So Christmas is now over, the January sales are in full swing, the twelve drummers are drumming and we’re all left to contemplate our expanded waistlines (or is that just me?). Even more significantly, 2010 marks the end of the first decade of the Millennium. It was a big one historically (how many wars can you cram in a decade?) and particularly for the Internet.
The question on our minds is whether the next decade can possibly be as significant for the Internet as the last one?
Sure, there’s plenty of life left in the old dog, but it’s amazing how many of the things we consider part of everyday life now weren’t even a twinkle on a programmer’s keyboard 10 years ago.
Where were we in 2000?
The turn of the Millennium saw the “dotcom crash” – even that seems like an archaic term now! The naysayers were convinced this was the end of the Internet. The rest of us were just wondering how anyone ever thought a company like Boo.com could ever be valued skywards of $100m+. A lot of corporate fingers got burnt badly. Thankfully, for most, reality soon dawned. People realised that the Internet could indeed be exploited for commercial gain – providing traditional business rules and models were applied.
Things you’d never heard of in 2000
Here’s a list of things that have only come into being in the last decade. Feel free to comment on any I’ve missed out…
- YouTube
- Social networking
- iPhones / iPods
- Wi-Fi
- BBC iPlayer / on demand TV
- Mozilla Firefox
- Google (OK, you might just have heard of them by 2000)
- 7dots
Great list, I would add “blogs” as one of the things. Although I think the term might have been invented in 1999
/tero
ps. Google was founded 1998 I think, but it’s safe to say no one heard of them before 2000
That’s ironic – how did I miss blog!
The iPod was the big one for me – it made me think ‘big-time revolution’ when I got my first one, without anyone telling me it was a big deal.
Also, I knew a guy who spammed all his friends with acerbic observations on the minutiae of his life every couple of weeks – in 1998. I emailed back to say, ‘Why are you telling me this, exactly? Please stop!’ Little did I know Ralph-the-coffee-shop-grumpster was a proto-blogger. Or that we would all now consider such material the norm rather than a nuisance.
That said – loving the Dot-ty blog!