Interwebology: Happy birthday to WWW
The Internet is young. While computer technology has been gradually developing over the course of several decades, and connection technologies like ARPANET showing signs of life since the cusp of the 1970s, as a network open to commercial use, the Internet has only really been available since the late 1980s. Residential use didn't take off until the 1990s, with the greatest peak in 1996 and 1997.
The opening months of 2010 have marked milestones for almost every major Internet service, as well as the Internet itself. Twenty-five years ago, on March 15, 1985 the first .com domain was registered. It was one of only six registered in that year, though within a dozen years that number had ballooned up to one million.
In the top level domain game .com is still by far the most popular, gaining in excess of half a million new registered sites each month, though others such as .ca, .org, .net, and .biz still hold steady among the almost 300 TLDs available.
The lifespan of a dot-com is often quite short. While the aforementioned first site can still be viewed at symbolics-dks.com, the company itself has long since folded. Certain sites like Google seem to be destined to become mainstays, though for many other services the verdict is still up in the air.
One of the older social networking sites to still be kicking around is MySpace. While the site has had to shift its focus and redefine its identity to compete with Facebook, its numbers are still strong. Things have changed behind the scenes, too, as former president Tom Anderson is no longer being added as a friend to every new account. The company fired the founding team - Anderson included - in mid-2009, but visibility saved Anderson to a degree as he was kept on, though his title was reduced from president to unofficial mascot.
Facebook's recent news is somewhat more celebratory, as the beginning of February marked the site's sixth birthday. The project, originally called thefacebook.com, has expanded from its earliest iteration as an exclusive Harvard network to include a broader swath of university students, and later open membership. These days having a Facebook account is almost as common as having an email address, with the site boasting roughly 100 million unique visitors each month.
A week after Facebook's birthday, YouTube joined the celebration at age five. The domain was registered on Valentine's Day 2005 and has well surpassed competing sites like Vimeo to become the premiere online video portal. The site, however, has not been without controversy. Copyright issues still abound, and it is argued that YouTube's lenient attitude towards infringement is as responsible for its popularity as ease of use and accessibility. As well, deportalization threatens the site's future as many people are now seeking their videos at more specialized sites, or through social networks like Facebook.
A little older and a little smaller, LinkedIn also achieved a milestone when the site welcomed its 60 millionth member. The “social networking for business” service has noted exceptional growth in the Netherlands and India. In fact, half of all LinkedIn users are international, making the site far more multinational than its competitors, some of which (Facebook included) are actually banned in some countries. As well, opening up its API to developers and releasing a new iPhone app have also given the site a boost.
Most recently, the Internet's youngest social phenomenon, Twitter, hit 10 billion tweets in early March. This milestone indicates exponential growth in usage, as the site marked its one-billionth tweet well over a year ago, and its five-billionth late this past fall. In fact, the process of “tweeting” has become official as the service's “update” button now simply reads “tweet.”
Also celebrating the 10-billion mark is iTunes, whose downloads hit the landmark on February 24 when a man in Woodstock, Georgia bought Johnny Cash's Guess Things Happen That Way. The purchase date also happened to be Steve Job's 55th birthday, and he celebrated by giving a $10,000 iTunes gift card to the lucky user.
For many, these services have become so commonplace that it is hard to imagine living without them, though less than a decade ago that is exactly what we did. While their growth has been exponential, it remains to be seen whether or not they will fall as quickly as they rose, and what new services will soon become social essentials.
The opening months of 2010 have marked milestones for almost every major Internet service, as well as the Internet itself. Twenty-five years ago, on March 15, 1985 the first .com domain was registered. It was one of only six registered in that year, though within a dozen years that number had ballooned up to one million.
In the top level domain game .com is still by far the most popular, gaining in excess of half a million new registered sites each month, though others such as .ca, .org, .net, and .biz still hold steady among the almost 300 TLDs available.
The lifespan of a dot-com is often quite short. While the aforementioned first site can still be viewed at symbolics-dks.com, the company itself has long since folded. Certain sites like Google seem to be destined to become mainstays, though for many other services the verdict is still up in the air.
One of the older social networking sites to still be kicking around is MySpace. While the site has had to shift its focus and redefine its identity to compete with Facebook, its numbers are still strong. Things have changed behind the scenes, too, as former president Tom Anderson is no longer being added as a friend to every new account. The company fired the founding team - Anderson included - in mid-2009, but visibility saved Anderson to a degree as he was kept on, though his title was reduced from president to unofficial mascot.
Facebook's recent news is somewhat more celebratory, as the beginning of February marked the site's sixth birthday. The project, originally called thefacebook.com, has expanded from its earliest iteration as an exclusive Harvard network to include a broader swath of university students, and later open membership. These days having a Facebook account is almost as common as having an email address, with the site boasting roughly 100 million unique visitors each month.
A week after Facebook's birthday, YouTube joined the celebration at age five. The domain was registered on Valentine's Day 2005 and has well surpassed competing sites like Vimeo to become the premiere online video portal. The site, however, has not been without controversy. Copyright issues still abound, and it is argued that YouTube's lenient attitude towards infringement is as responsible for its popularity as ease of use and accessibility. As well, deportalization threatens the site's future as many people are now seeking their videos at more specialized sites, or through social networks like Facebook.
A little older and a little smaller, LinkedIn also achieved a milestone when the site welcomed its 60 millionth member. The “social networking for business” service has noted exceptional growth in the Netherlands and India. In fact, half of all LinkedIn users are international, making the site far more multinational than its competitors, some of which (Facebook included) are actually banned in some countries. As well, opening up its API to developers and releasing a new iPhone app have also given the site a boost.
Most recently, the Internet's youngest social phenomenon, Twitter, hit 10 billion tweets in early March. This milestone indicates exponential growth in usage, as the site marked its one-billionth tweet well over a year ago, and its five-billionth late this past fall. In fact, the process of “tweeting” has become official as the service's “update” button now simply reads “tweet.”
Also celebrating the 10-billion mark is iTunes, whose downloads hit the landmark on February 24 when a man in Woodstock, Georgia bought Johnny Cash's Guess Things Happen That Way. The purchase date also happened to be Steve Job's 55th birthday, and he celebrated by giving a $10,000 iTunes gift card to the lucky user.
For many, these services have become so commonplace that it is hard to imagine living without them, though less than a decade ago that is exactly what we did. While their growth has been exponential, it remains to be seen whether or not they will fall as quickly as they rose, and what new services will soon become social essentials.
