Why Waivlength can transform Social Networking, Caolan Ward, CMO and Head of Community

Caolán is CMO and Head of Community at Waivlength, an Irish startup creating a decentralised social media platform releasing later this year. While still studying Marketing, Innovation & Technology in DCU, he has previous startup experience with Merlin Mask - a project designing a better, cheaper, more sustainable face mask during the COVID-19 pandemic which placed in the top 5 out of 1000 entrants in the XPRIZE Next-Gen Mask Competition. Currently, Caolán is managing the current Waivlength community, all social outreach, and wider strategy surrounding their equity fundraise and Beta sign-up.

Technology to Transform Social Networking

Through seamless blockchain and cryptocurrency integration, Waivlength adds many features which set it apart from current mainstream channels.

There’s a lot of buzz around the Web 3.0 movement and the changes it will bring to the industry, but few people actually know why it began and what it will bring. To understand this, let’s take a look back at its predecessors - Web 1.0 and 2.0.

Web 1.0 or ‘World Wide Web’ as it was known, was just a set of static websites with lots of information and no interactive content. Slow dial-up connections for chat rooms and MSN messenger, AltaVista and Ask Jeeves. Then came 2.0. Faster internet speeds paved the way for interactive content. The web wasn’t about observing anymore, it was about participating. New platforms provided users with faster, more reliable, and feature-rich services. The global sharing of information spawned the age of ‘Social Media’. Youtube, Wikipedia, Twitter and Facebook gave voices to the voiceless and a means for like-minded communities to thrive.

With the vast increase in internet users and volume of data floating around, big digital corporations soon realized how valuable of an asset personal information is. So began the mass stockpiling of data in centralized servers, with Amazon, Facebook and Twitter the biggest custodians. People sacrificed privacy for the convenience of these services; whether they knew it or not, their identities, browsing habits, searches and online shopping information was sold to the highest bidder.

While the Web 2.0 democratized many power structures and created new opportunities, the economic engine is largely privatized and monopolized. Almost all online services are hosted on hardware owned by the “big three” cloud providers, which consist of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google. Facebook now boasts 2.9 billion users worldwide. Uber and AirBnB have created private networks for public infrastructure which they dominate.

The Web 3.0 is the antithesis of this, it’s about multiple profit centers sharing value across an open network. The primary purpose of the Web 3.0 movement isn’t focused on expanding the functionality of the internet. Instead, Web 3.0 is focused on restructuring the way in which the internet is accessed and interacted with. We now have the development of what is described as a human-centred internet.