By Did you ever stop to think about your daily Internet routine? Chances are it starts with Google, continues with looking up some reference on Wikipedia for work, with your Facebook open in the background, all the while keeping up with the YouTube links your friends send over mail or IM. At the end of the day, you get home, and chances are you’ll either read someone’s blog or make a few new entries on yours.
Congratulations, you are a digitally enabled homo sapiens and it’s the most natural thing ever, even if your daily habits would seem completely alien to your great-grandfather. But even though it feels like the computerized cocoons most of us live in now have been here forever, ten years ago most of the sites mentioned above didn’t even exist. With that in mind, we’ve decided to bring you a list of websites that paved the way for the ones we all now use and love. A few of these web pioneers aren’t around anymore, but it’s worth remembering them for what they represented – markers on the road to the huge bundle of awesome that is today’s Web.
1. The first search engine
The year is 1990, and the World Wide Web is 2 years away from being created. These are the dark days of the BBS, 10 MB hard disks and 9600 bps modems (yep, that’s bits). Most people online are still scientists, university professors and IT students. No WWW means no http, so no need for search engines, right? Wrong, because many people used (and still use) something called file transfer protocol (or ftp) servers to upload and download files. But how to find what you’re looking for in this mess of ftp’s all over the world? Enter Archie.
Simple and clean, two attributes people still look for in a search engine
Almost a full decade before two Stanford U students would start Google in a friend’s garage, an MIT student named Alan Emtage created the world’s first search engine. While he wanted to call it “Archives”, the name was too long for the Unix operating system to support, so he shortened it to Archie. It used a script to gather lists of files from ftp servers across the then-infant Internet, and enabled the user to search for a specific term within the names of those files. The implications for education and the free sharing of knowledge were staggering, but not nearly as great as the implications for celebrity gossip, porn and pirated music.
2. The first video sharing site
Want to share video online? Well, there’s the 1000-pound gorilla called YouTube, the brave contender DailyMotion, the hipstery-looking Vimeo and the corporatish Hulu, plus too many to add here. Well, way before YouTube came about in 2005, a brave soul named Chase Norlin launched the awkwardly-named ShareYourWorld.com. It was 1997 and most computers still struggled with 640×480 video – watching cats do funny things in HD was still a pipe dream. With dial-up connections reigning supreme, analog camcorders outselling digital by a huge margin and no universal peripheral connection (USB had yet to be invented), ShareYourWorld.com was clearly an idea whose time hadn’t come yet – as Mr. Norlin himself discusses below.
Suffice it to say, ShareYourWorld.com didn’t end up being a game changer and now very few people remember it ever existed. Technical hurdles aside, what killed the site was the lack of a viable financing model – the idea to marry targeted online advertising with a clean, uncluttered interface wouldn’t come about for a few years more, from the same Stanford students I’ve mentioned above. Who now, by the way, own YouTube.
3. The first Wiki
Where would humanity be without Wikipedia, the #1 source for the most obscure video game trivia ever? Where would trekkies be without the Star Trek encyclopedia, Memory Alpha, or far-right conservatives without the equally fictional Conservapaedia? How can you get loads of people around the world to pool their knowledge of trolling and filthy humor on something like Encyclopedia Dramatica? You can bet none of these questions were on Ward Cunningham’s mind when he put up WikiWikiWeb on the 25th of March 1995.
The Wiki Wiki shuttle at Honolulu airport, an unlikely source of inspiration
The word “wiki” comes from Hawaiian, or to be more precise, from the shuttle that links terminals at the Honolulu Airport (where Ward had passed through shortly before). The idea is simple: put up a bunch of web pages, all linking to one another, and make them user editable. The implications for sharing the world’s knowledge, business and academic collaboration were huge. Not only did Wikipedia become one of the world’s most popular websites, but communities have sprung up around such bits of culture as Mass Effect and The Godfather, dedicated to starting edit wars around the most obscure bits of trivia known to mankind.
4. The first social network
Stephan Paternot, left, and Todd Krizelman, in 1998 (photo courtesy of the Cornell University Chronicle)
Few technologies have beginnings as murky as social networks, because few are as ambiguous. After all, people have been networking for the thousands of years it took the Internet to emerge. If we reduce the idea of social networking to meeting new people online and catching up with old friends in an online community, then the first is probably Theglobe.com. Launched by two Cornell students in 1994, a full year before Classmates.com and Yahoo’s Geocities, the site’s main feature was a chatroom where one could talk to everyone else, along with primitive user profile features. The success wouldn’t last long though, as the company was hit very hard by the dot-com bust of 2000-2001 and subsequently morphed into a magazine publisher, a VoIP provider and ended up as a shell company in serious debt – read the whole sad story at www.theglobe.com.
Friendster as it appeared circa 2003
However, if we talk about social networks in the modern sense of the word, Friendster gets the glory of being first. Launched on the March 22, 2002, it paved the way for Myspace and Facebook by providing the key features of what we now understand to be a social network : the ability to customize one’s own profile, post images and eventually video and add friends. Although it’s recently seen a decline to less than 10 million unique monthly users , Friendster is alive and still growing in Asia, where more than 90% of its users are based.
5. The first blog(ging platform)
Since it burst onto the scene during the last 10 years, blogging has been variously decried as promoting a cacophony of conflicting opinions, or lauded as empowering those that had never had a voice. At its core, any blog is little more than an online journal about topics as diverse as human rights violations in the Congo, designer handbags and obscure electronic music. Keeping that in mind, we tip our hats to Justin Hall, who’s been blogging about his life since 1994, in what amounts to the world’s oldest blog, or online diary if you prefer. Credit for the term “blog” goes to Peter Merholz, who separated the earlier term “weblog” into “we” and “blog”, forever cementing the word into popular consciousness.
Justin Hall, in full-on "Hello World!" mode
However, creating a blog wasn’t easy – it required a bit of technical knowledge, from html to css and other dark arts that the average journalist wasn’t really proficient in. Enter the blogging platform – the point of entry to online publishing for the masses. No longer would the great swarms hungry for a voice need to learn how to make entire websites in order to wax poetic about the lives of their cats (and comment on the exciting lives of other cats), for now it would be as easy as signing up and tweaking the blog through some sort of online software (à la WordPress).
The first website to bring publishing to the masses was Open Diary, in October 1998, a full five months before LiveJournal. Its novel feature was the ability to comment on other people’s journals, a move that led to thoughtful, well-thought discourse in precisely 0.01% of cases, with the rest being either angry rants at the author or angry rants against people who post angry rants for no reason.
So there you have it, five websites that influenced the way we connect and share information in the 21st century. Whether successful or going down in flames, these early pioneers paved the way. The inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, could never have imagined what would follow when he posted that first ever webpage online back in 1992, but my guess is he’d probably do it all over again.