Web 1.0, 2.0 & 3.0 - A Three Part Act In Plain English

Prologue: You don’t have to spend a lot of time on Google before you end up with a browser full of long, technical definitions regarding each “version” of the web, including the assertion that there really isn’t an actual versioning tree at all. The long, technical definitions are certainly why I am still asked to define Web 2.0, which I am happy to try and do with the following caveat; I think you can only really understand Web 2.0 if you first define where Web 1.0 (the past) ends and where Web 3.0 (the future) begins…

Web 1.0: Most people generally intuit that Web 1.0 ended with the close of the twentieth century, was a lot like broadcast media and was, well… often “not pretty” from an aesthetic perspective. I generally don’t belabor the point that the simple invention of networking computers together is pretty amazing on its own. Instead, I think it’s more useful to build a context by telling the “story” of Web 1.0 as “a small group of people go out into the world and collect a few stories which they deliver to a larger group of people using a single, specific technology in order to create value, often in the form of money for themselves and in the form of knowledge for the rest.”

Web 2.0: I continue that context with the notion that we are living Web 2.0 in the present day where “the smaller group of people AND the larger group of people have learned to combine many different technologies to create spaces from which they compete to accumulate all of the world’s stories, deriving value, often in the form of attention, from their ability to hold that attention.” Often the question of “how” crops up at this point and I find it useful to paraphrase Tim O’Reilly’s 5 tenants of Web 2.0, which I thought was best articulated during his keynote at the Web 2.0 Berlin conference and expo:

• Users add value
• Value is data (video, audio, images, etc.) and data drives Web 2.0
• Data accrues on a platform (facebook) and a platform is made up of applications (chat, photo galleries, etc.)
• Applications can be adapted to access the platform from many devices (computer, phone, etc.)
• Devices are becoming more integrated into our lives and are changing our lives profoundly

Web 3.0: While that tends to make what Web 2.0 more or less “concrete,” I feel like it misses a larger point that Web 3.0 makes clear. To describe Web 3.0 I extend the context a bit further and tell this story; “technology is becoming so transparent that people are beginning to look beyond the technology to see patterns emerge in the stories they tell, and these patterns begin to reveal a greater meaning about who we are and why we do what we do.” The point, I believe, is that we are moving away from the singular pursuit of value (money, attention) from a commodity (information, tools) and moving towards the pursuit of meaning (what exactly are we doing here and why). I’ll write more about that in the future but feel free to debate it now…

Epilogue: The last point I like to make is that just because people talk about successive “versions” of the web it doesn’t mean that preceding versions no longer exist. Web 2.0 is made up of Web 1.0 technologies and Web 3.0 is emerging only because we have defined the boundaries of Web 2.0 — it is our perspective of the past, present and future that drives our desire to carve things up into versions or eras. The web, much like our lives, is an integrated, evolving phenomenon that is another experiment in a long, long line of experiments that we embark upon as a species to try and answer the fundamental questions we have yet to answer. Those answers are the real data — the version numbers are just “meta.”