The Internet was born many years ago, but it was very different from what we conceive today as the Web. The evolution in this field has been constant, impressive and has brought us to what we know today as Web3.
History of the web
It is important to make a quick review of the history of the web, to understand how we got to this moment in history.
1993
In this year the World Wide Web is created. Because connection technologies and browsers were not very powerful, this first version of the web was mostly informational and unidirectional.
1995
Brendan Eich creates the first version of JavaScript. This is how the web evolves from simple text, images and links, and becomes a world of more interactivity.
1995 - 2001
Strong competition between Netscape and Internet Explorer (Microsoft's) browsers takes place, forming an increasingly interactive web.
2005
The term AJAX Asynchronous JavaScript And XML is coined. AJAX revolutionized the exchange of data between the browser and the server, allowing interaction without the need to reload the entire page.
This was how there was a change in the entire web and an exponential growth of web pages with behaviors never seen before.
Functionalities after 2005
AJAX enabled the development of rich interfaces and produced a change in interaction.
The new functionalities led to the web becoming an interactive platform that allows users to:
- Create content
- Read
- Write information
- Give feedback to the platform
- Trade
- Grow your business and personal brands
Web2
With new technologies and ways of interaction, websites started to bring more users and Web2 came to the world. Thanks to that there was an exponential growth for big companies. For example:
Amazon
It started as a book store and became the most powerful e-commerce platform.
YouTube
It went from having simple videos to having influencers who earn billions of dollars by impacting the lives of people around the world.
Facebook
It was a platform for having a university profile and viewing photographs and became an entire ecosystem of information, news and commerce.
Drawbacks of Web 2
Although interactivity and globalization allowed many people to have opportunities to emerge and create businesses on the Internet, there are some problems with Web 2, for example:
Power is concentrated in a few hands
Corporations, who own the platforms, rent them to users, but users don't really have a say in the decision making or the rules of the game of what they use every day.
Companies take advantage of user data
All the time people are generating an infinite amount of data and sharing it on the web. By doing this, companies take this valuable information and are able to analyze consumer behavior, political trends, etc. This translates into issues of:
- Privacy
- Manipulation
- Insecurity
Tell us in the comments what other problems you currently see on Web2.
And if you want to see an example of a problem that can be solved with Web3, check the Decentralization class.
Contribution created with contributions from: Juan Pablo Solano Rodríguez and Zea Cuervo.
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