Take a look at Past, Present and Future of the web

In this article I am going to talk about how the Web has changed over time by introducing significant changes to human lives. In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee introduced the concept of the web to the world. Since then, the web has passed two generations and is now waiting to welcome the third generation or to be honest, to use the next generation as almost web 3.0 exists here. Namely, these generations are web 1.0, web 2.0 and web 3.0. It is fair enough if I say the web is doing more things to us than we do for ourselves today. Because in the 21st century we are living in, everyone needs to access the internet and carry out day-today tasks. If we want to make friends we go to the web, if we want to buy clothes, the first visit is to the web. From small to large scale, we use this amazing concept of the web for everything. Hence it is important to know the history of the web, what we are experiencing today and where technology is taking us in the near future.so, let’s review some features of each generation.

First generation of web — web 1.0

Web 1.0 is the first generation of web which started from 1989 right after Tim Berners-lee introduced web to the world. Web 1.0 also known as read only web and one directional web as it only supports users for viewing already uploaded content to websites. Web pages are static. A big collection of static pages are referred to as the internet. Just like a one big story book where you only read and never ask anything from you. Most of the time companies or personal content creators publish content where end-users(who visit the website) do not have anything to do. Just to take a look at the content is promoted. Isn’t it a little bit tedious to think? Yes, but this is the safest version of the web for end users because there was no need to enter data by the user. No one is getting your data through the internet. Another interesting feature is that there was no advertising revenue from the internet. Again the reason is no user data available to promote anything. Whatever I see on the website, the same content is visible to anyone who visits that website. No user based filtering is supported. This generation lasted from 1989 to 2004 with millions of users.

Second generation of web — web 2.0

In my opinion, this is the point where the web got interesting to many people with the arrival of web 2.0 in 2004. This web generation is also called the social web as the arrival of social media drastically changes the internet as well as human lives. Also called as read and write web as websites are showing us content as well as getting data inputs from us. Most of the time we are required to create an account to get the services from websites. The web we are experiencing today is web 2.0. The leading social media platform in this generation can be mentioned as Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg. From this point on wards, the internet was not just a bunch of static websites. Dynamic websites were developed where most of the time users publish content to the. The best examples are Facebook, you tube, twitter, Instagram, stack overflow…where you, the user upload content. Content can be a post, video,comment,like, answer for a question or even the question itself. We input our data to software platforms, they store these data in their servers and provide services for us by analyzing our data. The customized content is possible with this approach of the web. What I see in my Facebook, twitter or YouTube feed will not be the exact content that appears on someone else’s feed. Not only that, platforms who collect our data, will sell them to companies to use for advertising according to the user. As an example, Facebook exposes us to a lot of advertisements per a day. When looking at these points, our privacy is not safe around the internet anymore. Almost every website we visit collects our data and behavior and saves observers to use even without our permission. In other words, our data is controlled by companies who provide services via the internet. With the existing features like dynamic content, interactive web experience, user friendly internet, there is always doubt of being a victim of terrible data explosion. This web 2.0 generation has been there from 2004 to today with billions of users.

Third generation of web — web 3.0

The first generation was tedious. So we moved to the second generation which is interesting but is dangerous in terms of privacy. Now again we are in need of safe browsing. That is where web 3.0 also called as secure web and semantic web comes into action. Web 3.0 can be considered as a securely extended version of web 2.0 as it provides all services from web 2.0 and additionally allows end users to protect their privacy. Simply Web 3.0 is a bunch of decentralized applications(Dapps) whose back end logic is running on blockchain and does not require user data or user accounts to serve you. The use of blockchain as the back end store, web 3.0 has shifted from client server architecture. One of the best features is that anyone can get services from Dapps without revealing your data to applications. Hence no permission needed, there is no denial for anyone. Furthermore, let’s assume we create a social media platform on web 3.0 as a Dapp, then once you upload something it is uploaded to all copies of the network as these apps depend on blockchain (Read my article on A turning point called Blockchain). Hence to delete content, it requires more effort as needed to delete from all nodes. Another fact is that, content uploaded to web 3.0 is not easy to change or update as the immutability feature of blockchain. There are benefits such as security, control over user data. At the same time, there are several problems related to web 3.0 such as updating versions is difficult, scalability is an issue which we need to find solutions. The world has started to move to web 3.0 gradually by updating existing solutions to Dapps now. It is now only a matter of time for us to welcome web 3.0 from web 2.0. This is it for now. Let’s read about more details on Web 3.0, Dapps with another article.