Recently, I came across a post on Reddit by an anonymous user explaining about how he was told by one of his clients about Web 3.0. He seemed to be extremely excited about it particularly because he said it might change the Internet as it is today, forever.

But you might be thinking, what exactly is Web 3.0?

For many people the Internet itself is a mystery. And now there's a third version of it? Where were the other two? And why is this version in particular the supposed game-changer?

Web 1.0

Web 1.0 refers to the first stage of the World Wide Web. There were not many people who were using the Internet during this time and people who were using it, did not know what it would turn into. Personal web pages were common, consisting mainly of static pages hosted on ISP-run web servers, or on free web hosting services.

Fun fact! In Web 1.0 ads were not a thing and they were actually banned.

Four design essentials of a Web 1.0 site include

• Static pages.
• Content is served from the server’s file-system.
• Pages built using Server Side Includes or Common Gateway Interface (CGI).
• Frames and Tables used to position and align the elements on a page.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 refers to world wide website which highlight user-generated content, usability and interoperability for end users. An interaction and collaboration with each other is allowed by Web 2.0 in a social media dialogue as creator of user-generated content in a virtual community.

Well okay. This all makes sense and we see it happening in today's world.

What's 3.0 going to give us or allow us to do?

Web 3.0 is focused on decentralizing the web. Yes. That's right. Blockchain is going to make the web decentralized and the data that is generated or produced for the web or on the web is not going to be owned by any company or institution (coughfacebookcough).

The data and content generated by users are going to be solely their property and they can use it in any way they want, on their terms and conditions. Talk about ownership!

The problem users are facing right now is that they don't know what data is collected about them or who is collecting them or where they're getting it from. One might assume that online behaviour of a user is monitored and stored and later sold to advertisers for effective targeting of their ads to maximize conversions and make profits.

But that's just the tip of the ice-berg. That same data can be used against us. Our data is not the thing that is being sold. It's our attention. Large tech companies use this data to create a model of our online behaviour and tweak the content one sees to make them stay on their platforms for longer periods of time. In fact, there is a Netflix documentary called The Social Dilemma in which ex-Facebook employees describe how the company recruits "Attention Engineers" and the responsibilities of such a person is to find ways to make a user stay on the platform for as long as possible, using the data they have collected.

So Web 3.0 is supposed to be good right?

For the people using the web, yes. For the companies providing services like social media, emails, videos, search engines, etc., to the people on the web, not really.

Companies will not be able to collect, map, extract and compute the data in order to do the things they are currently doing because every piece of data that is produced by the user will get recorded on something called as a "universal ledger" where all information about who owns what piece of data on the web and who uses that piece of data will be available for everyone to see.

That's essentially what blockchain is in a nutshell.

So, there's still not much known about this yet, or at least not to the general public. But do you think this would be a game-changer and will it change the way we use the web forever?

Let me know in the comments and share this with people who you think this might interest them.