If there was one site that would
change the world for ever, it
would be the first ever website, created by internet pioneer Tim
Berners-Lee. It went online on 6 August 1991
offering people help with using
the brand new 'World Wide Web',
rather modestly described as a
"wide-area hypermedia
information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access
to a large universe of
documents". If Berners-Lee had known what
was to come, he might have
added: "This is going to be
awesome!" 2. GeoCities Fascinating as it was back then,
the web wasn't a whole lot of
fun and after four years of
pages created by scientists and
academics, David Bohnett and
John Rezner, who ran a web directory called Beverly Hills
Internet, turned their company
into GeoCities, giving anyone the
ability to create their own site
for free. "There was a time when half the
internet seemed to be on
GeoCities and I don't think that
this can be underestimated,"
says Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda,
founder of Slashdot. "GeoCities made it possible for anyone to
put something online for nothing.
This was a huge deal." 3. Blogger GeoCities made it easy for
anyone to build their own site,
but in August 1999, Blogger
made it even easier. Now anyone
could post a diary of what they
had for dinner or why they hated their parents. Acquired by
Google in 2003, Blogger continues
to enable everyone to document
their lives without needing to
get their hands dirty with HTML.
As does WordPress, TypePad, Tumblr and a million other
services that have since
appeared. GeoCities was
purchased by Yahoo! in 1999 and
lives on as Yahoo! GeoCities,
though we've never heard anyone say "Check out my
Yahoo! GeoCities page." 4. Yahoo! One thing that Yahoo! will be
remembered for, though, is its
search directory, without which
most of us would never have
found GeoCities in the first place.
Founded by Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang
and David Filo in January 1994,
Yahoo! was a manually compiled
directory of sites. "Remember
when you bookmarked Yahoo!
indexes because they were actually comprehensive sources
on a subject?" says Rob Malda.
"Good times." But those good times weren't to
last. Computer-compiled search
listings from AltaVista and, later,
Google, were to rise in
popularity, leaving Yahoo! behind,
perhaps distracted with building its community features such as
chat rooms, email and message
boards. "They were an early
leader but went down a path of
being more marketing- oriented
than technology-oriented," says Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy
Wales. "I hope they recapture
the idea of pushing the
forefront of technology." 5. The internet-connected
coffee machine When you're chatting with
friends on your webcam, who'd
have thought you owe all that
to a coffee pot? The internet-
connected coffee machine from
Cambridge University went online in November 1993, so university
staff could check on whether
there was coffee in the pot
before walking down several
flights of stairs. A year later, student Jennifer
Ringley installed a webcam in her
dorm, giving viewers a regularly
updated window into her life on
the JenniCam. Usually mundane,
but not shying away from appearing nude or having sex,
Ringley attracted an estimated
three to four million viewers,
some of whom were paid
subscribers. But on 31 December
2003 Ringley shut her site down to lead a quieter life, out of the
public eye. Cambridge University's coffee
machine is also living a more
private life these days, but you
can read more on its history at www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/
coffee.html . 6. Danni's Hard Drive So the early 90s were an
innocent time, but that all
changed when, in the spring of
1995, model Danni Ashe created
Danni's Hard Drive. Ashe started
out in newsgroups after hearing her pictures were being posted
there and soon after that she
hired some programmers to build
her site. Not satisfied with the result,
Ashe studied HTML and built her
own site, which she ran single-
handedly for over a year before
bringing in extra staff. Ashe
went on to become the Guinness World Record holder of the title
'Most downloaded woman on the
Internet', in December 2000,
when it was confirmed that her
image had been downloaded over
a billion times. 7. MP3.com It wasn't just photos that we'd
be downloading, though. In 1998,
along came MP3.com, without
which there would have been no
Napster, and no iTunes. MP3.com
was to popularise the MP3 format of digital music, offering
downloads of unsigned bands,
which people would have
downloaded and transferred to
their iPods, had the iPod actually
been around at the time. "I remember downloading my first
few MP3s from MP3.com while
ripping my own CDs. It took
something like eight hours to rip
and encode a single CD," says
Slashdot's Rob Malda. "A year or two later, tiny devices like the
Rio paved the way for the iPod. I
can't tell you how powerful it
felt to browse what felt like an
infinite number of songs." 8. eBay In September 1995, programmer
Pierre Omidyar founded
AuctionWeb, later renamed eBay.
It's been responsible for turning
stay-at-home mums into
successful businesswoman, and lists Damon Albarn, Gordon
Ramsay and Meg Matthews
among its sellers. It's also known
for a decommissioned nuclear
bunker and the image of the
Virgin Mary in a decade-old toasted cheese sandwich. Brian Groth, product manager
for Windows Live at Microsoft is
a fan: "Not many sites can claim
to have created and ridden their
own zeitgeist, but eBay did –
and it still is! Its simplicity is its genius and the feedback system
is a shining example of how
seamlessly self-regulating
internet communities can work. A
further testament to its success
is that it's the only website on this list that's created a viable
new career choice – the
professional eBay trader." eBay
was ahead of its time, adds
Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales. "It really
was Web 2.0 before Web 2.0 was cool. eBay is all about having
ordinary people contributing the
vast majority of what's going on
at the website." 9. Amazon Another company that was Web
2.0 before the term was coined
is Amazon, founded by Jeff Bezos
in 1994. Bezos had originally
planned to call the site Cadabra,
until in a moment of clarity he realised it sounded uncannily
close to 'cadaver'. And so Amazon
was born, initially offering books
but now selling everything from
watches to lawnmowers. Not only
did it popularise online shopping but its focus on user reviews
paved the way for sites such as
TripAdvisor and Epinions. Match.com'son Stockwood says
of Amazon: "Many people had
huge reservations about using
the internet, and even more
about ecommerce. Amazon led
the charge, and continues to play a crucial role in encouraging
a wider demographic to feel
comfortable surfing." 10. Boo.com Not every site was as successful.
