Evolution of the Web and the Internet

In the last few decades, computers have made our life easier, and especially after the Internet came into existence, mass communication improved drastically. After the Internet became so popular, we were able to browse the internet for knowledge through websites and browsers. That's when the term web came into existence. The internet we are using today is the World Wide Web and it is currently in its third version.

I used to wonder why blockchain is called web 3 and what was web 1 and 2 all about. I did some reading and understood this concept. I wanted to share the information in this article explaining each version of the web.

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Web 1

This was the first every internet we had. Internet was very costly and was used for limited functionalities. When the internet came into existence, people were able to get some data from the internet. It was called the World Wide Web where it primarily acted as a knowledge base and people were able to grab that knowledge from the World Wide Web with the help of the Internet. Those were the days when computers did not even reach some countries. But as the Internet got popular, technology enthusiasts started exploring the world of computers and the capability to use that as a communication medium with the help of the Internet.

It was mostly like people will try to find information from the internet using the web protocol but they will not be able to send anything back. It was mostly a single-way communication and not used for interaction purposes. But that was a great starting point for everything.

Web 2

When people already thought about a communication medium, web 2 was already born. Innovations were made in such a way that people can interact and communicate with each other effectively. Socializing was one of the best use cases of Web 2. The browsers were enhanced so much that the information request and response were pretty fast. It started with simple email communication that happened like two-way communication and later it evolved to social media platforms and so many creative stuff. People were able to upload their contents to the internet using facilities provided by many service providers.

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With web 2 anybody can connect to the internet with their server and both send data as well as accept data. When more visitors were visiting a particular website, the person hosting that website and keeping it live used to earn money too in the form of ads and other income. There was also too much censorship and centralization there. The website owners get to decide what should be displayed and what should not be displayed. In a way, it was good for controlling the content that was being created but it happened to remove the freedom of speech from the users.

Another biggest drawback of web 2 was the fact that when a user is on the internet, users were monitored and their preferences were collected as the data and their privacy was affected. Though we have lots of pros as well as cons in web 2, it was quite popular for these many years until innovations happened around blockchain technology.

Web 3

It was a great transformation from Web 2 to Web 3 where this technology brings lots of advantages. The first primary fact is that the network is decentralized and everyone gets their freedom of speech. There is no censorship and the web interfaces created in web 3 can decide which content they want to show and which content they want to hide. But the beauty is that if we want to see the hidden content, there is always another means through which the content can be seen.

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Web 3 technology has advantages not only for the content creators but for many companies and people who would like to stay around the decentralized world and for those who want to create metaverse applications and games as well. If someone would like to stay anonymous, they can truly stay anonymous. If we need basic control on the abuse of content creation privileges, we can implement it as a smart contract so that any web 3 created from that will have that implemented on the blockchain level.

We are seeing only a few use cases right now for Web 3 or the places where we go and read give us only a few examples of the capabilities of Web 3.0. But, we can technically have so many things and explore so many options that were a problem in web 2. I'm not going to say that web 3 has no defects but I can say for sure that web 3 is definitely better than web 2 with enormous opportunities.

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Posted with STEMGeeks