Evolution of the Internet: From Web 1.0 to Web 3.0

 The Evolution of Internet Technologies

In todays blog I will be going over the evolution of the Web. Starting from how and when the web came about, to what the future may have in store for us as we continue getting more and more advanced. 

Web 1.0

The World Wide Web was invented in 1989 by a scientist who worked at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) called Tim-Berners Lee. He originally intended it to be used as a way for scientists and researchers around the globe to share information quickly with each other. In 1990 after his first proposal to CERN was rejected he worked on it further with a colleague of his called Robert Cailliau. Eventually by the end of 1990 he had developed the key foundations of the internet as we know it; Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) as a way to find a specific page, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) which was a way for people to make websites and HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which is a way for transferring files around. A recreation of the first ever website can be found here http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html .

Web 1 was very limited/basic, users could only view simple webpages which consisted of text and images and had little to no ways of interacting with the website or the contents. The websites were mostly centralised around certain companies while design was also very basic and had limited media due to technology constraints. 

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is the web as we know it today; interactive, tons of different uses and functions and also shifted from a 1 way source of info to a huge amount of participation from the general public in the form of user generated content, such as videos, blogs, posts, etc. This began in the early 2000's after many people, investors and companies had joined the hype in the 90's causing the dot com bubble. 

Web 2 is referred to as the social web for good reason. As the internet evolved it became more social and platforms like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, etc were developed and became very popular. In this era of the Web we also saw the development and mass adoption of smartphones. This was huge for the Web as people could access it from anywhere with their smartphone instead of being at home on their computer. However it wasn't all good as big corporations control much of the platforms and data, meaning there is many security concerns around what is being done with this data.

We now have generations such as mine who can barely remember a time before social media and Web 2 and its part of most of our daily lives.  

Web 3.0

So what's in store for us with Web 3? 

• Decentralization and privacy: Currently most of the things we use are controlled by huge companies that save and store our data. Meaning that these companies can sell it and use it in other ways without us getting a say. A huge part of Web 3 is changing this so that we have control over our data, taking power away from these massive companies and putting it into our own hands. This will be done by using decentralised apps which rely on blockchain technology. Blockchains record data and transactions (think cryptocurrency) by using a network of computers, meaning its secure and can't be changed or meddled with.

• AI and Semantic Web: With the rise of Artificial Intelligence recently there is a push for something called the Semantic Web. This is about making data for machines easier to interpret so that when we ask it to do things such as answer complex questions or searches we receive better and more accurate results. We already are using this but the goal is to expand and become better at it.