Observer : Websites that changed the world
Uncle Yap
Websites that changed the world
Amazon used to be a large river in South America - but that was before
the world wide web. This month the web is 15 years old and in that
short time it has revolutionised the way we live, from shopping to
booking flights, writing blogs to listening to music. Here, the
Observer's Net specialist charts the web's remarkable early life and
we tell the story of the 15 most influential websites to date. Tell us
what you think of our choices here
John Naughton
Sunday August 13, 2006
The Observer
Johannes Gutenberg took the idea of printing by moveable type and
turned it into a publishing system. In doing so he changed the world.
But he did not live to see the extent of the revolution he had brought
about. If you'd told him in 1468 - the year he died - that the Bible
he had published in 1455 would undermine the authority of the Catholic
church, power the Renaissance and the Reformation, enable the
Enlightenment and the rise of modern science, create new social
classes and even change our concept of childhood, he would have looked
at you blankly.
But there lives among us today a man who has done something similar,
and survived to see the fruits of his work. He is Tim Berners-Lee, and
he conceived a system for turning the internet into a publishing
medium. Just over 15 years ago - on 6 August 1991, to be precise - he
released the code for his invention on to the internet. He called it
the World Wide Web, and had the inspired idea that it should be free
so that anyone could use it.
And just about everyone did, with the result that the web grew
exponentially. Today nobody really knows how big it is. At a recent
conference, Yahoo's head of research and development put the size of
the public web at 40 billion pages, but the size of the 'deep' web,
the area where web pages are assembled on the fly and served up in
response to clicked-upon links, is estimated to be between 400 and 750
times greater than the part that is indexed by search engines. Since
you started reading this piece, thousands of pages have been added.
By any standards, the web represents a colossal change in our
information environment. And the strange thing is that it has come
about in just 15 years. Actually, most of it has happened in less than
that, because the web only went mainstream in 1993, when the first
graphical browsers - the computer programs we use to access the web -
were released. So these are early days. We can no more envisage the
long-term implications of what has happened than dear old Gutenberg
could.
The strangest thing is how casually we have come to take it for
granted. We buy books from Amazon, airline tickets from Easyjet and
Ryanair, tickets for theatres and cinemas online, as if doing so were
the most natural thing in the world. We check the opening times at the
Louvre in Paris or the Museum of Modern Art in New York (or browse
their collections) online. We check definitions (and spellings) in
online dictionaries, look up stuff in Wikipedia, search for apartments
to rent on Craigslist or a host of local lookalikes such as Daft.ie in
Ireland. You can buy and sell just about anything (excluding body
parts) on eBay. Children seeking pictures for school projects search
for them on Google Images (and download them without undue concern for
intellectual property rights). Holiday snaps escape from their
shoeboxes and are published to the world on Flickr. Home movies
likewise on YouTube. And of course anyone with doubts about a
prospective blind date can do an exploratory check on Google before
committing to an evening out with a total stranger.
All this we now take for granted. To get a handle on the scale of what
has happened, think back to what the world was like 15 years ago.
Amazon was a large river in South America. Ryanair was an Irish
airline that flew to places nobody had ever heard of. eBay was a typo.
Yahoo was a term from Gulliver's Travels. A googol was a very large
number (one followed by a hundred zeroes). Classified ads were densely
printed matter in newspapers. 'Encyclopedia' was a synonym for
Encyclopedia Britannica. And if you wanted to read what your MP had
said in the Commons yesterday you had to queue at the Stationery
Office in London to buy Hansard. Oh, and there were quaint little
shops in high streets called 'travel agents'.
To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the web we've assembled a list of
sites that have become the virtual wallpaper of our lives. What the
corresponding list will be like in 15 years' time is anyone's guess.
As the man said, if you want to know the future, go buy a crystal
ball. In the meantime, read on and wonder.
· John Naughton's history of the internet, A Brief History of the
Future, is published by Phoenix at £7.99
1. eBay.com
Founded: Pierre Omidyar, 1995, US
Users: 168m
What is it? Auction and shopping site
You cannot buy fireworks, guns, franking machines, animals or
lock-picking devices on eBay, the internet's premier auction site, but
almost everything else is OK: sideburns, houses, used underwear and of
course Pez dispensers.
Pez is where it is said to have all begun for eBay's ponytailed
founder Pierre Omidyar when he responded to his fiancee's worries that
she would no longer be able to expand her toy collection when they
moved to Silicon Valley. Omidyar developed a car boot sale anyone
could use wherever they were, and without the need for getting
dressed. The name sprang from Echo Bay Technology Group, Omidyar's
consultancy company, and the first sale was a broken laser pointer.
Things have moved on a little since then. We spend more time on eBay
than any other internet site. There are more than 10 million users in
the UK. And eBay is far from just a second-hand stall. New items are
sold by global companies; many people have abandoned their jobs to
eBay full time, and normally sane people fret about 'negative
feedback' and being outbid by 'snipers'. eBay owns PayPal and Skype,
making dealing almost effortless.
