Web 3.0 The next generation of the Internet

A long and short history

The World Wide Web can look back on more than 30 years of existence. Repeatedly declared dead, the network reinvents itself again and again. After its numerous metamorphoses, the WWW came back stronger and stronger. Meanwhile, it is impossible to imagine the lives of billions of users without the Web as one of the most important technical innovations in the history of mankind. But where is the journey going, has its development already come to an end?

Web 1.0: the beginning

Three major milestones in the evolution of the Web are also labeled with version numbers 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. To understand what direction the technology might take in the future, it is first important to know the most important features of the previous and current versions.

Web 1.0 refers to a network of static websites that existed from 1989 to about 2003. The user was a passive consumer who was offered few possibilities for interaction. With some justification, one could say: the web monologued. The monologue only became a dialogue when social networks entered the scene.

The launch of facemash.com, the predecessor of Facebook, is generally regarded as the beginning of Web 2.0. In the 1990s, websites such as Classmates.com and sixdegrees.com already possessed a number of features of today's social media channels, interactivity and self-created content, to name just two of the most important.

Web 2.0: Everyone is a player on the WWW stage

Web 2.0 enabled everyone (with an Internet connection) to actively network with others and disseminate their own content. This development started around 2003/2004 and continues to this day. Content management systems such as WordPress, which allowed anyone to publish blog texts without programming skills, changed journalism.

Fast data lines and compressed video formats allow platforms like YouTube or Vimeo to become major providers of moving images. Facebook, Instagram or TikTok offer billions of users the basis for self-promotion and influence today. It was these social media providers, in combination with Google's search engine, that provided a strong alternative to traditional marketing in the form of personalized advertising.?

The dark side of Web 2.0

However, the new possibilities did not only bring positive developments. The multimillion-dollar use of social media channels brought hate speech to the Internet. This was followed by a series of more or less sensible laws that tried to stem this tide. The platforms, especially Facebook, were further criticized when it was revealed that media analysts such as Cambridge Analytica used social networks to target voters. Increasingly precise tracking and targeting of Internet users made user behavior increasingly transparent to advertising companies.

?The next step: Web 3.0

The transitions from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 were smooth, and so is the transformation from Web 2.0 to version 3.0. Meanwhile, a process is underway leading to the semantic web, on the one hand, and the decentralized web, on the other.

Broadly speaking, semantics is the study of the meaning of words and sentences. At present, search engines only understand search terms incompletely, let alone the meaning of entire sentences.

A number of technologies aim to change this situation, to make the mass of information understandable to machines and accessible to users in an orderly fashion. A simple example: you enter a question with a coherent sentence into your terminal and receive a meaningful answer. For this, it is important that the algorithm can recognize multiple meanings of words from the context. Google's search engine already calls itself a "semantic search engine" because it places the user's intention at the center of the search result, i.e. it tries to understand the meaning of the query.?

The second defining characteristic of Web 3.0 will be the decentralized orientation of the network. Today, the web is dominated by a few large companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook or Amazon. In the future, peer-to-peer architecture and blockchain as a core technology will create a network of computers with equal rights.?

At the same time, this development reinforces both the democratization of the network and access to information as well as data protection. The blockchain represents the basis for data exchange and offers most applications in an automated way. In addition, there is the further anonymization of payment transactions, also initialed by blockchain and cryptocurrencies. These steps give users control and sovereignty over their data.