Evolution of the Internet

A new word has been floating around lately and you might have stumbled across it, because it’s the newest model in web interaction; Web 3.0. The internet is undoubtedly the most significant technological development in human history, and even though it’s been around for 20 years, major changes are still being made to upgrade user experience. Simply put, Web 3.0 is the third generation of the internet, but what sets it apart from the rest is its upgraded intelligent interactions between users and devices. Will it change the way we interact with the web? Well, the answer is yes! It’s expected to be groundbreaking and will certainly make the internet more intelligent. 

Let’s take a deeper look into the evolution of the internet and how it started: 

– Believe it or not, there was a version of the internet that existed before social media and video streaming! The first introduction of the internet was Web 1.0, and this was a time before Google in the mid-to-late ‘90s. These websites were “read-only web,” meaning you were only allowed to search for information and read it. 

– Following the turn of the century, Web 2.0 evolved. It was significantly more interactive and collaborative than before. There were technical reasons for this, including the rapidly increasing bandwidth available to consumers and servers. It was the time that smartphones and mobile computing were introduced. Web 2.0 allowed users to create their own content and upload it to a website. It was the perfect place for marketing efforts, as its main aim was to make the internet more autonomous and make it as user accessible as possible. 

– Chances are you are already aware of the internet model Web 3.0, as it is the current, most advanced version yet. Here, intelligence is what defines Web 3.0 from the previous model. The fascinating aspect is that the internet learns what you like and plays on that. The website is learning from other users what your preferred choices can be and then use it to recommend to you that you may like. In essence, the website itself is learning and becoming more intelligent. 

So, what’s the difference between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0? 

The distinction between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0: Web 2.0 enabled users to post and share material directly on the website. Web 3.0 enables online applications and websites to receive information from the Internet and provide users with fresh information/data. It is essentially the interaction of software with other software. 

Another factor that left Web 2.0 a little unreliable was the amount of cybercrime that occurred as a result of the connections not being suitably authenticated. However, with the rise of digital IDs, two very important elements distinguished Web 3.0, those being the decline to the point of elimination of cybercrime, and individuals being able to manage and grant access to their personal data. 

Web 3.0 has four notable properties: 

• • Semantic Web: One of the major changes that internet now understands, is the semantic meaning conveyed by a sentence or word. The Semantic Web helps teach computers the meaning of data and develops artificial intelligence that can use this information. The central 

• idea is to create a spider web of knowledge on the internet which will help it understand the meaning of words in order to generate, share and connect content through searches and analysis. 
• • Artificial Intelligence: This allows your website to filter and present the best possible data to users. It is intelligent enough to know the difference between “good data” and “bad data” to give us the most reliable search. 
• • 3D Graphics: Web 3.0 will change the future of the Internet from a simple 2D web to a more realistic 3D cyber world. 3D design is widely used in Web 3.0 websites and services such as online gaming, e-commerce, and real estate. 
• • Ubiquitous: the development of smart phones and internet access have made it ubiquitous, meaning it exists everywhere at the same time. 

As everything in life has advantages and disadvantages, so does Web 3.0: 

Advantages of the Web 3.0: 

• • Increased information linking: Semantic web will help in the connectivity of online data. 
• • Efficient searching 
• • Better marketing. 
• • More efficient web browsing. 
• • Effective communication. 
• • Change human interaction. 

Disadvantages of Web 3.0: 

• • Less advanced devices will not be able to handle Web 3.0. 
• • Web 1.0 websites will seem that much more obsolete 
• • It can be very complicated for newcomers to understand. 

All in all, Web 3.0 is the new internet revolution, allowing greater use utility and will evidently bring groundbreaking innovation to our lives. While there is a lot of hype around Web 3.0, we still need some practical use-cases of it to truly understand the positive changes it can bring to our lives. While technology has impacted the present day in ways past generations may have never imagined, it seems with the increase of capabilities and access the internet brings us, life as we know it will drastically change yet again in the coming short while. Since the creation of the internet 20 years ago, we have surely seen some incredibly impressive progression, and the internet will continue to surprise us more and more in the future with technologies beyond human imagination. Speaking of when we should expect to identify Web 3.0 as up and running, just like Web 1.0 was not created on a specific date, most new technologies develop over time and slowly emerge. Maybe one day, we’ll wake up and find our browser doing useful things for us with a digital ID to interact intelligently. When that happens, we can then claim that Web 3.0 has been officially born.