Understand The Transformations Of The Web

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

The World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW or W3, commonly known as the Web), is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia, and navigate between them via hyperlinks.

Webvolution: Framework to Understand the transformations of the Web

Since its beginning, the World Wide Web (WWW) has been rapidly evolving. One framework used to understand its development is the concept of "Webvolution", which divides the major transformations of the Web into three parts: Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. The term which gave rise to this framework was "Web 2.0", introduced in 2004 by O’Reilly  and CPM Media. Although there is chronological aspect to the concept of Webvolution (Web 1.0 occurs around 1994-2004, Web 2.0 has been evolving since 2004, and Web 3.0 is in its infancy today), this framework is not a continual model. This means that the features that compose Web 1.0 exist within Web 2.0, in the same way that features of Web 1.0 and 2.0 will be present in Web 3.0. In other words, the main purpose of "Webvolution" is not to describe the history of the WWW, but to explain paradigm shifts in its transformation.

On the Beginning of the WWW

Defining exactly when the WWW starts is difficult since it depends on what point in its development one decides to consider "the beginning". From a technological point of view, one can go as far as 1945, when "Vannevar Bush publishes an article on Atlantic Monthly describing a photo-electrical-mechanical device called a Memex for memory extension which could make and follow links between documents on a microfiche" (W3C Timeline). On the other hand, if one considers the WWW beginning, the moment when it first becomes available to the general public, 1991 still doesn’t break it. In that year Tim Berner Lee’s (creator of the WWW) paper on the WWW was only accepted as a poster session at the Hypertext 91 conference in San Antonio, Texas (W3C Timeline). The WWW finally became available to the general public in 1994 when traditional dial-up systems (CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy) started to provide access in the United States.

Web 1.0

Web 1.0 was an early stage of the conceptual evolution of the World Wide Web, centered around a top-down approach to the use of the web and its user interface. Socially, users could only view webpages but not contribute to the content of the webpages. According to Cormode, G. and Krishnamurthy, B. (2008): "content creators were few in Web 1.0 with the vast majority of users simply acting as consumers of content." Technically, Web 1.0 webpage's information is closed to external editing. Thus, information is not dynamic, being updated only by the webmaster. Economically, revenue generated from the web was made by concentrating on the most visited webpages, the head and software's cycle releases. Technologically, Web 1.0 concentrated on presenting, not creating so, that user-generated content was not available. The hyperlinks between webpages began with the release of the World Wide Web to the public in 1993, and described the Web before the "bursting of the dot-com bubble" in 2001. Even so, the terms web 1.0 and 2.0 were given birth together Web 2.0 capabilities were present in the days of Web 1.0. Since 2004, the term "Web 2.0" characterizes the changes to the social web, especially the current business models of sites on the World Wide Web.

The shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 can be seen as a result of technological refinements, which included such adaptations as "broadband, improved browsers, and AJAX, to the rise of Flash application platforms and the mass development of widgetization, such as Flickr and YouTube badges". As well as such adjustments to the Internet, the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 is a direct result of the change in the behavior of those who use the World Wide Web. Web 1.0 trends included worries over privacy concerns resulting in a one-way flow of information, through websites which contained "read-only" material. Now, during Web 2.0, the use of the Web can be characterized as the decentralization of website content, which is now generated from the "bottom-up" with many users being contributors and producers of information, as well as the traditional consumers.

Web 1.0 refers to the main features of the WWW during the first 10 years its existence (1994-2004). During this time websites where information centered. Users accessed the internet in search of centralized information, which was posted by a webmaster responsible for updating content. Nobody else had the power to modify content. The user experience was limited to catalogue searching and content reading. The limitations of Web 1.0 were influenced by the early development stage of both software and hardware technology. For example, creating web-pages required programming expertise since they could only be created using HTML code. On the hardware side, bandwidth was an average of 50k, and computers processing power was significantly lower than what it was at the beginning of the Web 2.0 era.

Web 2.0: Communication and collaboration

Beginning in 2002, new ideas for sharing and exchanging content ad hoc, such as Weblogs and RSS, rapidly gained acceptance on the Web. This new model for information exchange, primarily featuring DIY user-edited and generated websites, was coined Web 2.0.The Web 2.0 boom saw many new service-oriented startups catering to a new, democratized Web. Some believe it will be followed by the full realization of a Semantic Web.

