Distinguishing characteristics of Web 1.0, 2.0 & 3.0

The Internet is very much alive and kicking. 

The first generation of Internet sites primarily gave information but with the rise of sites like Facebook and Amazon the web has become increasingly interective. On this Web 2.0 it’s mostly the user produced the content. 

Without contributors there would be no Facebook, and without the people who post information on Wikipedia and the clips on YouTube there would be no interaction on these sites. Meanwhile, most of the people have become familiar with Web 2.0. Blogging (which appeals to language teachers), tagging, social networking and social bookmarking have paved the way to a next step in the development of the web - the step to the intelligent and omnipresent Web 3.0. 

Web 3.0 is not totally different from the web we know now. It is in many respects a continuation of existing techniques. Think of the so-called recommender systems, that make a personal approach by a website possible, Amazon has cleverly used this system for a long time now, by offering their clients, products that other people with the same interest bought before them, and on last.fm you can listen online to music, that caters to your personal wishes. Web technologies like RSS, Ajax and XML started coming up. Web 3.0 is the today's era.

Simply speaking, the Internet is a web, full of appliances that communicate with each other by exchanging information, and every day it becomes more and more comfortable.