The internet can either be a dusty cobweb of fear, or an avenue for a new world. I reminisce here on my internet experiences, while defining the three stages of web development. Ongoing issues are discussed, along with a possible future.

The harsh buzzes and squawks of a 56k dial-up modem filled my early teens, which mainly consisted of text-based gaming across a few local bulletin board services¹. Mrs. Palmer’s 7-th grade English class at White Mountain Junior High changed everything. We were required to only use resources found on the then-nascent public internet. That afternoon in the school library, learning WebCrawler, Altavista, and Windows 95’s Internet Explorer, turned me into Amerigo Vespucci discovering a new world. A treasure trove accessible in minutes — rather than a few hours I’d need to spend at the local library — convinced me of its power. As I went through high school, and then college, my internet use kept up with this “portal of information” paradigm — a static view of readable data popularized by Tim Berners-Lee as Web 1.0.

Yes, the first internet explorer, and yes, I am that old. No, I don’t wear bifocals, so don’t ask…but I probably should. (Image Source)

Right after the turn of the millennium, use of peer-to-peer exchanges (e.g. Napster) and newer email clients (e.g. SquirrelMail) harked back to those early BBS chatrooms, turning one-way windows into two-way doors. Portals of information became portals of sharing! I could now participate and interact with the data before me, a concept whose exemplar manifested by joining Facebook in 2006. Around that time (almost overnight), every website and blog developed its own comments section. This dynamic ability to feed back to the data we were seeing — our two-way doors — gave rise to a new form of Web 2.0.

So where are we, nearly thirteen years after Facebook opened its doors to all? Berners-Lee’s read-write view to the internet’s second incarnation has exploded into every available aspect: our social profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram; our entertainment on YouTube, NetFlix, and Hulu; our travel with AirBnB, Uber, and Lime; our shopping with Amazon, Ebay, and AliExpress. Even our food is affected with HelloFresh, GrubHub, and Peapod — my local supermarket has online orders and delivery! And everyone has the option to share their opinion for every product ever offered or service streamed. Internet-of-Things devices such vehicular sensors and FitBits introduce yet even more data…it just keeps growing — an estimated 33 zettabytes² of data is expected to swarm to 175 zettabytes by 2025, according to IDC last November.

Amongst all this data are in-between relationships — the data within the data, such as with whom we post pictures (“Tag Your Friends!”), websites we’ve frequently visited (“Clear Your Browser History!”), how often we post (“Take the 10 Year Challenge!”), and what we purchase or how often we comment (“Complete a One-Minute Survey!”). This vein of interconnectivity is currently mined by bot software, and it’s a full-on destroy-the-mountain strip operation. Data and its relationships are formatted into query and ontology languages, allowing machine-to-machine communication and code execution — code such as machine-learning algorithms that develop computer-based inference. All of this is taking place under the bonnet, with the goal of a more ergonomic and human-friendly experience to the internet. As examples consider having purchase suggestions based on your past history, asking Siri for the nearest restaurant, tablet handwriting conversion, and even extended reality HUD overlays. We are smack-dab in the middle of this stage, building the semantic read-write-execute view of Web 3.0. Since this is ongoing, I can only extrapolate from here out. So Alexa, please cue Ary Barroso’s Aquarela do Brasil…