Meet the Metaverse
Web3, a new decentralised vision of the internet, and a new all-immersive virtual world are said to be heading our way. But are they just overhyped pipe dreams? And is a decentralised internet really such a good idea? Scott Guthrie finds out.
This morning I answered a clutch of work emails, scrolled through a couple of WhatsApp groups, tweeted a link to the blog post I wrote last night and checked that my joint bank account had sufficient funds to pay this month’s mortgage. All of these services are operated by private companies. Could a decentralised web, one where I had a stake in how these platforms were run, how they stored and shared my data and where I was incentivised to publish content, be the future of the internet? This is the vision of Web3.
Loosely dated from around 1990-2004, the phenomenon known as ‘Web1’ was a read-only internet. We were passive content consumers reading webpages held on static corporate websites. With Web2, dating from 2005-present, the ‘read-only’ internet became the ‘read-write’ internet. And these days, the social web enables us to interact and to collaborate with ease.