Happy 20th Birthday World Wide Web!

Now that the Web has nearly reached the drinking age  (the US drinking age anyway) it makes sense to look at how she has grown up over the last 20 years.  For those of you who didn’t already know Tim Berners-Lee and the team at CERN invented the World Wide Web  in 1989 to make information easier to publish and access on the internet.  FYI, the terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used in every-day speech without much distinction. However, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not one and the same. The Internet is a global data communications system. It is a hardware and software infrastructure that provides connectivity between computers. In contrast, the Web is one of the services communicated via the Internet. It is a collection of interconnected documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs.

Other key milestones along the way include Marc Andreesen (later of Netscape and AOL) launching the first web-browser “for the people” called Mosaic in 1993.  Mosaic introduced proprietary HTML tags and more imaging capabilities making the web a visual experience for the first time.  In 1994 “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” is renamed Yahoo! and received 100,000 visitors.  In 1995, it began displaying ads.  In 1996  The browser wars begin. Microsoft sees the internet as a threat and integrates Internet Explorer with Windows.  Netscape and Microsoft go head-to-head, and an arms race of features begins.  Two years later, in 1998, Google arrives and creates a ranking system that uses links to assess a website’s popularity.

Then comes Y2K and chaos.  Oddly enough the catastrophe many expected to occur just after midnight December 31, 1999 never happened but a more sinister and game changing disaster does occur.  The bubble, that was the seemingly never-ending increase in dot.com stock prices, bursts amid the realisation, among other things, that many web-based businesses had no business model and could not sustain themselves.  This is a defining moment and ultimately leads to the death of what later becomes known as web 1.0.  The web as a bill-board, a place to post information and shout at your audience, has failed.  Well, not failed really, but it has reached puberty and gone through some tough growing pains along the way.  Like many early teens, the web goes through an awkward stage.  Dial-up connections make using the web as anything more than a bullhorn difficult and clumsy.  However, in time, broadband connections begin to shed light on a new vision for the world wide web.  By 2004 broadband begins to displace dial-up for active users and the web begins to reinvent itself. Tim O’reilly coins the phrase Web 2.0 and a new socially connected era begins.  As 2007  rolls around the top 20 connected countries in the world have broadband penetration over 20% and by 2008 the US eclipses the 50% mark.  As broadband becomes more popular, media companies see selling music and video online as a real business rather than a novelty.  Apple iTunes becomes the #1 music retailer in the US surpassing retail giant Walmart.

Now that most of us are nearly “always on” the next evolutionary step comes with the birth of social media which takes advantage of the now socially connected web which has been well documented.  No doubt enterprise social media will follow leaving us all connected with our friends, families, colleagues and strangers if we like.  So what’s next?  Where does the web, now in early adulthood, go from here? The answer is up in the clouds! As the era of “cloud” computing begins my next post will take a look at cloud computing and how I think it will evolve in the coming months.  Stay tuned.

Special thanks to Sean McManus who’s “Short History of the Internet” provided material for this post.