The Internet has changed a lot since its (relatively) humble beginnings. Starting as a small information-sharing network, today it spans the globe and people can barely imagine life without it. In a lot of ways it hasn’t changed, it’s still just a network for information sharing, what has changed, however, is how we use and interact with it and what type of information we choose (or sometimes don’t choose) to share. We are now on the cusp of the next generation of internet usage – augmented reality – some would argue we’re already in it! But how did we get here? And what has really changed? Let’s reel it back and take a look at the three epochs of the web, and then see what lies in store for Web 3.0.
The Very Beginning: Web 1.0
In the very beginning, the internet was just a repository of information. Webpages came in the form of Wikipedia-like pages, forums, and sometimes personal blogs. Interaction was low and for the most part, it was just text on a screen. The use of animated images or even anything outside of plain text was often a novelty. Even the most professional of websites were little more than this. For some examples look no further than the violently 90s website Space Jam website, or try one of the oldest nerd-centric websites to ever take on the Star Wars vs Star Trek Debate, Star Destroyer.net.
Almost every website was like this. A lot of really cool and interesting information could be found on these and other websites, and forums in particular were a hub of community activity. But there were some major limitations. Dial-up internet was a big one. Websites were technically more than capable of hosting a lot more content, but with download speeds measured in the kilobytes per second – and with the internet using the same connection as your regular phone line – websites had to be minimalist, quick to load and quick to access. There was also a rather large difference in the culture around internet usage.
You’ll note that in our example websites there’s no visible comment section, and no way to directly respond. The vast majority of users were consumers of content, not contributors. Content was the sole domain of whoever hosted the website, with forums being one of the only options for more-or-less live interaction. Emails were the primary mode of personal communication, but eventually, other applications rose for quick, instantaneous communication. And that brings us to…
Where We Grew Up: Web 2.0
The early days of this were on MSN, a lightweight messenger service that worked fairly similar to today’s Facebook Messenger. Eventually, other services began to step up to offer social connections but the big fish in the pond was Myspace. This was a major precursor to Facebook and it offered a little bit of everything. A personal blog page where you could add your friend’s pages and it would play your favourite music whenever someone visited your wall.
It was an attempt to replace the forums of Web 1.0 with a vast, sprawling social network that everyone was engaged with. And it was a success! From 2005 to 2009, Myspace was the largest social networking site in the world. It was eventually bought out by News Corporation for $580 million (and a few years later it would be bought by Justin Timberlake) however this ‘buying out’ revealed the real shift between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.
Web 2.0 was a commodity. If Web 1.0 was simple websites run and populated largely by hobbyists and community groups, Web 2.0 was the product of massive corporations. The early days were the time of the browser wars, with various corporations trying to gain a literal virtual monopoly, and some succeeded. Google came to dominate many areas of the internet, becoming the default search engine, a corporate Facebook overtook the media landscape, eBay dominated the market and YouTube, soon to become a massive company, became the primary platform for online video content.
The internet was no longer just a bunch of friends coming together and showing the world their piece of the internet, now it was curated content, with the underlying matrix owned and run for a profit by online conglomerates. Many stores began to tentatively sell their products online, and then Amazon, originally just an online bookseller, began to take over the entire online market. With these corporate overlords came many downsides, including the spread of malicious and unmoderated content, mass confusion over legal access and culpability, and computer algorithms that continue to make massive decisions for us about what we see, what we hear, and what we can access. But the future may not be the domain of corporate monopolies forever…
Where We’re Going: Web 3.0
Web 3.0 is a term that has been coined to describe the evolution of Web usage and interaction that includes transforming the Web back into a database, and a lot of people – both start-ups and tech giants – are trying to put their vision of the future in the hands of modern users. There are a variety of proposals as to how this will work. Meta (Facebook’s parent company), for example, has been trying to promote the Metaverse.
Others see an internet of Virtual Reality using VR goggles or perhaps tinted glasses and augmented reality software – kinda like combining your phone, your glasses and Pokemon Go. Whereas others push for an internet built out of the same technology as crypto-currency – blockchains – allowing anonymity and access at the user’s discretion, and most of all personal control.
There are dozens of ideas about what the future will bring, and exactly what the future will look like is still being determined. Web Development in particular is getting a hard push, with the relationship and integration of diverse websites and the push for media diversity and branding being stronger than ever. The push to diversify the internet and bring the future to the present has never been stronger, but there’s still time for some new revolutionary ideas to form the groundwork of what 3.0 will look like.
