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?
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.