What is Web3 and how to explain it to your friends
This is Tim. Tim is interested in technology. On a daily basis, he scrolls through his Feed and mainly scans the headlines. For a few months now the term “Web3” keeps popping up.
By his peers, Tim is regarded as a very tech-savvy individual. However, if he is honest with himself, he barely knows what Web3 is all about. So what happens if one of his friends asks Tim if he could explain Web3 to them? Well, let’s help Tim out here…
As you can imagine, when you see the term “Web3,” there were two major versions that came before. Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Web3 can also be referred to as Web 3.0. But you might lose some of your hipser-ness.
Web 1.0
You can think of Web 1.0 as being a collection of paper pages which have been digitized. As a bonus the text could contain links which would then take the user to another page. The advantages of this early version of the internet was that people could find information easier.
Think about it: instead of having to look through books and paper files you could now easily call up a web page and search for the information you need. This saves a huge amount of space for storing all the paper. It also reduces any transportation costs since you can access the information from anywhere.
But there were are couple of drawbacks. The information on a website had to be provided by a very tech savvy person. Also the technology was still in its early legs. So even simple websites took quite a lot of effort.
This is where Web 2.0 comes in.
Web 2.0
With Web 2.0, users were now able to create content themselves. It is called User-Generated Content (UGC). While this new feature may seem small, it allowed us to create the internet we now know. Huge Social Media platforms, which are used by billions of people around the entire planet were build.
Databases started to emerge, and we built APIs for other software applications to use the same data. We no longer have to duplicate data every time we build a new site or application.
The aspect of content creation moved from the system administrators to the user. In easy terms: Web 2.0 allowed the content of the internet to be created by the users themselves.
Web 3.0
Let us call it Web3. The true nature of Web3 has not yet been revealed. However, the idea behind Web3 is that basically the machines take over. With Web3, we will see a surge in AI technology, not only reading but also curating the content of the internet. The network itself will become more decentralized, and more and more machines will start interacting with world wide web.
Blockchain and crypto currencies can be part of this. Blockchain technology eliminates the necessity for centralized databases, and crypto currencies actually allow for monetary transfer via machines.
Think about your home security cam, which needs storage online to store relevant recordings. With blockchain technology this storage does not have to be provided by a company. You simply choose a network that allows you to store your recordings. And the security cam will be able to pay for that storage on its own and only when needed.
Summary
With that, Tim should be able to retain his status as a tech-savvy individual to his peers. The intricacies of the different stages of the web can be explored in great detail, but Tim may find that those details will only bore his friends. I encourage you to read more about the subject though, as we are currently experiencing a great revolution.
