Internet, the network of networks connecting computers worldwide, emerged in 1969 and has since undergone numerous technological and infrastructural modifications to reach what it is today. The initial purpose of the internet as a means of sharing information has extended way beyond that over the years, and has become an essential part of our lives.
The introduction of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee has played a major role in transforming our lives in novel ways. The web, elaborated as the World Wide Web, is a collection of websites built on top of the internet. These websites contain information in the form of text pages, digital images, videos, audio etc., which users can fetch from anywhere in the world.
Invented in 1989, the WWW has evolved gradually from its initial static page state to the more interactive version we witness today. Today’s engaging and interactive web, the predominant tool used by billions to read, write and share information and interact with others worldwide, has undergone many phases of evolution since its inception. Let us see what these phases are, and how much the web has evolved since its birth.
Web 1.0
Web 1.0, the initial version of the World Wide Web was developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 which lasted until 2004. Usually referred to as the read-only web, the websites of this era were solely informational and encompassed merely static content. They lacked any interactive content or design components and were primarily connected via hyperlinks. Additionally, only text emails were allowed to be written and sent during those times, while images could not even be uploaded or attached.
Nevertheless, static pages hosted on web servers managed by ISPS or free web hosting providers were mostly personal pages, which were highly popular. Interestingly, users were charged for each page they read, including directories that allowed them to find specific information. Overall, Web 1.0 was a content delivery network (CDN) that allowed the display of information on websites where users passively consumed materials without having the option to leave reviews, comments or other types of feedback.
Web 2.0
Web 2.0, also known as the second generation of the web, is the prevalent web of our era that emerged in 2004 and is still thriving. It is considered the read-write web that facilitates user interaction, which is a massive improvement over the one-way communication that Web 1.0 allowed. It enables websites to produce user-generated content, enhancing usability and interoperability for end-users, thus, making it the participative social web it is.
Web 2.0’s social connectivity and interactivity have led to the development of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Discord, where users can upload content that other users can view and provide feedback on. All of this resulted in the Internet extending to mobile devices like iPhones and Androids, leading to the dominance of apps like WhatsApp, Instagram, Uber and Paytm.
As the use cases of Web 2.0 increased from mere a mode of communication and information gathering to e-commerce and more, the number of users also grew to billions, parallelly boosting the creation of user-generated content. As a result, Web 2.0 became “web as a platform”, on which software applications began to be built.
Web 3.0
Comprehended as the next generation of the web, Web 3.0 is the executable web or read-write-execute version of the web. It is also known as semantic web and is an extension of the World Wide Web that uses standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It aims to make the Internet smarter by handling information with human-like intelligence using artificial intelligence systems.
Tim Berners-Lee coined the term Semantic Web, which refers to a version of the web that can connect everything at the data level. He stated that with the emergence of the semantic web, “the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The “intelligent agents” people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”
In the present-day internet, there are information silos. For instance, the information you upload on LinkedIn will not be automatically updated on Facebook or Twitter because they are not linked. Berners-Lee aimed to connect all the information by linking web pages and making them interoperable so that no one ever needed to upload their information separately on different online platforms.