Web 2.0 represents a revolutionary way of collecting and integrating online information and knowledge repositories. Several key elements characterizing Web 2.0 are:

Social web: participation and communication can link people located anywhere with similar interests, forming a social network. The content provided by web sites in the Web 1.0 era may only be read, whereas users may easily generate and publish content on Web 2.0 sites. Examples of non-bioinformatic sites leading the Web 2.0 transformation include YouTube, blogging sites and wikis. Furthermore, users may adopt the Really Simple Syndication technology, subscribing to customized content provided by others. Such customization enables data distribution and sharing with greater convenience, rapidity and efficiency. This increase in efficiency of communication alone can facilitate data integration. Likewise, in order to discover knowledge from rapidly accumulating biological data through collective intelligence, a social web is also needed for bioinformatics to connect people with similar research interests.

Software as a Service (SaaS): software may be provided as a web service that is always on, and always improving in reply to users’ latest needs. For instance, Google Documents, a service to create and share documents online, has successfully turned ‘Office Software’ into a web service that one may easily access through the browser instead of buying software, installing it and regularly upgrading it. ‘Release early, release often’ and ‘the perpetual beta’ are the motto for SaaS, and new features are added and updated frequently. For example, consider Gmail, offering free web-based email and archival services: it seems that a ‘Beta’ has been enclosed in the logo for years. The major advantage of SaaS is that it removes the need for local installation and for communication across diverse platforms each with their own operating language. SaaS provides up-to-date web services to facilitate communication and collaboration over the Web. In the wake of accumulating of biological data, numerous new bioinformatics software and tools are also needed that provide SaaS.

There is no clear cut  transition to Web 2.0. The Web slowly turns more interactive around the turn of the millennium. The Web evolves from a "passive" "read only" event to an "active" "read and write" "collaborative" experience. Web 2.0 is fundamentally about how user participation and collaboration has transformed and established the current shape of the web today.A critical development in the creation of an "architecture of participation" occurred in 2001 when Napster developed P2P technology. Napster "built its own network not by building a centralized song database, but by architecting a system in such a way that every downloader also became a server, and thus the network grew" (O´Reilly, What is Web 2.0). All that Napster provided was an instrument/place/context that permitted user to exchange content/data: music files. Social Networking Sites structure is fundamentally the same: they provide end users with a context in which to interact. On Ebay, users find a context where to make commercial transactions, on Youtube they find a place where to post videos, and on Flickr a place where to post pictures and create communities based on photography tastes.

A very interesting phenomena is the dynamic of the Web. 2.0 businesses mentioned above. The companies provide users with a service and users indirectly give value to this companies by providing content. The more content users provide the more attractive and valuable the site becomes. During Web 1.0, the value was situated in the sale of one-way information. Users would either buy access to the site or create value by generating traffic. In Web 2.0, the value lies in the content which users add into a Website. This content creates value for companies in two different ways: 1) the content attracts more users making the site more attractive, and as a result traffic is increased; and 2) the content itself represents very valuable data that the company can use for its own benefit. Google, for example, gives multiple services for free, yet it uses the information users provide through those services to compile invaluable data.

New software development technologies together with businesses´ new attitude towards the openness of programming codes (since they have realized that value lies not on selling software but on allowing users to potentialize their own platforms) have further increased the creative potential of programmers and end users. The release of API´s (Application Program Interface) by companies like Google, Craiglist, Amazon, and Flickr have permitted the creation of "mashups": websites that tap into and combine the data of these companies to create new sources of information. For example, YouLyrics combines Youtube and ChartLyrics so that someone can watch videos with lyrics at the same time, and 2RealEstate combines Ebay and Google Maps so that all the real estate auctions on Ebay can be portrayed on a map. The combination of data to express specific information is one of the first steps of the web in the process of becoming intelligent. The potential development of the Web´s intelligence is what today is coined as Web 3.0.

Mashups are an example of how the participation of internet users has led to a "harnessing of a collective intelligence" (O´Reilly, What is Web 2.0). Three other example of how a collective intelligence is generated in Web 2.0 have to be mentioned. The first example is Wikipedia, an impressive project to tap into the knowledge of all the internet users in the world, in order to create the most extensive encyclopedia ever. Another dimension of the collective intelligence generated in the web is created through the interactions and discussions of bloggers. Technologies like RSS (Real Simple Sindication) catalyze these interactions by allowing users to select and receive up to date information on their particular interests. During Web 1.0, the web was organized by a formal taxonomy. In Web 2.0, on the other hand, users order the web according to their own criteria by using tags (the technical term for this is "folksonomy"). In Delicious, users organize their bookmarks individually by attaching tags to them, and in Flickr users do the same with the pictures they post. Metadata tags not only permit users to order things according to their own criteria, they also provide a link to unite people within a community. Once people are able to connect personally then another dimension of intelligence arises.

