Before I deep dive into, I just want to say that there is not some internet encyclopaedia that's verified by the institute of global technology that has a strict defination of what web 3.0 is. So instead I am going to give you a rough defination of what the internet says, what web 1.0 is, what a lot of people are saying web 2.0 is and then I will explain this new phenomenon that a lot of people are calling web 3.0
Web 1.0
An initial overview of what the internet was. Between the years of 1991 and 2004 the internet was mostly a bunch of static pages meaning that whenever you loaded them, they just show some stuff and that was it some called it read only.
There wasn't any logging in or interacting with posts or viewing analytics. Most of the early internet wasn't even profitable by adds. It was just like one big Wikipedia all hyperlinked together.
Now ofcourse with time we slowly made improvements and things like flash and javascript added many new features. However, during this time the users of the internet were consumers they went to the internet to consume information.
Next we have,
Web 2.0
From around 2004 until now during this time the web evolved a lot but one of the biggest changes was the interactivity of the internet. This meant that not only did we get information from pages but the web pages started getting information from us. As we viewed Facebook and YouTube and performed google searches these centralised companies started collecting data about us. So that they could serve us better content which in turn would make us stay on their websites longer. This meant more money for them but eventually they realised they could package up all the data they had collected on us and sell it to advertisers.
Web 2.0 is the age of targeted advertising and the lack of privacy for its users. Now to be fair we willingly gave up this privacy too to the companies like Facebook and Twitter. In web 2.0 me and you could both view Facebook.com and see two very different news feeds because the page depended on who was viewing it. Which is an important note for a difference in web 3.0. That I will talk about in a minute. The content on your feed is the company sorting data by information that you know that you gave them like, likes and how much you watched a video. But if you look at the adds that they show you that is sorting data by information you didn't know you gave them. When you went to eat burger last night they knew that, when you dropped your kids off at school everyday at 8AM except for sundays they knew that.
Machine learning started showing a guy some parenting adds because they knew he was going to be a father before he did. If it wasn't machine learning it was probably because his girlfriend used their public IP address to do a search on her symptoms, and machine learning algorithms probably already know when she was ovulating. Anyways whatever the case is how they predicted this. One centralised company controlling all of this data whether we want to or not is scary.
Next up,
Web 3.0
Web 3.0 is the next evolution of the internet probably utilizing blockchain technology and the tools of decentralization. In web 2.0 you were the product as you were browsing social networks but in web 3.0 some believe that you will be the owner of your content. The stuff that you post online. Now this is kind of true so if you want a post to stay up it will stay up but if you want to take it down down it will down. In web 3.0 you can control that because as we all know usually when something is on the internet it's always on the internet.
To expand on this your post couldn't get taken down because your post wouldn't just be on one of face servers. It would theoretically be on thousands of computers around the world ensuring that the blockchain social network you are on is not attack or censored.
In web 3.0 experts say that we will reach the point of the internet where every company is ran a decentralized group called a DAO which stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. However, DAOs means that there are no CEOs or president to impress. Those with the most tokens to get vote on how the company changes not limited by a government or some family tradition.
In web 3.0 there will be no censorship of social network like Facebook or Twitter. One controlling authority can not shut it down..
Lastly, one of the biggest thing in web 3.0 is that your digital identity is not 100% connected to your world identity. This means I can view pages, download things, make purchases and any other activity on the internet without being tracked to the real me.
Reality Of Web 3.0
What web 3.0 really means for us is that in the next decade you might be able to buy Amazon gift cards using Metamask and pay with $NEAR or that you could anonymously leave a like on one of your friends posts using one of your hidden wallets.
It's not going to be a bunch of life changing stuff all at once. It will likely be a series of ideas that grow together until centralised companies like Facebook and Google are disassembled by legislature while decentralised unregulated DAOs grow to replace them.
How Near helps web 3 adoption?
Near Protocol helps the adoption of web 3.0 where it supports projects for increasing decentralization on the internet. At the same time Near Protocol offered some grants which a lot of them have to do with supporting and using the Near Blockchain. So it seems to me the Near Team used web 3.0 name as a brand to push their own agenda. Like Facebook is a company while web 2.0 is an idea. The same way that Near is a blockchain and web 3.0 is an idea. One doesn't own the other.
At the same time Near raised the $150 million to accelerate the adoption of web 3 technologies. The team announced that the fund would be used to develop regional hubs and raised awareness for blockchain and decentralized tech.
According to the announcement, the funding will be used to help Billions of people learn and use blockchain. With this, project building on Near Blockchain will have the opportunity to connect with new audiance.