3/21/2008 - Internet Party

I got my first real taste of the internet back when I started college in 1994. Boy those were much simpler times back then. Webpages weren't the multimedia showcases they are today, and for good reason: almost everybody relied on 28K modems to get online back then! There were only a few "go to" websites out there back then that I can remember. Yahoo! was probably the most used internet portal out there and I used AltaVista for a search engine. You would rely on newsgroups to download high-resolution images and multimedia files. Online shopping was nearly non-existent without the likes of Amazon and eBay.

A couple of years later, streaming video was popularized with RealPlayer and then the MP3 revolution changed everything in terms of digital media. Once people figured out how you could make money off the internet, everything became commercialized and the DotCom boom took hold. The bubble eventually burst along with obviously illegal ways of distributing media like Napster.

The rise of Google would herald in the era of Web 2.0, which we are still in right now. Webpages have to be interactive AND elegant now and most of the popular sites out there reflect this. Social networking is now the "in" thing now with sites like Facebook, MySpace, and even YouTube and Blogger (both owned by Google, of course). It's been a wild ride and I really can't predict what is next. But here is a cool little skit about the 2.0 sites that servers as a nice time capsule for this period: