Day 1 — Introduction to Web 3.0

The next step in world wide web evolution

5 min readDec 25, 2021

TL;DR:

Web 3.0 is the next step in the evolution of the World Wide Web.

It will help transform and change the way users will experience content — instead of finding results based on keywords and most used links, information is disseminated based on built-in artificial intelligence and how it comprehends the word.

It is decentralised, so no central entity will hold the power of the information; sharing of content will not be used as a tool for manipulation, but rather, give people actual freedom to discover results to their inquiries at a faster, more impactful manner.

Potentially it will help carve us towards creating a Metaverse (to be explored more in the future)

Introduction to Web 3.0:

So let’s dive into Web 3.0.

It is supposedly the next step in our evolution into the World Wide Web, but to really understand the impact it brings, let’s go back in history to start the original version 1 of the web:

Web 1.0

In the beginning there was nothing.

That was until DARPA build a network known as ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) — which was the predecessor to Web 1.0.

The factors that defines the design elements of Web 1.0 includes:

Static pages
Use of HTML elements such as <frames> and <marquee>
Majority of users are consumers of content

Essentially, Web 1.0 is limited in its capacity to create interactive experiences for users; instead, it’s used to spread and share information.

Web 2.0

Let there be collaboration and participation.

Web 2.0 opens up to allow humans to interact with one another. This is where the tables turn; users are both content creators and content consumers.

Key factors that defines Web 2.0 includes:

What Web 2.0 websites allow you to achieve is to allow users and people on the world wide web to interact and collaborate together via social medial, as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community.

Web 3.0

Now the exciting part. Let’s take a look at Web 3.0

Web 3.0 has been defined as:

“semantic web desires to decrease human’s tasks and decisions and leave them to machines by providing machine-readable contents on the web”

Essentially what our Web will be evolving into, is a higher level of web utilisation and interaction; geeksforgeeks has coined it as “Altering the Web into a Database”.

To put it into perspective, this new Semantic Web or Web 3.0 is essentially transforming the World Wide Web from a “web of people connection… into a web of knowledge connections”.

There are (in my opinion) four key factors that defines Web 3.0:

Semantic Web — Allows web technologies to “create, share and connect content through search and analysis based on the comprehension of the words, rather than utilising keywords or numbers.”
If you want an example of what that looks like… Try this out: search “Australia vs America”, in Google and once more in Wolfram Alpha. What you’ll see is that in Google, it’ll return the link which contains the relevant keywords or the most relevant link according to their digital profile of you — in this case, Google returns “14 Cultural Differences between the USA and Australia”. However in Wolfram Alpha, it uses Natural Language Processing to comprehend the words you’ve used and instead, returns comparison between the two countries, showcasing the name, flags, geographic comparisons etc.
Artificial Intelligence — An example of this from before; where Natural Language Processing helps computers understand and distinguish information like humans to provide more relevant results. Just like all AI, it becomes even more intelligent over time to fulfil the requirements.
3D Graphics — Three dimensional design that allows us to transcend traditional web applications from simple 2D static images to 3D graphics; you can think of this as having computer games, e-commerce, geospatial context (google earth). My personal favourite is seeing how NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) like Bricktopians introduce amazing ‘4D’ effects to their collection that transcends what you’ll see commonly.
Connectivity — Web 3.0 Applications will run on decentralised networks of many peer-to-peer nodes (as some many know — blockchains). Not only that, these applications also uses Semantic Data (data that describes the meaning of the data), which evolves the user experience.

Conclusion

There are many facets to Web 3.0 — this is an introduction to what it is currently defined as; due to its evolving nature, we can definitely look towards changing definitions over time.

Before we dive into future topics, I want to share about what excites me about Web 3.0 is the idea that we now have an opportunity to redefine the way the WWW as it is today.

Instead of centralised platforms that control the flow of data, we can create decentralised virtual communities, with intelligent web application that helps us understand and get more relevant results, which ultimately help us accelerate growth and opportunities.

Thank You

Thank you for taking the time to browse through this article — I hope it has provided you some enlightenment to Web 3.0. As always, I’m simply an amateur in these technology, and these are my personal findings (links before that I’ve shared on resources that I’ve used). Please feel free to reach out and message me for any inaccuracies and I’ll do my best to fix them!

What’s Next?

In my next article, I want to be able to create connectivity between articles; since we’ve had a quick look at Web 3.0, let’s dive into Blockchain next!

References:

As always, the content in this article is based on my own research from articles written by the following websites:

Day 1 — Introduction to Web 3.0

The next step in world wide web evolution

TL;DR:

Introduction to Web 3.0:

Written by vVmilkteaVv