What is web 4.0?

Everything evolves. Including the Internet

Or did you think it had always been the same?

Since its origins, back in the 1960s, the network has been enriched and transformed to become what it is today. But this process has not stopped, it could even be said to be accelerating.

In a few years’ time, the Internet will bear little resemblance to what it is today.

In fact, some relevant voices such as Eric Schmidt, CEO of Alphabet, have already been announcing for years that the Internet will “disappear”, but not because it will cease to exist, but because it will be so integrated into our lives and our environment that we will not even notice it.

What is Web 4.0. and how will it transform the Internet?

Where is the network evolving to? In this article we are going to see what the next step in the Internet’s evolution, known as Web 4.0, will be like, what its near future will be and how it has been evolving since its beginnings.

To reach Web 4.0, the Internet has had to evolve over time, going, as you can imagine, through 3 previous phases that have meant significant changes in its operation and in what it offered to users.

Evolution of the web before 4.0

The three previous phases that allow us to talk about web4 are the following:

1. Web 1.0

It is the one that developed during the 20th century. The network in its most basic state. In Web 1.0 users (also known as “surfers”, a term nowadays in disuse) were limited to consuming static content, without having any possibility of adding new material on their own. Thus, in Web 1.0 everything is in the hands of the webmaster.

2. Web 2.0

It is known as web 2.0 to the one developed around the first decade of this century. It was an important evolution, becoming a social phenomenon in which millions of users exchange ideas and content in forums, blogs or social networks. While Web 1.0 went through a relatively slow social adoption process, Web 2.0 burst onto the scene with great force, reaching hundreds of millions of users worldwide. With Web 2.0, the Internet became a global phenomenon.

3. Web 3.0

Web 3 is the one we use today, known as the “semantic web”. It is a “smarter” web, which is particularly evident in search engines. Tools and algorithms are closer to understanding human natural language. In addition, another very significant change is in the mobility of its use. Currently, a large part of Internet use is done through mobile devices, and tools such as “the cloud” diversify their usage options. For this reason, we could also call Web 3.0 the “mobile web” or the “flexible web”.

Web 4.0 features

What will Web 4.0 look like? A standard for Internet 4.0 has not yet been established, let alone a name, but there are clues as to where it will evolve. It is possible that we could call Internet 4.0 the “active web”. In today’s Web 3.0, the use of search engines is still essential, and they serve us information – mostly in the form of web pages – which we use according to our needs. For example, if we are looking for hotel accommodation for a night in Rome, we type in a search engine something like “hotel room Rome”, and the search engine serves us a list of web pages, generally room search engines, which we will use “manually”. Web 4.0 will be a radical change. When it is fully developed, it will eliminate several of the steps required to use Web 3.0, making its use more direct and “invisible”. First, traditional search engines may not disappear, but they will be integrated into virtual assistants. These virtual assistants will be able to understand natural language, both spoken and written, and we will be able to make requests to them as we would to a human assistant. Thus, we will say something like “book me a room in Rome for July 12”, and we will directly obtain a reservation in a hotel chosen on the basis of our tastes -which the virtual assistant will know beforehand- and we will only have to confirm. But this “simplification” or “activation” of our use of the network will not be the only change provided by Web 4.0. In addition, it will be the network itself that will propose actions to us – we already see this today in its primitive state through the suggestions that reach our cell phones – in a contextual way. So, for example, if an application or your virtual assistant knows your habits and tastes, it will reserve, on its own behalf and on your behalf, movie tickets to see the new premiere of your favorite director, requiring only that you confirm your acceptance of the reservation.

Will it take us a long time to be immersed in Web 4.0?

Probably less than you expect. The technologies that will make this possible are already being developed and are beginning to see the light of day. Virtual assistants, such as Siri, Cortana or Google Now, are gaining, day by day, a better understanding of natural language thanks to machine learning systems. At the same time, “Big Data” is being processed more and more effectively, linking all the information obtained from multiple sources. Don’t you find all these changes exciting? We do, and we hope that Pandora FMS plays a role in all this history.

The web and its monitoring

Still don’t know what Pandora FMS is?

Pandora is a flexible monitoring software that adapts to the needs of your business or organization, capable of monitoring devices, infrastructures, applications, services and business processes..

For example, if you have a website, one of the things you can do with Pandora FMS is to monitor the user experience of your visitors. Take a look at this video to see how:

Pandora FMS is already used by hundreds of customers in many countries around the world. Some of the most important companies and organizations in the world already use our monitoring software. Want to see which are some of our customers? Click here.

Do you want to know everything Pandora FMS can offer you? Here you can do it.

Or if you have to monitor more than 100 devices you can also enjoy a FREE 30 days DEMO of Pandora FMS Enterprise. Get it here.

The Pandora FMS team will be happy to assist you!