My Social Web 3.0

Oh so many people have tried to define web 3.0, essentially connecting the dots from web 1.0 and the 'current' era of web 2.0. So I thought I'd toss my two cents in the wishing well. The way you define web 3.0 has to do with the way you define the previous webs. The web 1.0 is fairly uncontroversial, if only because it was what we had in the beginning. There are many ways to describe it, but we all know what we had more or less. We were surfers surfing web pages. From one page to the next, hyperlink to hyperlink.

Web 2.0 is essentially what happened after the dot com bust at the turn of the Millennium. Some call it the era of interactive websites etc. I side with the people who call it the era of communities. The notion of community became prevalent. Everybody wants to build a community, from open source projects to multinationals, everybody is trying to connect with the users and crowd source whatever they can. User generated content, viral advertising, reputation systems, cloud computing are all children of web 2.0.

So for me, web 3.0 is the era when communities will claim independence and take over the web. In web 1.0 we all came for the hubs. The web pages , the articles, the directories. In web 2.0 we connected to each other through these hubs. Web 3.0 is when we ditch the intermediaries and connect to one another without the need for assistance. While they are building their data centers in the clouds, we can bypass them and talk to each other. Web 3.0 is when we build our decentralised, true web.

Just to add a bit of a disclaimer, my definition is not what I believe will happen, it is not a prophecy. It is a dream and a wish. I do believe we will reach it at some point, but cannot claim I know this will happen any time soon.