The concise definition of Web 1.0,Web 2.0 and Web 3.0

t seems that everyone has their own idea of what Web 2.0 means.Thatis one of the pitfalls to using a single buzzword to define everythingyou see on the internet. I have heard people describing nearly everynew website as being Web 2.0 as if it was describing the launch date ofa site. The term ironically is the most popular category on ResourcefulIdiot. In leu of this, I am going to finally give you the definition ofWeb 2.0 and the principles that define it. In order to do that however,I need to start from the beginning with Web 1.0.

You can group each of the “Web x.x” as a different movement when itcomes to internet usage. Web 1.0 is the movement that took place duringthe beginning of the internet.

Think AOL, Geocities, and Netscape.

Back then the primary use of the internet was taking print media andposting it online. Web 1.0 saw books, news, music and everything elsebeing moved into a digital format. This movement is still going on andwill probably never stop. This is because as new data becomes availableit needs to be made available online, but the majority of the communityhas shifted focus toward data integration since there is not muchinnovation remaining in posting data online.
Now that brings us to Web 2.0. Many think that this is the currentmovement of the internet, and in some ways you are correct. After allthis data was posted online with the Web 1.0 movement, the onlinecommunity began to look for ways to share all of this data. The mainquestion that drove this movement, “How can I take this data and shareit with other people?” Since this question was asked, sites have poppedup all over the internet trying to answer this question with differentapproaches. One of the most adopted solutions involves the idea ofsocial networking.

Facebook is a popular Web 2.0 site utilizing social networking as a solution

All of these sites, like Facebook, use the concept of a socialnetworking to create a community. Each community member is responsiblefor contributing information to the rest of the users. Even thoughsocial networking is the most popular approach, another prominentapproach is the development and utilization of web services. I wrote anarticle a few weeks ago about different web services and their technologies (REST and SOAP),and I mentioned that the majority of sites you visit have a web servicerunning in the background. These services allow you to integrate databetween sites through API’s (Application Programming Interface) such asyou see on Flickr and Amazon. RSS/Atom feeds are also products of the Web 2.0 movement. This movement is still very much alive and being actively addressed.
Now to look into the upcoming movements, Web 3.0. It is difficult todefine what Web 3.0 will be as you cannot define something that has yetto occur on a large scale. The best way I can define what we will seewith this movement is the integration of data on the internet. Now thatthe data is online thanks to Web 1.0 and sites can share data throughAPI’s and social networks (Web 2.0), the next obvious direction is todo something with this massive amount of data we have available. Acommon way of describing this is the use of internet as a platform.With Web 3.0 applications we will see the data being integrated andapplying it into innovative ways that were never possible before.Imagine taking things from Amazon, integrating it with data from Googleand then building a site that would define your shopping experiencebased on a combination of Google Trends and New Products. This is justa random (possibly horrible) example of what Web 3.0 applications willharness. An illustration would be to draw nodes to represent all thesites on the internet and then draw a new node. Draw lines from allthose existing nodes into the one you just created. The consumption andpresentation of the data is what Web 3.0 will potentially be.
The definitions of Web x.x terms is highly debatable. Even whenwriting this, I was told that technology is what defines Web 2.0. Theuse of Javascript and AJAX is the “essence” of Web 2.0. However, thesetechnologies have been around since Web 1.0 so obviously this isincorrect. The technologies that have been developed during thesephases are simply there to help answer the question in a more accurateway. To prove my point let’s look at history. The guillotine did notdefine the Enlightenment movement back in the 1700s, the guillotine wasdeveloped in response to the questions the Enlightenmentmovement sought answers for (in this case, “Humane death”).