Web Evolution from 1.0 to 3.0

Vivek Madurai
3 min readFeb 17, 2018

World Wide Web is the primary tool used by billions of people to share, read, and write information to interact with other people via internet. World Wide Web made much progress since its advent, in this article I will be sharing a brief idea of the evolution happened in web from web 1.0 to 2.0 and to web 3.0.

http://www.mdpi.com/futureinternet/futureinternet-04-00852/article_deploy/html/images/futureinternet-04-00852-g001.png

The first version of web Web 1.0 also referred as Syntactic web or read only web is the era(1990–2000) where the role of a user is limited to reading information provided by the content producers. There is no option given for user or consumer to communicate back the information to the content producers. Example of Web 1.0 are static web sites and personal sites.

The Web 2.0 also referred as Social Web or read-write web is the era(2000–2010 and continues even now) which facilitates interaction between web users and sites which intern allows users to communicate with other users. In this era every user can be a content producers and content is distributed and shared between sites. Some of the famous Web 2.0 applications are Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, Twitter etc., The web technologies like HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript frameworks like ReactJs, AngularJs, VueJs etc., enables startups to innovate new ideas which enables users to contribute more in this Social Web. Web 2.0 is build around the users, producer just need build a way to enable and engage them.

The Web 3.0 also referred as Semantic Web or read-write-execute is the era(2010 and above) which refers to the future of web. In this era computers can interpret information like humans via Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Which help to intelligently generate and distribute useful content tailored to a particular need of a user.

  • What if computers can understand meaning behind information
  • What if they can learn “what we are interested in”
  • Then they can help us find what we want
  • It can recognise People, Place, Events, Companies, Product, Movies etc.,
  • It can understand the relationship between things

Some of the examples of web 3.0 are Apple’s Siri, Googles Cloud API, Wolfram Alpha.

The Web 2.5 is the concept to address the practical and real evolution which we are currently seeing in our era 2010–2020 between Web 2.0 and 3.0. On our way to Web 3.0 some of player like Amazon, Google, Salesforce, KiSSFLOW etc., provides a service model in Cloud computing for developers to create web applications for their users to connect them on any devices, anytime and anywhere.

Web 2.5 is majorly focussing on mobile computing and evolution in mobile technologies. As we all know mobile computing plays a major role in engaging larger audience via native apps as well as mobile web apps, we can find more and more apps getting into mobile market to establish their presence by addressing mobile users. Some of the technologies which got introduced in this era where Progressive Web Apps(PWA), Accelerated Mobile Pages(AMP) etc., To make in conceptually clear we can call Web 2.5 as the convergence between Social and Semantic web.

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Vivek Madurai

Lead Technologist, Full Stack developer at OrangeScape.