My first experience with the internet was 10 years ago in 1999. I would run a long phone cord to my computer and connect through NetZero. Using the internet tied up our home phone, so I had limited time to enjoy it.
My start page was Yahoo, and this is where I spent most of my time online. I would play Yahoo Games, read Yahoo News, use Yahoo Mail, etc.. I used the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to remind me of what it was like. I actually prefer the 1999 Yahoo to the bloated, ad filled Yahoo of today.
When I wasn't using the various Yahoo services, I was playing multiplayer games and chatting with my online friends. Some of my favorites included Acrophobia, a game where random letters are shown and you have to come up with a sentence that fits that acronym, and You Don't Know Jack, an online game show. I made many online "friends" while playing these games. We would chat during games and occasionally exchange emails. The site that hosted all these games, Bezerk, got taken down in 2001.
That's about the same time I first started with web design. I had gotten a few magic trick books and I created a Yahoo Geocities page explaining how to do various card tricks. I got close to 1,000 visits to my site over the few years.
I discovered Google around 2003 and haven't gone back to Yahoo since. Here's what it looked like then.
I discovered Wikipedia in 2003, signed up for a Gmail account in 2004, and started using Digg in 2005. Since then, I've discovered Youtube, Flickr, Worth1000, Pandora, Hulu, Facebook, and Blogger.
Back in 1999, images were sparse and video was non-existent, background music and animated gifs were considered good web design, most of the content on the web was written by professionals, and interactivity wasn't really interactive.
Now, sites like Vimeo, DailyMotion, Youtube, and the recently deceased Stage6 stream High Definition video on demand. Web 2.0 design styles overtook ugly, bland ones. Sites like Wikipedia, Youtube, and Blogger made amateurs the primary source of content. Today, almost all sites are interactive and some like Facebook take this to extremes.
In the future, video may be replaced by 3d animation, web 2.0 styles will look quaint, and interactivity will be taken to levels not even imagined today. I for one, can't wait.
The Changing Web
Posted by
Jeremy Dorn
|
Sunday, February 8, 2009
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1 comments:
I enjoyed how you showed images of what websites use to look like when you were first introduced to the internet. Your webpage on card tricks seemed interesting as well. I love Google too. If anybody has a question about anything I tell them to Google it. Google is my answer to everything. Now, you can even text Google on your cell phone and use it as a telephone directory; it’s pretty neat.
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