- The future of the web is
Web 3.0 – withMicrosoft ,Facebook andApple , all interested in shaping it. - According to crypto investment firm Grayscale, the industry is a $1 trillion opportunity.
- However, the philosophy behind Web 3.0 is for developers to take back control of their content from these tech giants.
“The
Today’s Web 3.0 promises to be more reliable, decentralised — with control in the user’s hands — enables socialising for work and play through the metaverse, and makes it cheaper as well as easier to make payments. At Facebook’s developer conference this year, founder Mark Zuckerberg laid out his vision for Web 3.0 and the metaverse. He even changed the name of his company to ‘Meta’ to signal a new age of development. “I believe the metaverse is the next chapter for the internet,” he said in October.
To start with, let us differentiate between the ‘internet’ and the ‘worldwide web’. The Internet is the physical infrastructure of cables, satellites, Internet Service Provider (ISP) networks and routers, through which all data traffic passes. The web is one of the types of data traffic that flows across the Internet. It’s the highway you travel when browsing the internet, making a video call, surfing social media or sending data from your computer to the cloud.
The first iteration of the web, Web 1.0, is thirty years old. Think company home pages, curated website directories, static web pages and flash banner ads. Very few people were creating content and a large part of the population was only reading what they had to say. You have moved well past that stage, and are at the transition between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0.
As compared to Web 1.0, Web 2.0 brought in a lot more interactivity between people – think comments, blogs, wikis, social media, government websites for citizen services, streaming video, and so on. Although these services are accessible to everyone including those with small smartphone screens, they’re mostly hosted on centralised platforms.
This Achilles Heel left Web 2.0 susceptible to cyber-attacks, user data breaches, server outages and government censoring as seen with Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and the big tech giants of today.
The pandemic of 2020 accelerated every building block of Web 3.0. Starting from making it viable for large groups of people to hangout together online for long time periods — a social and workplace requirement — to the resulting large virtual economies of scale, aspects of Web 3.0 led many companies to accelerate their digital transformation plans.
However, the hunger for schooling and working from any physical location, also led to popularity of decentralised digital communities and virtual worlds that mesh with the real world, especially those which were previously unheard of from the blockchain space.
Looking forward to Web 3.0 has begun a scramble for both, identifying and defining the future of the web. During the era of Web 1.0, Netscape connected users to the online world. During 2.0, Facebook sparked a revolution by connecting people to online communities. Now, during the nascent stages of Web 3.0, platforms like Decentraland are creating community owned virtual worlds.
This year, Microsoft, Meta — Facebook’s new name, which many have speculated is Zuckerberg’s comical attempt to shed the bad press associated with the social network — and Apple have all announced their interest in the metaverse.
Rather than get disrupted by other players, these tech giants are attempting to disrupt themselves with the shift in how users spend their free time. Millennials and the generations that have come after, spend less time watching TV, preferring social media and video games instead. With convergence of social lives and gaming, the revenue of virtual gaming worlds is expected to grow to $400 billion in 2025, according to Ark Invest’s estimates.