The Steinhorn Stare

Title of the post got your attention, huh?

While I don’t particularly like this arbitrary labeling of web technologies and paradigms in terms of version numbers (Web 1.0, Web 2.0, etc), there an obvious emergence of themes throughout the evolution of the Internet, and I think that the Web will continue to evolve in thematic fashion. So, while I won’t go so far as to predict what Web 3.0 or Web 4.0 will look like from other people’s perspectives (and in fact, I would argue that we’re already into Web 3.0 and 4.0), I do have some opinions on the themes that have most recently begun to emerge.

But, before I jump into what I think the next “version” of the Web will look like, I wanted to clarify how I would portray the historical evolution of the Internet in terms of major themes.

Most people, when referring to Web 1.0, think about the evolution of browsers back in the 1990’s. But in actuality, the Internet was first created in the 1960’s, and to ignore the technical advances of the first 20 years of the Internet would be like ignoring the existence of vacuum tubes – sure you might not have ever used any hardware that relied on them, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t precipitate a revolution in computer technology that shapes our lives today.

The first 20 years of the Internet was about Communication. The U.S. government started ARPANET – the first large-scale packet-switched network – back in 1969, and its purpose was to send military information around the country. Until the late 1980’s, Internet communication was mainly asynchronous (email messaging and non-real-time file sharing). In the late 1980’s, public use of the infrastructure proliferated, and the first social aspects of the Internet emerged. College students were using rudimentary multi-user chat clients (BRC, IRC), online gaming in the form of multi-player role-playing games had emerged, and large groups of people were participating in online discussion boards and newsgroups.

If you had to attribute a version number to it, I’d consider these first 20 years of information sharing and small-scale communication to be Web 1.0.

Then, like all highly adopted technologies, the Internet hit a tipping point, and evolution turned to revolution. While the first 20 years of the Internet were all about communication, the next ten years of the Internet (the 90’s) were all about Presentation. Browsers were created, mark-up languages evolved, portable interpreted languages (Java) were again popularized, and over ten years the Web was transformed from monochrome and text to rich graphical presentation of useless information and epilepsy-inducing animated widgets… 

Again if I had to label it, I’d say these next 10 years of technical advancement in the presentation of data could be characterized as Web 2.0.

Then came the late 90’s, and a new theme emerged in the continued evolution of the web – Monetization. For the most part, monetization emerged in two key areas, commerce and advertising. Early online commerce was highly analogous to the offline world with generic storefronts and static inventory, and early advertising was likewise analogous to the offline world with campaigns targeted large segments of the consumer market that couldn’t be adequately tracked for performance or actual lead-generation. Over the next five years, online commerce evolved in terms of scale and personalization, and online advertising evolved in terms of targeting and performance tracking. Commerce and advertising are certainly not the end-all-be-all of monetization on the Web, but over the past five years, they have played a significant role in shaping how we use and perceive the Internet today.

Once again, if you need to assign a label, I’d refer to the first round of monetization on the web as Web 3.0.

Which brings us to today…and tomorrow… Where are the emerging trends? What is “Web 4.0” if you must use that type of terminology?

That I’ll explore in an upcoming post…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 7th, 2005 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.