The internet is a wonderful place. Who knew the sheer amount of stuff that you do simply by connecting two computers together and giving them a way to communicate to each other. But as cool as the internet was, it was the web of data on top of it all that gave rise to the explosive growth and the technology we see today. My grandma does not care that she is using TCP/IP and HTTP to connect to different servers that feed her web pages on her client side machine. She just wants to see what her friends and family are up to Facebook.
Web 1.0: Connected Pages
Tim Berners-Lee made the internet interesting by creating the World Wide Web in 1989. This guy built the specs for HTTP, HTML, and URIs. If you don't know what those are, that is perfectly fine. Most people don't. You simply need to know is that they are very important in the modern internet landscape. Hell, the post you wrote a couple of hours ago was converted to HTML. You just designed a webpage with the help of Markdown. But I'll stop using these technical terms and talk in English.
Once upon a time, the internet was composed of only static pages with links that connected to other pages. Those links were a big deal. They are what made the web, the web. Suddenly you could take a web page and connect with every other web page in the entire world if that web page was on a server connected to the internet.
Challenge:
If you don't think that is a very big deal, just try going to YouTube and try to find videos just by using the search bar provided by your browser. Don't click on any links.
Web 2.0: The Social Web
Web pages were nice, but the internet in the early 90's simply served the reader content. This paradigm would shift going into the 2000's through the creation of a more social internet where users could perform changes on web pages and those changes would be stored.
The most revolutionary thing to come out of this era of the internet was the social network. For the first time you could post content of yourself online and share with people across the globe. While Web 1.0 focused on connecting you to the internet, the social web allowed you to express yourself on the internet and connect with others. While there was not a lot of huge innovations technology wise, the innovation was how the technology was used. Sure the first phase of the internet popularized the use of the technology, but this second phase made it a part of our daily lives.
Challenge:
If you don't think this is a big deal, stop using social media for 3 days. Not so easy.
Web 3.0: The Semantic Web
You might be asking yourself what the semantic web is. Well, it was what Web 3.0 was supposed to be. Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and internet god himself, described the concept in 2006. So what is it and why haven't we heard about it yet?
The idea of the semantic web is to create a web of data. To put it into more technical terms, the idea was to turn the web into a distributed database of information that different machines could read. HTML pages don't really support this, but they imagined a technology stack on top of the web that allowed you to make the connections that were so useful in Web 1.0 and have them connected in a way that machines and computers could build relationships and derive information from these connected pages.
That in itself is a pretty ambitious vision. Why is this useful? For one, you could query the internet. Now search engines do this, but in a very limited way. They serve web pages, not the information itself. To illustrate this point, let's say you wanted to know the GDP of the Top 10 countries that use Dogecoin. Google doesn't give us a very good answer:
With the semantic web, we should be able to build the relationships using that distributed information and build a list of the Top 10 countries that use Dogecoin and their respective GDPs.
Unfortunately for the Semantic Web, it never really caught on. You can play around with a primitive version of the semantic web here, but the vision for the technology was never really realized in a way that truly impacted and revolutionized the way that we fundamentally use the internet.
The primitive version of the semantic web uses tags and relationships that connect the tags to allow the web to be queried, but the system is limited in scope and requires the use of querying language called SPARQL (pronounced sparkle). Just imagine how easy and fun SQL is and then multiply the pain and suffering by 10. Perhaps that was the reason it never caught on.
Anyways, that is the semantic web for you. The Web 3.0 that never really caught on. The Web 3.0 that everyone forgot about. Now we have blockchains where large amounts of data are copied to verify that data so we don't have to trust anyone because we are paranoid. Well, maybe one day the semantic web will catch on and AIs will be able to quickly analyze the internet and conquer us all by optimizing content so well that we all become internet addicts. Or maybe not.