Warning: I will mention web3 in this post.
To reduce the obvious, vendors, reporters, and enthusiasts often exaggerate when it comes to new data technology like Web 3.
I am using the term web3 in a hopeful way with an extended definition in mind, one that is unfamiliar to most people. When I mention Web 3, it would be a good idea to put aside correlations with cryptocurrency, blockchain and the endless speculative-driven hype cycle for a moment.
Think instead about the benefits of an open, borderless web – a shared infrastructure that is intricately connected and scalable automatically with fewer hassles, more built-in features, and no inherently silent.
A website where you can publish on demand and simultaneously control access – in a built-in way – to all the data you publish.
The web that supports serendipitous discovery and rapid community building in many new and different ways.
One large, less centralized peer-to-peer graph allows descriptive organizations and co-organizations to organically form, evolve, integrate, grow, and reform.
Unlike the “metaverse” (which won’t be real until transnational, flexible, and interacting organizations become the norm), the technology for this big graph is here and now. Most people have not learned how to use it for their best benefit yet, if they have learned to use it at all.
Big infographic for innovation
Let’s avoid the hype and avoid discussing “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations” or DAOs (neither decentralized nor autonomous). Instead, think of dynamic, machine-assisted, interhuman organizations—what IDC called innovation mapping five years ago.
What I found compelling about IDC’s concept of the innovation graph when first introduced to it is that with data knowledge and maturity comes a new form of resilience – the ability for people and organizations to skate along the edges into various valuable industrial nodes that they didn’t have. You haven’t been able to continue or capture before.
For example, companies can become data providers when they are not. Consultants can also use their relationships across industry boundaries to help clients transcend these boundaries.
The most data-knowledge attack and the most mature on all fronts now, in the same way that Amazon started to grab grounds in healthcare, logistics, and cloud services jointly ten or fifteen years ago.
Web3 as an evolution of P2P networks + shared file systems
P2P data networks such as the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) are key to the feasibility of upgrading to peer-to-peer networks. Unlike the W3C web standard, IPFS offers unique logically derived identifiers and a content address.
Two examples of the benefits of content identifiers (CIDs) and content titles on their own:
Eliminate duplication. The CID generated with IPFS provides a digital fingerprint that can guarantee authenticity and uniqueness. This simplifies the process of removing duplicate data by creating a single data instance with an immutable CID. And since there is only one copy of each resource, authentication is much simpler.
Since there is no duplication, IPFS reduces storage space consumed by data backups and archives. This creates a huge advantage for any organization that archives their data.”
– From the IPFS hardware optimization provider silicon mechanics If you are
Eliminate link rot. Thanks to content manipulation, link rot may become a thing of the past. A content processing system like web3.storage is similar to a key value based DNS, with one important difference: you can no longer choose keys. Instead, keys are derived directly from the contents of file using an algorithm that always generates the same key for the same content.”
– From IPFS Provider web.store’s If you are
Keep in mind that file systems in general are gaining capacity. The implication is that more developers are not using databases as much as they used to; They use file systems instead.
In this sense, they can avoid the disadvantages of databases (such as inherent silos, centralization, and feature bloating). They can use a large graph with the built-in file system instead. IPFS in this sense provides a single automated file system for all.
All these free capabilities are now available on a different kind of open web. While ease of use isn’t often among these capabilities yet, a critical mass of a good enough user experience should be realized over the next few years.
Legacy: The Gift That Keeps Giving (When We Want It)
With the benefits of expanding IPFS and the growing ecosystem around it, collaboration can expand at a faster and more dynamic rate than it used to be. What could be holding us back? It’s what market analysts call the proven base.
The base installed in the software indicates technical debts and inertia on a gigantic interconnected scale. It’s Wasteland Software, all the code is one purpose and a little different enough to not interoperate, all the architecture that still gets in the way and continues to appear in cloud services today. It is all the methodologies that our education system continues to re-teach, the regional silos in issue editions of relational database textbooks that students still have to rent, the paucity of edu coursework about the commonalities of content, data and knowledge graphs that should all be treated as one… ..
It’s the packaged software modules that adopted microservices a decade or more ago and were reborn as….a cloud monolith, with cloud software stacks, SaaS, redundant data proliferation, and all the other modern dilemmas.
The biggest challenge facing innovators today is to maintain their integrity and continue to advance despite temptations. It’s easy to give up and take bigger paychecks in old markets that have been renamed as new. The true Web 3 of the One Big Graph without all the inhibitions of office is here to take it – if we are to fight hard enough for it.