Re: Naming Clash: The W3C Web 3.0 Stack and "Web3"

On 7/21/23 5:27 PM, Daniel Appelquist wrote:
> +1
>
> Dan
>
> ------- Original Message -------
> On Friday, July 21st, 2023 at 21:47, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> 
> wrote:
>
>> Fwiw the TAG don’t systematically monitor this email list and haven’t 
>> for years (unless that changed recently). Github is the way to their 
>> attention.
>>
>> In passing…
>>
>> W3C has never really used “Web 3.0” (or 2.0) for its work. The whole 
>> reason “2.0” resonated rhetorically 20 years ago was because we all 
>> know you couldn’t really version the web like that. And the only 
>> reason people tried to claim “web 3.0” was the success of Tim 
>> O’Reilly’s original account of a cluster of trends he labelled “2.0”. 
>> It was more like an era - the era of “the dot com crash hasn’t killed 
>> this idea”. Given the attention it got, of course there was going to 
>> be an unseemly scramble to number, name and describe what came next. 
>> But it was never particularly serious. We should just stop acting 
>> like “web 3.0” means anything very specific or technical. The 
>> O’Reilly “web 2.0” was a good (because parodoxical) name for the 
>> “recovery from the dotcom crash” moment, not a spec. And “RDF as the 
>> third version of the web” was always laughable; it is one tool 
>> amongst many, and we all knew it.
>>
>> Dan
>
Hi Dan,

There’s more to this story than Tim O’Reilly’s coining of the “Web 2.0” 
term, as the Wikipedia history outlines [1].

Web 2.0, as a Wikipedia topic and cultural meme (largely propelled 
through Tim’s promotional efforts), quickly became synonymous with how 
companies like Google—and others that followed—scaled hosted solutions 
into dominant business models (Tim even said this verbatim during a Tag 
session that I attended, alongside TimBL, in Banff circa 2007). For 
those of us who viewed the Web’s evolution through a broader lens—where 
identity authenticity was key to a truly read-write Web—this forced a 
pivot toward the “Web 3.0” label.

It wasn’t a superficial reaction to what Tim O’Reilly was championing. 
It was a deliberate effort to safeguard the Semantic Web Project’s 
vision, where unambiguous identity is ground zero. Many of us recognized 
the structural flaws and societal risks baked into Web 2.0 even at the time.

I believe history will ultimately be kind to those who tried to avert 
what Web 2.0 has become, as its societal impact becomes clearer by the 
day—even as we now watch the same playbook being used to push the Web3 
moniker, further obscuring what Web 3.0 was truly meant to deliver.

Links:

[1] 
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Web_2.0&action=history&dir=prev

-- 
Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
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