The Difference Between Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0

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We all hear the term “web 2.0″ being used hundreds of times a week. It’s all over the Internet and it pervades modern technical conversation to the point of being cliché. But what does “2.0″ really mean? What came before it? And what’s coming next? Here are some basics.

Web 1.0 This is the first iteration. It wasn’t actually called web 1.0, of course; it was just “the web”, or “the Internet”. You don’t call something version 1 when you aren’t anticipating a second version. This version was (and still is)…

A system of interlinked, hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a Web browser, a user views Web pages that may contain text, images, and other multimedia and navigates between them using hyperlinks.

Web 2.0 Interestingly enough, Web 2.0 doesn’t truly correspond to a change in technology. While AJAX is commonly associated with Web 2.0 functionality, the difference is actually in how web 2.0 applications are used, not in how they are implemented. Web 2.0 is…

A perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which facilitate collaboration and sharing between users.

Web 3.0 This is the current holy grail — the semantic web. The semantic web represents a shift from documents to data, meaning that data will be presented to humans and computers alike that can be manipulated in various ways. Most importantly, however, there will be meaningful links connecting these various sets of data.

The semantic web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a form that can be read and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily.^[1] It derives from W3C director Sir Tim Berners-Lee‘s vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.

In other words, the semantic web links information together in a way that is both useful and automatic rather than manual and disjointed. It’s a collection of data resources that are interconnected and speak the same language.

Using the semantic web will be similar to asking a personal assistant to help you accomplish something. You might say, “Find me all bilingual Porsche dealers within 200 miles that are open on Sunday, and add their sales staff contact information to my address book. Also, let me know if any of their employees have published contacts within 2 degrees of separation from me.”

This will be possible because all that information (business type, language proficiencies, location, contact information, etc.) will be available through the company’s Internet presence. And most importantly, this information will be easily processed and manipulated by any semantically-aware software agent. That’s web 3.0..:

– Quoted text is from Wikipedia