Evolution of the Web

Hello everyone, welcome back to my blog. Today we will be discussing the evolution of web as a whole. How did this network of information start? Who used it? Who produced content for it? Who consumed said content? How many people were on either side of that transaction? How did the numbers change? What were the different eras of "Web" and what was the nature of its use? I will try to answer all these questions in this entry. Let's dive in.

At the beginning there was the Personal Computers Era. Personal computers started to replace big folders and binders in the corporate landscape. It was cleaner, easier to create and store and more importantly easier to maintain. However this brought about a sharing problem. People were able to give a bunch of paper to others to share the information on them but now computers were fixed to their location due to how big and heavy they were. This brought about the "intranet": a network of computers within a company that can share folders among them. Intranet later evolved into the internet where each company and eventually each country was interconnected to one another. 

Then came Web 1.0 which is also called read only web. Published content by already established outlets such as news channels were dominating the web back then and user generated content was practically non-existent. There weren't many websites available and in those websites, users mostly consumed content instead of creating content.

After this point came Web 2.0 where social media, blogging, wikis and similar outlets begun to be used more often. Internet was not just about consuming anymore, it also meant that you can have an online presence, an identity within the collective intelligence of the web. The number of websites greately increased and so did the number of users. 

Later, came Web 3.0 which was the era of livestreaming. This era is marked with synchronus creation and consumption of content. Thanks to outlets like twitch and youtube people could share their screen and stream the content they create as they are creating it. It is not only limited to what you can do on a computer, same technology allows users to attach a camera to their stream and video log themselves in real time. 

Now, we live in the age of Web 4.0 with intelligent personal assistants, artificial intelligence and machine learning. After this point schedules are created by computers for us and widgets and apps are created for our needs as we mention them to our friends. Algorythmic analysis of our search engine gives better direction to marketing and development endeavours. I think internet will only get better after this point.