A more ideological and less technological view.
(This was first published at jshamsul.com on 2024-07-23)
The year was 2006. After my final year for a Bachelor’s Degree in Information Technology at University Tenaga National, several students were given the chance to pitch their final year projects to a panel of tech industry experts and venture capitalists—people who, at that time, I thought were smarter than I was. They were from Cradle, MDEC, and other supposedly industry players.
During my presentation, I talked a lot about Web 2.0. A section of my presentation was dedicated to explaining what Web 2.0 is. I needed the panel of experts to be on the same page with me on what Web 2.0 means and to understand that this is a new paradigm shift. The way we use the web is going to change, which it already has.
Pre-Web 2.0 era, which people refer to as Web 1.0, the web was not really called that back then, similar to how the folks during “World War I” did not actually call it ‘World War I’; they just called it ‘The Great War’. The name ‘World War I’ was coined after the onset of ‘World War II’ to differentiate the two wars. Similarly, the web back then was just called ’the Web’ or ‘the World Wide Web’; the term ‘Web 1.0’ was coined after the onset of ‘Web 2.0’ to differentiate the two eras of the web.
So, what was the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 that required a different name? Many people have different exact interpretations of the two terms, but mostly they all have the same theme. ‘Web 1.0’ was the era of ‘read’ web, and ‘Web 2.0’ is the era of ‘read-write’ web.
In the era of Web 1.0, the majority of people got online to read information on the web. The bar for people to put up their content on the web was very high. In those days, you needed a server hosted and connected to the internet all the time. Only then, you could put your content online for people to read. For those that just wanted to read, it was easy; all they required, was a modem and they could start browsing. There was a time when it was not common for the large majority of web users to ‘upload’ stuff. It's hard to believe that was once how things were.
After a while, we had sites like GeoCities, Angelfire, and LiveJournal. People could write and host their images online without the need to own and operate a server that was connected to the internet 24/7. It was clear that this was the next evolution of the web. Social media websites, photo-sharing services, and other websites where web users could do more than just read started to pop up more and more. Web users could now read, write, share, and create on the web. People in the tech industry needed a catchy name for this new phenomenon, and the term Web 2.0 stuck.
The Ethos of Web 2.0
The ethos of Web 2.0 is a ‘user-generated content’ web, a more social web that promotes ease of collaboration and participation. Web 2.0 blurs the line between content creators and content consumers. Web 2.0 makes the bar to upload and share content so low that everyone with a browser could put something up online that has the potential to go viral globally. Web 2.0 democratised content, enabling everyone to participate, or so it seems.
What came with the onset of Web 2.0 was centralisation. Sure, we could now all share our ideas and thoughts, share our photos, share our videos, and become content creators, but our contents were all centralised to just a few titans of tech companies. Our contents were trapped in a digital walled garden. Web 2.0 did promise interoperability, but it was nothing but an empty promise. Meta (Facebook) and X (Twitter) used to offer APIs into their data; we used to be able to build things on top of them, but it's all gone now. RSS was supposed to standardise content platform interoperability, but so few nowadays support RSS.
There is a saying, “Give a man a fish, and he will not go hungry for a day. Teach a man how to fish, and he won't go hungry for the rest of his life.” Everyone now knows how to fish. We were given fishing rods and nets and were told to go to that stream, and we could get fish there. The fishing rods and the nets were given to us by the same company that owns the stream. The fishing rods and nets couldn’t be used over on a different stream owned by a competitor company. The fishing rods and nets were not interoperable; we couldn't bring them to another river stream. Unless we were VC-funded, we could not make our own river stream. Sure, we now know how to fish, but we are more dependent than ever.
The Promise of Web3
Murmurs of the next iteration of the web are spreading. The term Web3 was coined recently, and it comes with a set of promises. A promise to set us free from the shackles of centralised big tech of Web 2.0.
Web3 promises us control and ownership. Our data, content, digital assets, and online identities are ours to own and control. With that, Web3 also promises us interoperability. We should be able to take our data, content, digital assets, and online identities anywhere to any platform, or at the very least, access them on any platform. Imagine, someone on X (Twitter) could see what his friend posted on Facebook without the need to create another identity on Facebook.
Web3 promises us decentralisation. Everyone should be able to run their node and join a network without the need for permission from a central authority. Everyone is free to participate in the network. With this, Web3 also promises decentralisation in governance. Since no single entity owns the network, there needs to be some form of governance for it to sustain and grow, and a decentralised model is what Web3 promises to bring.
All these, as of today, are nothing but promises. I am not saying that they are empty promises, far from it. I know there are some projects that are building towards achieving these. All I’m saying is that we still have a long way to go. There are still many things to be built before we can really say that a new Web is here.