The World Wide Web is a global information medium that users can access via computers connected to the Internet. The World Wide Web enabled the spread of information over the Internet through an easy-to-use and flexible format.
The very first ideas about the web or Web1 came from Tim Berners-Lee. Working at CERN around 1989 - 1993 he developed the first web server, the first web browser and a document formatting protocol, called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Websites for the general public began to emerge in 1993 - 1994. In this early stage websites were like printed pages in a book - after being made the websites stayed the same all the time. One could only read the information, much like looking at a storybook that never changes its pictures or words.
As the Web grew in the mid-1990s, web directories and primitive search engines were created to index web pages and allow people to find things. Web or online shopping began to emerge with the launch of Amazon's shopping site by Jeff Bezos in 1995 and eBay by Pierre Omidyar the same year. Over the next few years, billions of dollars were raised to fund thousands of startups having presence mainly online and operating via a website.
The Web1 grew rapidly and new technologies made it easier to create websites that worked more dynamically. This new era also brought into existence modern web searching, social networking, blogging and video sharing. The video-sharing website YouTube launched the idea of user-generated content. Big companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and many others helped to build the new web that everyone started to use daily. Wikipedia's user-edited content quickly displaced the professionally-written Microsoft Encarta.This new media-rich model for information exchange, featuring user-generated and user-edited websites was dubbed Web2, which is generally considered to have begun around 2004 and continues to the current day.
Web3 is a new development of the World Wide Web which incorporates ideas inspired by blockchain technologies. The focus areas are primarily related to shared ownership and governance, financial assets and financial transactions using electronic tokens as well as the Web3 identity allowing people to identify, authenticate themselves without the risk of revealing unnecessary personal and private information. Web3 is a relatively new perspective being actively discussed, developed and re-imagined.
Lastly, there is also an idea of what might come next after Web3 - some people even talk about a future Web4, where everyone's daily online experiences could become even more smart, intelligent and personalized. Exploring these ideas can be like embarking on an adventure, discovering how our digital world might grow and change with every new step of technological evolvement.