What did: web 5 do?
As a software developer I never really loved to hear about the web 3 space because when I read through docs & articles on it, it seemed as though using it would be adding more work to my already stretched work life as a developer, I mean, why would I ordinarily want to build & learn about something that's a whole lot different from the way I'd normally interact with APIs or build apps while building for web 2, it was just a whole lot for me, so whenever I saw anything online about web 3 I'd usually just scroll past it.
While scrolling through X, I stumbled upon an article on web 5 from tbd, my first reaction was - "Is this another decentralized AI or something? :)". Taking a deeper dive into that article, I found out it was a way to do web 3 the web 2 way, I got really excited and interested, such that I signed up for a hackathon by tbd to build great experiences and have fun with this new cool kid on the block :).
This is not supposed to be a very lengthy article by the way, as I am just starting to get my hands dirty with this technology, and also am sure there's nothing new I'd be telling you that you may not have seen from other wonderful articles out there, and if you haven't seen any one, please check out the tbd website, and if you are a developer, definitely read the sdk, blogs and ask the wonderful AI assistant on tbd's web page about the questions you have on web 5. Link below:
https://developer.tbd.website/docs/
So lets discuss, remember when you open an ecommerce app to search for a product you want to buy, you input your demographic info, possibly click on a product to purchase and then you open an entirely different app from the ecommerce app and you see targeted ads based on the information you just gave the ecommerce app?, this can be annoying and very uncomfortable for some users. Web 5 helps limit this violation of data privacy through storing your data on your decentralized web nodes making you responsible for the permissions you can give to these apps. So you are at the forefront of determining what an app can access and what it can't.
Over the course of a decade its been known that hackers have targeted end user data to extract financial, health, and personal information to sell on the dark web and for other criminal acts. With web 5 and decentralization, developers & end users can limit the ability of hackers gaining access to end user information since no central database for storing these information are available for hackers to compromise. The most recent occurrence of end user health records being breached occurred at the Indian council of medical research where end users' personal data were exfiltrated from the ICMR's COVID testing database and sold on the dark web. Implementing web 5 features of decentralized web nodes, decentralized identity and verifiable credentials would have drastically helped the Indian government mitigate against the loss of very crucial end user health information.
Lastly, I want to discuss on one very important use case of web 5, and this is web 5's ability to make my life easier as a developer. Every developer values the need for development tools and technology that increases their productivity, and I can say that with the advent of web 5 and having to let the user take ownership of their data, it limits the headaches developers have, as developers would no longer have to manage & secure multiple databases storing end user information or bother about cloud database expenses as well as database setup and configuration, especially for simple demo apps. In my opinion, I think this is the second best thing I have experienced since Steve Jobs did a demo of the first iPhone :)
So dear reader, I hope I have been able to convince you and not to confuse you on why web 5 would be the next big thing in tech and in the world generally.
For terminologies that are unclear, please visit the tbd website to learn more. Link below: