The WWW Evolution: Web1.0, Web2.0, Web3.0, Web4.0 and....

Historian's Facts

WWW or the World Wide Web, was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and it was him who coined the term "World Wide Web".

In October 1994, Tim Berners-Lee also founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT/LCS) in collaboration with CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), where the Web originated, with support from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the European Commission.

Basics of Web.0 - Did you know?

Let's refresh our basics so we have the baseline of what are these all Web.0 versions and what a person can comprehend on a high-level:

• Web 1.0 :: Read Only Web
• Web 2.0 :: Social Web
• Web 3.0 :: Semantic Web
• Web 4.0 :: Symbiotic Web
• Web 5.0 :: Self-aware?

Understanding the WWW Timeline, let's start from the Future...

Web 4.0 :: Symbiotic Web

Also known as the “Symbiotic Web”, I believe this is a revolutionary thought in process and most intriguing to my thoughts as Web 4.0 will become reality soon! Expanding the idea, once the metadata are organized by Web 3.0, human and machines can interact with mind-controlled interfaces. This will bring in the Emotional Intelligence that I have been looking forward to getting embedded in our human lives, marking the front year evolution of mankind as an advanced intelligent species in our dimension.

• Web 4.0 will be the time where the OS will reside in the Cloud and web participation would be a necessity.
• The Symbiotic Web will have its backbone via the IoT (Internet of things) devices which will play a vital role in the connectivity, processing and decision making.
• We will have multiple choices for getting the data: desktops, laptops, netbooks, mobile phones, tablets and even iTV.

Imagine a world where all devices are inter-connected in your real world as well as in your virtual world and that too real-time!

According to Nils Muller, CEO of TrendOne, a German Microtrend Analysis firm, Web 4.0 is as an "always-on" world where humans can "self-upgrade" through technology extensions.

Web 3.0 :: Semantic Web

Thanks to Web2.0, it's now hard to control all the 'incomplete' information that circulates online and people getting influenced as well as making decisions based on it. So, before we discuss Web3.0, it's important to understand that Web3.0 is different from Web3, and I know some may disagree but again this is my personal opinion.

• From the facts that we have, in 2006, Berners-Lee described the Semantic Web as a component of Web 3.0, which is different from the meaning of Web3 in blockchain contexts. 
• The term "Web3" was coined by Polkadot founder and Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood in 2014, referring to a "decentralized online ecosystem based on blockchain."

According to the W3C, "The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries.”

• This is an efficient way to represent data on Web, or as a database that is globally linked, in a manner understandable by machines, to the content of documents on the Web. 
• Web 3.0 desires to decrease human tasks/decisions and leave them to machines by providing machine-readable contents on the web. 
• It has added machine readability feature to web documents which did not exist in the web 1.0 and web 2.0.
• Semantic technologies represent meaning using ontologies and provide reasoning through the relationships, rules, logic, and conditions represented in those ontologies. 

Example: If someone is searching for the flight timings of a particular country, a semantic search will return flight times to this country as well as the details of the weather conditions at the time of visit, maps, city guides, and the other useful information such as hotel, restaurant and car reservations 

Web 2.0 :: Social Web / Wisdom Web

An era of user-generated content, Social Media, Blogging, Video-sharing, Web Apps, VOIP (VoiceOverIP), E-Mails, Instant Messages, Social Bookmarking, Podcasting, Picture-sharing, Mashups and Folksonomies, and all kinds of online interactivity became possible with Web2.0.

• Focused on the ability for people to collaborate and share information online thus also referred as “Social Web”. 
• Interestingly, Web 2.0 is also called as the "Wisdom Web", "People-Centric Web", "Participative Web", and read/write Web that has opened doors of bi-directional information between content providers and viewers. 

Most significant impact of Web 2.0 to the mankind has been the social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga, Google, Flickr, Foursquare, and YouTube, and others.

Web 1.0 :: Read Only!

It was the conceptual evolution of the World Wide Web which could be considered the "Read-Only Web".

• People went from offline to online to search and purchase products or services, but they could not interact and contribute to the content creation.
• It was a read-only Internet which was a source of information and a research guide. 

The Final Perspective

* Feel free to add your comments or share thoughts to contribute to this article and spread the knowledge together.

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