What Exactly is Web 3.0?
Recently I’ve been seeing a concerted effort online to start brandishing the “Web 3.0” stick and waving it around at everything trending. We’ve been waiting for this day since we first settled on what Web 2.0 meant. So what is it, and should you care? Well, eventually you’re going to be interacting with it on some level or another so it might be for the best if we lay some groundwork. Let’s run up to it by doing a brief history lesson.
Web 1.0
Back in the dim dark days of the internet everybody had a site. Geocities accounts showing off somebody’s family dog and HTML “under construction” pages littered the web. This period is now referred to as Web 1.0. It was static passive content with no real interaction. Content creators were outweighed by consumers.
Web 2.0
Otherwise known as the social web, this is what you spend most of your life doing right now. Now everybody is a content creator at some level or another, just by virtue of using the net. Sites are now vessels for user generated content. Why make static pages when it can be dynamic and generating something new for you to look at all day long? Blogs and forums were the earliest examples of Web 2.0. Comment sections on every page or post became a given. Now the net is dominated by Youtube, Facebook, and Tik Tok. Wikipedia is a great example of maybe the only good thing we’ve ever done with a collaborative internet.
Web 3.0
I should probably use the term Web3, as Web 3.0 is used usually to refer to a concept known as the Semantic Web, which makes everything on the web machine readable. The use of the term Web3/3.0 since 2020 has commonly been used to reference blockchain related growing technologies. But at its heart the Web3.0 movement is striving for a decentralised internet, spreading data between nodes rather than having it pooled and hoarded by central authorities. Data will be shared peer to peer.
With decentralisation being a prime component of Web3.0, that means that running things through the blockchain might be a viable path, and using NFTs could be a possible way of owning and moving data from service to service. In fact, you could use an NFT style service as a universal identifier/login. This means you wouldn’t need to tie a login to a Google owned email address or Facebook owned profile.
Plenty of these emergent technologies will try and hitch their wagon to the Web3.0 term to gain clout in much the same way that companies in the real world added “blockchain” to their names to gain crazy market share for nothing. I’m looking at you Long Blockchain Corp. So whenever you see the term crop up, especially if you’re considering an investment, be wary that some are using it as a method of bamboozling you.
