Web 3.0 is about innovation and big ideas. What does this mean for our collective digital future?
Web 3.0 is coming.
A term first coined by The New York Times' John Markoff, Web 3.0, also known as Web3, describes the next wave of the Internet. Over the last decade and a half, its use has grown in popularity, even as the world has entered a fully Web 2.0 scenario.
Web 3.0 is about innovation and big ideas. What does this mean for our collective digital future?
A Brief History of the Web
The 1990s marked the arrival of a new phenomenon: the internet. Although, in its purest form, this revolutionary concept was invented before, in the 1980s, it only truly became the backbone of what we know it today in the last decade of the first millennium.
This was Web 1.0, although at the time it was simply “the web.” And for his age, it was a marvel. Today, we look at rudimentary web pages and laugh, but back then, this was a radical way to disseminate and consume information. There was little to no interactivity, with pages almost entirely in “read-only” format. There was also a lot of what today we would call fake news.
In the 2000s, the internet entered its second wave: Web 2.0. This era of digital innovation was characterized by the emergence of today's technology giants, the Amazons, Googles and Facebooks of the world. Search engines, social media networks, and complex media designs reigned supreme. Customization and personalization, leveraged by new languages and functionalities, have become more viable.
Web applications, new media, and more have become ubiquitous. The same happened with new devices – mobile devices and tablets suddenly became digital vehicles, allowing people to access all types of content through an Internet connection.
And now it's time for Web 3.0.
What do we mean by Web 3.0?
Web 3.0 is a complex idea. At its core, it's about the democratization of the Internet – essentially, giving power back to the people, rather than concentrating it in the hands of a few tech giants like Amazon and Google.
“There is a small group of companies that have all of these, and there are us who use them, and although we contribute to the success of these platforms, we have nothing to show for it,” said Mat Dryhurst of New York University. Web 3.0 aims to solve this problem.
Web3 will incorporate the semantic web, which involves the computer's ability to read and assign meaning to multimedia content and establish connections between items. This is a network of linked and shared data, not a string of keywords.
Decentralization is another important facet of Web 3.0. Think about blockchain – the power behind cryptocurrency has also launched a movement towards transferring information and data without the need for an intermediary. This means greater autonomy for the people who use the Internet, rather than the giants that currently rule the web. This way, we also won't need an intermediary – just what is essentially a peer-to-peer network.
Thanks to the innovations introduced during the Web 2.0 phase of our digital lives, this new era will mean greater accessibility from virtually any device and anywhere there is an Internet connection.
Naturally, any discussion of Web 3.0 would be incomplete without addressing artificial intelligence (AI). This increasingly ubiquitous tool will enable computers to act with human-like intelligence, processing information at rapid speed in order to understand and provide more refined results. Due to AI's ability to learn through repetition, results will also become more accurate.
And finally, Web 3.0 will incorporate more sophisticated graphics, including 3D imaging and VR technologies, into all types of products.
How will Web 3.0 affect the Internet and its users?
At this point, Web 3.0 is still an emerging entity. But it's not as far away as some of us imagine. We already have the foundations for this new phase of the Internet – we just need to put them together.
People will have access and control over their own information. Their activities will be recorded in a public, decentralized ledger — a blockchain — and they will be able to facilitate connection, streamlining their lives and making everything more efficient.
The ability to share information will be back in the hands of the people who need it – not on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
Take, for example, non-fungible tokens or NFTs. This allows individuals to effectively own virtual materials and is possible through cryptocurrency sales. The property is cataloged on the blockchain.
But Web3 will mean much more than representative ownership. It will be the next phase of the sharing economy and will facilitate stronger communication and accessibility.
What should we expect?
Will we see Web 3.0 in the near future? It's still not clear.
While many innovations that have already materialized may seem similar to Web 3.0, such as voice assistance technology that enables location-specific searches and VR/AR that allows us to “experience” otherworldly places, we are still pretty firmly in the territory of Web 2.0.
According to some experts, Web 3.0 is a distant innovation, which may not even be fully realized. But others believe it will work hand in hand with Web 2.0, without ever truly replacing the latter phase. In fact, perhaps it would be better to stop thinking of these separate eras, but rather as groups or categories of digital entities.
This means that the most likely scenario is that while decentralization will grow, so will companies that have a considerable amount of power. But the fact remains: we are about to have an immensely transformed digital future.
Source: BairesDev
