A journey: Web1 to Web 3

The Internet & Progression of the web

The internet is the infrastructure that provides the communication capabilities. It’s more or less the wires and connections that make everything interoperate and the web is the forms and data that is sent along those wires and connections.

Web 1.0 — History

The web has progressed over the years from something that was relatively static and maybe a small part of our day; to something that is more integrated and baked into our daily routine. It’s not so many years ago that we had to make some destination point: maybe an internet café or the local library was our entry into the internet and all the data that the web provides. The first edition of the web was:

1. Hard to use
2. Expensive
3. A destination that had to be connected to
4. Relatively Read only.

Web 1.0 was all about some corporation or entity posting information for consumption. It was a place for businesses to broadcast their information and the functionality provided back to the user was limited. A destination to do read only communications.

Now we have that power in the palm of our hands as a mobile device. But with web 1.0, the user was limited to search and?consume/read?functions. It was expensive, hard to use and had limited adoption due to these barriers to entry.

This is NORMAL with all new technologies. As an example the Automobile took years to adopt; today most Americans have owned several automobiles in their lifetime and it’s not something that is difficult to learn how to operate or use. This is simply the normalization that occurs when we adopt new technology. That’s what we needed to do with web 1.0, Normalize it. This normalization process happened with the web with web 2.0.

One of the biggest opponents to the automobile in large cities was the “Horse Manure shovelers Union”.

Web 2.0 — Current

Web 2.0 concentrated on fixing the normalization problem. Web 2.0 provided a different kind of website. One that gave the user the ability to generate their own content; but do it in a way that provided ease of use and interoperability with other users. This turned the Read only web into a web of?Read/Write. However, the ownership of that data was not in the hands of the creator. Instead power & data is centralized to the platform. This helped to normalize the technology but it created a new problem by centralizing the power.

Powerful centralized platforms such as Linked-In, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Craigslist, YouTube, and others gave the user the ability to become their own publishers but they did not own their data. This is the current situation of the web and most of its content. The problems we are seeing is these platforms are forms of centralized power. Power so great that they where able to censor a president of the United States. These levels of censorship are something that should be part of an open democratic process.

To address this problem; decentralized solutions can be made by leveraging blockchain technology as part of a web 3 rollout.

When platforms become powerful enough to silence a nationed state elected official. It may be time to start building protocols to distribute the power of these platforms.

Web 3.0- Future

Web 3.0 was initially called “The Semantic Web” by?Sir Tim Berners-Lee?and was aimed at being a more autonomous, intelligent and open internet. Data will be interconnected in a decentralized way, which would be a huge leap forward to our current generation of the internet (Web 2.0), where data is mostly stored in centralized repositories.

These Centralized repositories have created a situation in Web 2.0 where power has been concentrated in the platforms. In order to counter that centralization of power; Blockchains can be used as decentralized protocols that provide the same functionality of the platforms(Uber, Facebook, AirBnB etc) but done more at a protocol level as part of a “Smart Contract”(More on that later).

Web 3.0 uses these technologies like blockchains to allow for data decentralization and create more transparency and security in the computing environments. By leveraging these types of technologies we start to address age old problems of things like:

1. Not having ownership of your data.
2. Automation of Workflow process: elimination of barriers and friction points that provide little to no function but have high cost.
3. Transparency in the transactional data and it’s meta-data(Data about data).
4. Provide data sovereignty and self sovereignty: True sovereignty implies owning and being able to control who profits from one’s time and information.

Web 3.0’s decentralized blockchain protocol will enable individuals to connect to an internet where they can own and be properly compensated for their time and data, eclipsing an exploitative and unjust web, where giant, centralized repositories are the only ones that own and profit from it.

Now users can?Read,?Write?and?OWN?their digital assets.

Electricity was used for over 50 years in telegraph messaging prior to the Chicago worlds fair. This “Light bulb” moment literally normalized electricity. Electricity was an important horizontal innovation that sparked massive amounts of inventions literally powered by it.

Blockchain too is a Horizontal innovation that will touch literally every workflow. It will provide the tooling and structure needed to move away from powerful platforms and more into a sematic web. One that will provide digital immutability and ownership back to data.