What is Web 2.0 What was Web 1.0 and What will Web 3.0 be

Version numbers are a funny thing. To developers they begin as Alphas, followed by Betas; all pre 1.0 releases. These initial pre-release terms aim to organize the development workflow through various testing phases of the project at hand, in order to satisfy a final 1.0 public release; Also known as a Golden Beta.  To the general public, version numbers typically don’t appear until version 2 comes out. In other words, no one cares about a 1.0 release as a version, since there’s no prior version to compare it to. Take the Hummer for example, now at version 3, coin phrased the H3. The initial Hummer, now referred to as the H1, wasn’t marketed to the public as the H1 Hummer until Hummer H2 and H3 came out.

I didn’t know much of the Word Wide Web following it’s initial release in 1989 by the creator Tim Berners-Lee, who’s now the director of the World Wide Web Consortium. My first introduction was in 1993 learning how to take apart my Hyper Card projects at school and turning them into atrocious looking websites. The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), much like any other consortium aims at preaching and continuing to develop web standards across the World Wide Web in order to maintain some sort of stability. With the huge variety of websites and companies offering web services, Web 1.0 began. Yet no one considered it Web 1.0 since there was no prior version to compare it to.

Web 2.0 came about in 2004 It wasn’t a technical software patch that propagated down from our internet service providers onto our computers. instead, the term Web 2.0 meant the process in the way we utilize the World Wide Web. To me on the other hand, it was and still is the way websites are built and the purpose they serve to those interacting with them. The idea of an Open Source System is the main characteristic of Web 2.0 in my opinion. Wordpress, Joomla, various Ajax libraries, and many many more are all perfect examples of sets of code built by open communities and distributed freely. These projects aim at growing communities and further help the development of the project wether it be through plugins or visual templates created by designers and developers.

Web 3.0 in my opinion has already began several years ago with the social media concept. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter are all fun and exiting social media platforms but with a completely different business model in comparison to Open Source Systems. Again, I stress that this whole versioning of the World Wide Web is hypothetical; In my opinion there is no set time as to when one starts and the other ends. Social media websites are all about establishing themselves as the living room of your daily networking activities online. The use of  ’some’ of that database is freely available through APIs which developers use to build web applications that manipulate that data through various ways with user interactions.  Yet, the home base stays in tact with very little customization from the visitor. Integration of the data from that database onto personal and company websites is where Web 3.0 is heading in my opinion. What happens next? Well the same way operating systems fight for your loyalty, the same way search engines fought for your “bookmark me in your toolbar as your place to start your day in front of a computer” will be the same way these social media platforms fight for your living room experience online.

Several years ago, I believe it was with the introduction of Mac OS X by Apple, Steve Jobs described the personal computer as the “center of your living room”. Microsoft in turn focused on the television as being the “Hub of your daily activities”. Social Media platforms now are all about being in the know about what’s happening as it happens and before it happens. Will you run home, grab the remote and turn on the TV, grab your laptop out of bag in some trendy coffee house and relax, or will you be the type to wip out your mobile device (iPhone, Palm Pre, Google Android device) and be part of the news or even better, have the power to create it.