I am sorry, but I am confused.

I am reading and hearing about “Web 3”, but I am not sure if I understand what it is all about. It is quite possible that I missed some information.

So, to what I understand:

1. Web 1 seems to correspond to the first incarnation of the “WWW”, from the first years to the first e-commerce platforms (up to approx 2004)
2. Web 2 seems to correspond to what we currently know as “WWW”, based on dynamic pages and services, or “Web as a platform” where most services are centralised (eg. Cloud) and/or users are also producers of contents (social media etc.)
3. Web 3 is not here yet, but should be arriving soon and should be a “decentralised online ecosystem based on blockchain” (see Wikipedia) and should incorporate also some features envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee in his 1999 proposal of a “Semantic Web” (or Web 3.0, just to add to the confusion) which should be a web of data that can be processed by machines (that is to make Internet data machine-readable).

And 2021 should have been the year of the real beginning of Web 3, with crypto-currencies, NFTs and a general adoption of blockchain decentralised services. But opinions on this are quite diverging: from extremely optimistic to “marketing buzzword”.

I’ve tried to think about it and from the little I understand I see at least two points of view: as persons and companies. As personal use of WWW I do not think that much will change, still there will be services to use online, Apps to install (and update, but no pain please) and companies that will deliver all that (at a price or with other business models). From the company point of view, the only thing that comes to my mind is a parallel with the IT Out-sourcing / In-sourcing cycle: technologies and business models change, and approaches follow.

Still it is not really clear to me what Web 3 actually is or should be.