internet resources. Instead of buying expensive data centers that quickly became obsolete, companies got unlimited resources at prices unthinkable before.
But what comes after that?
6, 6, 6
Here we are, at the present day. You may not suspect it, but according to many leading specialists, we are right now on the threshold of a new watershed. Accelerated by the forced digitalization that came over the past year because of the coronavirus, a new transition is at hand.
In fact, it was Tim Berners-Lee again who spoke about it 15 years ago. He calls the third phase in the development of his brainchild “the semantic web.”
And here the speed of communication and the capabilities of the hardware itself are no longer nearly as important.
There are three main directions expected to form the foundation of Web 3.0—edge cloud solutions, decentralized networks and, of course, artificial intelligence.
Three Out of Three
Edge technologies (edge cloud computing) are linked to some of the most talked-about fields of recent years, such as managing artificial intelligence or the Internet of Things (IoT). With this approach, the traditional internet connection between server and user is gone, and data transfer takes place on three levels.
At the base of it all is the cloud; individual edge units, or edge nodes, connect to it, and the end clients in turn interact with those. This architectural solution is especially popular with “smart” devices, where it matters to shorten the link between the user and the source of information. That's where the intermediate layer of servers comes in, drastically shortening the path. So a self-driving car racing down the highway at 200 km/h doesn't need to store the entire map of the road it will travel. It's enough for the map to be kept at the intermediate level, with the car “downloading” the bits it needs.
There's no need to go into detail about artificial intelligence—we often tell Digital Stories about it, and at length.
Perhaps the least familiar of the three directions is decentralized networks, of which blockchain is an example. They are a great help to technologies that generate data (whether the readings concern your health, the condition of agricultural produce or that of your car). With decentralized networks, data is sent and received quickly and far more safely, without risking security.
Three Times Three
In Web 3.0, users and technologies interact directly, with no need for intermediaries. According to Tim Berners-Lee, the semantic web we are entering will be centered on the human being and their security online. But it will also let them interact with every technology that ends up online on a new, personalized level.
Still, those are the technological aspects. What should we, as users of Web 3.0, expect?
First of all—internet everywhere. Yes, in Bulgaria we're rather spoiled by the fact that a decent enough connection now reaches almost every village, but much of the world will very soon get access of an entirely new generation. We're talking about projects like Starlink. Through it, Elon Musk's company SpaceX will soon have a network of satellites providing a good connection to the web from any point on the planet.
Besides, Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 each came with their own new paradigms for how business is done and, accordingly, what users get. Both social networks and eBay, Airbnb and Uber became possible—all very different forms in which the end user receives a far more accessible and varied service. Of course, all of these also have downsides related to inequality, monopolies and poor regulation.
One to One
Web 3.0 is expected to change that too. Thanks to the much higher level of security in data exchange, it will be possible to exchange goods and services directly between individuals, businesses and machines, with no intermediary needed. The entire layer of businesses we just mentioned will become redundant, because until now they were the link between whoever offers a service and whoever receives it, and they were the ones guaranteeing trust in the system.
In other words—the end of middlemen and resellers of services, more decentralization… Especially if we believe this could be allowed by today's powers that be on the internet, which have turned into corporations far mightier than even the strongest states.
Berners-Lee also foresees a significant growth in the volume and scope of interactions between people and machines, to heights we can't even imagine today.
One in a Million
Of course, blockchain is another of the directions here, one with potential in far more areas than cryptocurrencies—we'll soon tell you about it in detail.
The “daddy” of the WWW also promises us a world of information that is far more complete, organized and reliable than today's social networks and search engines could ever give us. I'm not sure we have enough arguments to share his optimism on this, but I hope he's right.
And what else? Hardly anyone could tell you in detail. Just as no one could have predicted, say, what social networks look like today. But it's more than certain that Web 3.0 is arriving with plenty of new and promising ideas that will change our lives, that we'll be talking about, and that will give birth to the next Digital Stories.
What comes next? Should we expect Web 4.0 to bring the “symbiotic web,” in which we'll “merge” with computers on a much higher level? Then again, that still looks like a (perhaps) impossible future.
But isn't everything new just something old, well forgotten?