Boo.com was set up at the end
of 1999 selling branded fashion
clothes, but went into
receivership just six months
later, after burning through more than £100 million. The site
was big on Flash, with its 3D
views of clothes and virtual shop
assistant Miss Boo. 56k modems
weren't ready for it and
shoppers stayed away in their droves. But perhaps Boo was
just before its time: does a 3D
view of the product you're
browsing really sound so
ridiculous now? Wikipedia, Slashdot,
YouTube and more 11. Wikipedia If Amazon championed user
reviews, Wikipedia was to take
user-generated content to
another level, with an online
encyclopedia anyone could edit.
Sounds like a recipe for disaster, but where errors or downright
lies appear, they're quick to be
corrected by the site's users.
"Yes, the information is
imperfect," says Jason
Stockwood, "but the rigidly democratic nature of the site
means that Wikipedia is a true
embodiment of what the
internet revolution originally
promised." 12. Slashdot If you'd rather comment than
review, then you owe a debt to
Slashdot, a site where people
submit news stories for
discussion. Created in September
1997 by Rob Malder, it continues to be a must-read destination
for anyone interested in
technology. Drew Curtis followed
up with FARK.com, and Kevin Rose
with digg.com. Commenting on
stories has become so widespread that it now seems
odd to arrive at a site where
there are no comments. 13. The Drudge Report It's hard to believe now, but it
used to be that the mainstream
media was where you went for
serious, trusted news and the
web didn't get a look in. But on
17 January 1998 The Drudge Report was to change that,
when it broke the Monica
Lewinsky scandal to the public
after Newsweek decided not to
publish the story. Reporting on the event on 25
January 1998, BBC News said, in
what sounds obvious and naive
all these years later, "In the
future, academics, politicians and
journalists aren't likely to dismiss the internet so quickly." Now news is regularly broken by
specialist blogs before you read
about it in the morning paper.
That's assuming you even buy a
morning paper any more. 14. YouTube And where do you watch your
TV? Started in a garage by
three former PayPal employees,
one site went on to shake up
the TV industry, and was
acquired by Google for $1.6 billion. All that for a company
that's less than four years old.
You've probably heard of it: it's
called YouTube. "You used to find a text search
result for every keyword you
could think of," says Torsten
Schuppe, marketing director at
eBay. "Now you find a video for
every keyword you can think of! I've been told people upload 10
hours of video content every
minute – that's huge!" 15. Gabocorp Until Flash came along in 1996,
the web was much like Ceefax,
with a few animated GIFs and PC-
crashing Java applets thrown in.
But the arrival of Flash was to
herald a new era in web design. The sign of things to come
appeared in 1997 in the form of
Gabocorp (archived at thefwa.com/flash10/gabo.html). Suddenly the web was no longer
static. "This was the equivalent of TV
going colour," says Rob Ford,
founder and principal of Favourite Website Awards. "Gabocorp made us realise we
could now make things move,
add sound and generally be far
more creative than the days of
blue hypertext links that turned
purple on-click. Animated GIFs took a body blow while lake
applets took the knockout
punch. Gabo Medoza, for me, is a
true web pioneer: we all owe his
creativity and vision for where
we are today." 16. Legal & General On the accessibility front, an
encouraging early example of
accessible web design produced
by a commercial company was
that of Legal & General. Julie Howell, director of
accessibility at digital agency Fortune Cookie explains: "Legal & General were concerned that
their website was needlessly
excluding disabled people, so
undertook a site refresh that
took into account the W3C Web
Accessibility Initiative Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
1.0 (WCAG 1.0). While the
company's main intention was to
make the site easier for disabled
people to use, the business
returns were quite astonishing and proved that accessible
design can be good for
everyone: conversion increased
by 300 per cent, maintenance
costs reduced by 66 per cent,
natural search listings improved by 50 per cent and page load
time reduced by 75 per cent. If
Legal & General can do this,
what excuse do other companies
have for not doing it?" 17. Hotmail Free email for all, accessible
anywhere – that was the
promise of Hotmail. Founded by
Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia, it
was launched in 1996 and sold to
Microsoft in 1997 for around $ 400 million. 18. Classmates.com Hotmail helped us keep in touch
with people we knew, but
Classmates.com, launched in
1995, helped us get back in
touch with people we hated at
school and never kept in contact with. Four years later, the UK
followed suit with Friends
Reunited, which made the
mistake of charging a fee to get
in touch with old school pals.
Then Facebook stepped in, offering the same service for
free – and now we can all see
that the person we fancied at
school isn't quite so hot any
more. 19. Match.com Having exhausted old school
friends for potential mates,
where to turn? Match.com
opened the entire internet
community up for grabs. Going
live in 1995, it was the first popular online dating site, and is
also notable for being one of the
first sites to persuade internet
users to part with their cash for
a subscription. Today, online
dating is rapidly becoming the new, natural way to meet and
(hopefully) fall in love. 20. HotWired And finally, if you haven't fallen
in love, how about something to
hate? In 1994, web magazine
HotWired pioneered banner ads.
Bastards.

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