Web 3.0 Evolution

Web 3.0 is all about personalization and the Semantic Web while integrating real-time data through different platforms. Semantic technology will create a meaningful format around human interaction online and human interests. This format will enable better online matchmaking and content distribution in addition to better control of online privacy through smarter distribution. Corning, a world leader in specialty glass and ceramics has created an awesome video that describes the future of technology. In this example, you will see the main platform is glass and how is personalized live data is being integrated everywhere you go.

The evolution of Web 3.0 has to do with the increasing popularity of mobile Internet devices and the merger of entertainment systems and the Web. The Mobile Web 3.0 has elements that build upon prior eras, but it also has several distinct and different elements from what has come before.

Limitations of HTML

Internet coding, starting in Web 1.0, used HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and was built with the sole purpose of ‘simplicity of use’ with a fixed set of tags. Hence, it had a lot of limitations and constraints under which the web-developers had to design. With the introduction of Web 2.0, many plug-ins have been introduced, but the struggle for a more permanent solution is still on. Some of the major problems encountered while working with HTML are broken links, fixed sets of tags, formatting restraints, and inefficient search results. Now, most search engines perform searches solely using the information displayed in the web page. This is to say that the syntax, relevance, and/or meaning of what is being searched is not taken into consideration. This leads to many results out of which some are relevant and some are not, and the user has to go through the pain of sifting through the results. Another problem that is faced by users nowadays is the fact that language translators do not provide accurate results. They tend to give a word-to-word translation instead of a context and content translation. This is a consequence of the fact that the translator is not able to understand what the user actually means to translate. This problem results from the fact that HTML does not support definition tags, which would allow a designer to define the category or context of a website.

In Web 1.0, Google achieved supernova momentum when it introduced its Cost-Per-Click ad model. With a dominatingly high quality search engine for users, Google gained share on search, and in effect knew what people were interested in. This was a break-through for advertisers in terms of measurability. Advertisers could escape the Mad Men world of spending on TV, print, OOH, and banner ads with their fuzzy efficacy and measurability. With Google, advertisers now could place ads in front of people searching on relevant terms. A huge step in terms of measurability, Google’s model had the added benefit of only charging when a user clicked on a specific ad. All combined to deliver a vastly more measurable and as such valuable approach to spending ad dollars.

Web 2.0 ushered in the social wave. Facebook now is showing ads of stuff we might like based on the interests we’ve indicated or based on referrals from friends. This embraces and extends much of the Google model, but provides potentially even more. Facebook knows what we like day to day (Graf Ice Skates, Breaking Bad, Crossfit for me), and what our friends like. Add to this the tremendously detailed demographic data that its users have willingly provided, and the opportunities for advertisers are pretty profound. While Facebook will continue to optimize its appraoch to ads, there should be little question that its current core business of ads is going to continue to grow.

With Mobile Web 3.0, the user experience opens the door for another level of innovation in advertising and promotion. Now technology services have the ability to leverage not just the social graph data from Facebook, but even more real-time / real-world information. Your current location, weather, traffic, local merchants other friends nearby, how often you’ve been to this specific store or location are available (or will be soon). And this in turn provides a whole new level of commerce opportunities for potential advertisers. Mobile brings advertisers and users closer to being able to close a transaction. It’s real-world commerce. Which leads to the question: Why pay for a click when you can get an actual customer? That’s the promise of mobile for advertisers, brands and merchants. The opportunity is huge: both in pure dollar size opportunity and for disruption. The internet advertising models of selling clicks to advertisers will need to evolve.

A few companies to watch in this new world are Waze, ShopKick and Foodspotting, to name just a few. Waze, the social mapping and GPS service, provides free turn-by-turn directions with real-time traffic information and routing to over 20m users. With users depending on Waze to help them find the fastest and least congested routes, Waze now shows offers for the cheapest gas prices along the way. Real value for users translates to real commerce for merchants.

ShopKick is a mobile app that gamifies retail shopping. Users who open ShopKick gain rewards for different tasks or quests they complete on ShopKick. What ShopKick is starting to show retailers is that ShopKick tend to spend more money when they’re in store, because of the interaction and engagement the ShopKick app can drive while the user is at the point of purchase. Again, real value for users leads to real commerce for merchants.

Therefore, Web 3.0 is super exciting.