The web now has version numbers. About three years ago, amid continued hand-wringing over the dot-com bust or crash of 2001, Dale Dougherty dreamed up something called Web 2.0, and the idea soon took on a life of its own. In the beginning, it was little more than a rallying cry, a belief that the Internet would rise again. But it has become so strong that it succeeded in challenging the traditional (mainstream) media at least in the West. As the Web 2.0 is on way to percolate in India, the bloggers are already abuzz with talk of the Web’s next generation, Web 3.0.

To many, Web 3.0 is something called the Semantic Web, a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the (first) World Wide Web. In essence, the Semantic Web is a place where machines can read webpages much as we humans read them, a place where search engines and software agents can better troll the Net and find what we are looking for.

But some are sceptical about whether the Semantic Web will actually take hold. They point to other technologies capable of reinventing the online world as we know it, from 3D virtual worlds to Web-connected bathroom mirrors. Web 3.0 could mean many things, and every single one is a breathtaking proposition.

In fact Web 1.0 refers to the state of the World Wide Web and any website design style used before the advent of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. It is the general term that has been created to describe the Web before the ‘bursting of the dot-com bubble’ in 2001, which is seen by many as a turning point for the Internet.

Terry Flew in his 3rd Edition of New Media described what he believed to characterise the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. He says: “Move from personal websites to blogs and blog site aggregation, from publishing to participation, from web content as the outcome of large up-front investment to an ongoing and interactive process, and from content management systems to links based on tagging.”

Flew believed it to be the above factors that form the basic change in trends that resulted in the onset of the Web 2.0 craze. The shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 can be seen as a result of technological refinements, which included such adaptations as broadband, improved browsers, and Ajax, to the rise of Flash application platforms and the mass development of wigetization, such as Flickr and YouTube badges.

Web 1.0 trends included worries over privacy concerns resulting in a one-way flow of information, through websites which contained ‘read-only’ material. Widespread computer illiteracy and slow Internet connections added to the restrictions of the Internet, which characterised Web 1.0. Now, during Web 2.0, the use of the Web can be characterised as the decentralisation of website content, which is now generated from the ‘bottom-up’, with many users being contributors and producers of information, as well as the traditional consumers.

Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and applications, such as social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies. Tim O’Reilly described Web 2.0 as the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Tim Berners-Lee has questioned whether one can use the term in any meaningful way, since many of the technological components of Web 2.0 have existed since the early days of the Web.

Social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter continue to build populations surpassing those of many countries, the last of the Web 2.0 holdouts remain proud to be freewheeling free agents.

“I receive emails from friends and family requesting to join these networks almost daily. At first I did feel pressured to join, but I quickly got over that. I now reject every invitation to join and I don’t feel bad about it,” said a social worker in the US.

According to a March report from research firm Nielsen, two-thirds of the planet’s Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites.

Across the world, activity in “member communities” accounts for one in every 11 minutes spent online, the report said. In the United Kingdom, the average is one in every six minutes. In Brazil, it’s one of every four minutes.

Ki Mae Heussner says in abcnews, “The holdouts aren’t the only ones wrestling with the constant connectedness of a Web 2.0 world. Though it may pain the social media elite to hear it, some of the most connected among them admit that they sometimes near the verge of exhaustion.”

“I have this feeling that people are hitting that breaking point. There are too many choices, too many invitations,” said Dan Tynan, a technology journalist. Recently, he said he’s started to feel a little burnt out himself. “When I go on Facebook I feel like I’m at a cocktail party with everyone I’ve ever met in my life,” Tynan said. “But you can’t stay at a cocktail party doing that forever.”