Web 1.0 to 4.0 Evolution

Web 1.0 to 4.0 Evolution



The four generations of the Web so far cover Web 1, 2, 3 and 4. With Web 4.0 in transition and still developing, Web 5.0 is the great unknown and as such will be the next step in the evolution of the Web. I can say there will be some exciting new technology that we have not yet imagined. Perhaps the science fiction of today will become the reality of tomorrow. We may take part in participatory web action as holographic beings!
For now we will look at how the web has evolved from the first iteration to the most current.

Web 1.0

Web 1.0 is the first iteration of the Internet. Introduced by Tim Berners-Lee as a way to transfer information over the Internet, it is the read only version. This is the passive web of communication where people used the Internet to read and assimilate information. This is referred to as a web of cognition. This early version of the web allowed businesses to broadcast their information to prospective clients. It allowed for static intervention only and provided the public with a way to peruse the services and products offered by companies through their web sites. Communication was through email and file sharing was possible through applications like Napster and BitTorrent.
Some of the technologies developed during this stage of the Web include:
  • File and Web Servers
  • Content and Enterprise Portals
  • Search Engines (AltaVista, Yahoo!)
  • PIMS (Personal Information Managers)
  • E-mail (Yahoo!, Hotmail)
  • P2P File Sharing (Napster, BitTorrent)
  • Publish and Subscribe Technologies

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 allowed users to not only read content but to participate in social interaction. Dale Dougherty in 2004 referred to this as as a read-write web.It was known as a web of communication. Business could now build applications that utilized networking capability. T
Web 2.0 is also known as the participatory web, or read-write web. With reading as well as writing, the web  has two components which link to provide interactivity rather than passivity. Users could now interact with each other via video conferencing or chat boards and share their own content. This provided businesses with an even more dynamic way to target audiences and
Some of the key technologies developed during this stage of the Web include:
  • Blogs (Blogger)
  • Wikis (Wikipedia)
  • Social Bookmarking (del.icio.us)
  • Social Networks (Facebook, MySpace)
  • Instant Messaging (Yahoo!, Google Talk, AIM)
  • Mash-ups
  • Auction Web sites (eBay)
  • Professional Networking (Linked-in, Plaxo)

Web 3.0

Web 3.0 was the next iteration and provided a further improvement to include semantic technologies combined with social computing. Semantic web relates to the way computers talk to each other. It  is not limited to publishing data on the web; it is about making links to connect related data.
Searching in the Web 2.0 world is keyword based. You search for a word or phrase, such as “football,” and the search engine returns all content with “football” in it. Web 3.0 takes this searching to the next step. In the Web 3.0 world, searching for “football” would find documents with the word “football” in it. It would also find related results, such as football  Teams, professional sports and other information sources related to football. It uses semantic technology to locate all related fields
  • Ontologies (YAGO, DBPedia)
  • Semantic Searching
  • Thesauri and Taxonomies
  • Personal Intelligent Digital Assistants
  • Knowledge Bases

Web 4.0

Web 4.0 is in transition now and will be a read-write-execution-concurrency web with intelligent interactions. It may be known as the symbiotic web in which human mind and machines can interact in symbiosis. This could includmore powerful interfaces that could be controlled by the mind to react and decide what to do.
The most current iteration Web 4.0 implies that the web is moving toward using artificial intelligence to evolve as an intelligent web.

Some of the key technologies that are being developed during this stage of the Web include:
Examples of key technologies that will or are being developed include:
  • Semantic Social Networks (Twine)
  • Semantic E-mail (IBM Omnifind)
  • Context-Aware Games
  • Better Natural Language Processing
  • 3D web browser
Watch the interesting video on the Big Think web site

Ideas here sourced from  Evolution of the World Wide Web: From Web 1.0 to Web 4.0 in International Journal of Web & Semantic Technology (IJWestT) Vol.3, No.1, January 2012

After watching the video from Big Think how do you see the future of the web evolving? What do you think the next big idea will be and how will it change our world?
Readers of this blog will be very interested to see your comments on these questions.

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