Its little surprising that analysts at large aren’t pronouncing it yet .
So Web1 was the advent of the internet(wwb) as we know it . It heralded us into client-server at a worldwide scale . Everything is web-something website/webservice and so on. Browsers were the prime representative. Request-response or search/type was the paradigm.Active/Dynamic content was the currency.
Web 2 was the advent of content networks on the web. It heralded us into a network of content providers . Everything is a social-network something. Contact/Connections and the resultant network onto something were the prime representative. Feed/subscribe, scroll was the paradigm. Post and React was the currency.
Web3 is now the advent of Large Language models. It heralded us into an AI model as a window into the information. Everything is “ask me” something. Chat Windows are the prime representative. Generative Assistant is the paradigm. Questions/Answers, Detailing/Summaries, Ideate/review i.e humanization of the interaction is the currency (Anthromorpization of Internet).
ps: It also plays out accordingly if you study the programming frameworks of the era. The langchain tribe of frameworks has exactly recreated the primitives of the web/J2EE era. ChatGPT has replaced dot com as the representative term 🙂 .
Just to be fair to blockchain guys, it didn’t redefine the basic nature of human interaction with information systems. Analysts hurried to coin the buzzword for what was a different technology implementation of the web 2 style networked interaction model.