Comment by ok_dad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ok_dad | Hacker News Reader

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I think Web N isn't about the actual tech being used, it's about the way the tech is being used and how it interacts with the real world and our society. Web 1 was HTML informational web sites, maybe some chat rooms and games here and there but not much affect on the real world. Web 2 was/is the "web app" where you can transact various business online, and group into communities and stuff and which is well integrated into our lives. Web 3, I think, is currently being formed and I have no idea what it is, but whomever can figure that out will be the first nrillionaire or whatever. The tech itself is just all the same if/else statements in a different order.

It's interesting because, at the time of Web 2, it was not only the "social media" proposition the only one, but also AJAX as well as more Javascript-driven websites (with more interaction potential). It was also the time of widgets and iframes, where all kinds of interesting 3rd party integrations appeared, like the bookmarklets (remember Yahoo Pipes, netvibes, RSS?). Unfortunately, the seed of advertising pretty much killed the rest over time.

This exactly. And getting content from third party sites dynamically. The classic example was having a Google Maps thing on your site where you'd show your, or even yet another party's data on a map. There was increasing amounts of data becoming available, apis opening up, governments releasing data sets. Combining all of that into something interesting, that was the real promise of web 2.0.

And then everybody started using that to add trackers and push ads.

The advent of the smartphone and touchscreen is essentially the defining characteristic of Web 2.0 and we haven't really approached Web 3.0+ in any meaningful way, in my experience. However, I am not a computer architecture/hw guru, yet I still expect the future to be pleasantly surprising despite this, erm, rather unnecessarily difficult time.

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