Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Happy 25th Birthday WWW!

I heard a couple of people chatting on the radio this morning.  They seemed to be talking down the impact of the World Wide Web over the past 25 years, which I was kind of staggered by.

Fact of the matter is, that Sir Tim Berners-Lee came up with an idea that has changed the world - forever.  It was his simple concept in March 1989, to use networks to publish information, and view it from other computers, using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

The first pages were pretty basic, and appeared in slow motion, but here is a brief run down on what happened since then.

1993 - the Mosaic browser was released.

1995 saw the released of Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator and Opera.

1995 - JavaScript came along.  It made webpages a whole lot more interesting!

1995-2000 - the Dot Com boom gathered pace, and businesses and investors realised the potential of the web.

1996 - Two Stanford students start a project to crawl the web, and formulate a PageRank for the pages they discovered.  In 1998 Google was founded.

A succession of social networking tools came along, including forums, sites like Friendster, LinkedIn and Myspace, until...

2004 - Facebook arrived.  It started at Harvard, spread quickly through universities in the US, and became universally available in 2006.

2007 - as if the momentum behind websites like Facebook was not strong enough, in 2007 Apple gave us the iPhone and the web really went mobile.

Today, the web is part of everyday life in much of the world.  Many businesses are dead in the water without success in Google, many peoples jobs exist only in the web, the web is an essential part of our children's education, we use the web as a delivery tool for much of our entertainment and it is where many communicate with friends, family, colleagues and customers.

The WWW in numbers:

There is in the region of 700 million websites

2.4 billion people world wide access the internet

There are around 1.3 billion Facebook users, and each day nearly half of them log in

In 2013, 73% of adults in Britain accessed the internet every day

72% of adults in Britain bought something on the internet in 2013

I don't know about you, but I think this world wide web thing could just take off.

Happy Birthday!