Simon Garfield
Founded: Jimmy Wales, 2001, US
Users: 912,000 visits per day
What is it? Online encyclopaedia
As a young boy growing up in Hunstville, Alabama, Jimmy Wales attended
a one-room school, sharing his classes with only three other children.
Here he spent 'many hours poring over encyclopaedias', and faced the
familiar frustrations: their scope was conservative; they were hard to
navigate and often out of date.
In January 2001 he created a solution. Wikipedia was a free online
encyclopaedia and differed from its predecessors in one fundamental
regard: it was open to everyone to read, and also to edit. If you had
something to add - from a pedantic correction to an entire entry on
your specialist subject - the Wiki template made this easy. The
software enables entries to be updated within minutes of new
developments. There is nothing you cannot find - how best to make
glass, the use of the nappy in space exploration - and if something
isn't there, you may wish to take matters into your own hands.
Like any fast-moving venture - the site attracts 2,000-plus page
requests a second - it has not been slow to attract criticism.
Occasionally a libellous article will lie undetected for months, as
happened with an entry linking one of Robert Kennedy's aides with his
assassination. But Wales says his creation is abused only rarely, and
swiftly corrected by other users. 'Those who use Wikipedia a lot
appreciate its true value and have learnt to trust it,' he says.
'Sometimes a prankster will substitute a picture of Hitler for George
Bush, and within an hour someone would have changed it back.'
SG
3. napster.com
Founded: Shawn Fanning, 1999, US
Users: 500,000 paying subscribers
What is it? File sharing site
Shawn Fanning created Napster in 1999 while studying at Boston's
Northeastern University, as a means of sharing music files with his
fellow students. Of course, it was entirely illegal (home taping kills
music, remember) and was quickly attacked by a mainstream music
industry already struggling to make profits on its money-guzzling
artists. Its popularity reached a peak in 2000 with over 70 million
registered users before Fanning's company was forced to pay millions
of dollars in backdated royalties: a move which bankrupted the
original, free-to-use Napster the following year. By then, however,
the premature leaking and sharing of hotly anticipated albums by some
of the major labels' most bankable artists had proved to be a
stimulant, not a thief, of sales once the CD version was released. The
new Napster - effectively a renamed version of a pay-to-download MP3
site owned by the original Napster company's buyers, the German giant
Bertelsmann- has never recaptured its original cool, precisely because
it is now legitimate. What it did in its brief period of illegal
notoriety was popularise the notion that making music freely available
on the internet - through MySpace, one-off downloads or
artist-sanctioned 'leaks' - does artists no harm at all; indeed, it's
helped to launch the careers of many.
Lynsey Hanley
4. youtube.com
Founded: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, 2005, US
Users: 100m clips watched a day
What is it? Video sharing site
When Chad Hurley and Steve Chen began working out of a garage in San
Mateo in late 2004 to figure out an easy way to upload and share funny
videos they'd taken at a dinner party, they had no idea just how huge
an impact their creation would make. The former PayPal employees
launched the user-friendly site in February 2005 and it has since
become one of the most popular sites on the net, with YouTube claiming
that 100 million clips are watched every day. Through the grassroots
power of the internet and good word-of-mouth, the site quickly went
from a place where people shared homemade video clips to users posting
long-lost TV and film gems such as bloopers from Seventies game shows
to ancient music videos. It has also taken off as a place for amateur
film-makers to show off their talents - take David Lehre, a teenager
whose MySpace: The Movie became such a popular clip he's already
fielded job offers from major movie studios.
Not all television studios immediately embraced the idea of their
archived copyrighted footage being shared. 'We're not here to steal,'
insists Chen. 'When [US television network] NBC asked us to take
something down, we did.' In fact, NBC only last week announced plans
to work alongside YouTube, airing exclusive clips and trailers and
eventually hoping to post episodes of The Office and Saturday Night
Live on it. The company has had several offers to be bought out, but
the pair swear they will not sell out. They continue to work out of
their San Mateo loft, overseeing 27 employees and developing ways to
make the site easier to use while whirling lucrative deals with
studios.
Gillian Telling
5. blogger.com
Founded: Evan Williams, 1999, US
Users: 18.5m unique visitors
What is it? Weblog publishing system
There weren't too many computers lying around in the cornfields of
Nebraska in the 1970s when Evan Williams was growing up. But he was
drawn to them when he found them. He was also drawn west, to
California in the 1990s. Williams founded Pyra Labs with two friends.
At first it made project-management software for companies. It was not
glamorous. Then it made Blogger and changed the world.
'The funny thing was I actually hesitated before working on Blogger
because I didn't see the commercial applications,' says Williams. 'We
had started a company and we needed to make money. We didn't see how
this little hobbyist activity was going to make anyone money.'
The little hobbyist activity was blogging, the art of keeping a weblog
- of diarising, theorising, satirising, fictionalising your life and
observations online. It had already taken off among the tech
fraternity in the Nineties, but it required building and maintaining
your own website; the luddites were excluded. Williams created a tool
that made self-publishing online as user-friendly as word-processing.
It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this innovation. It didn't
just create a new form of creative expression, it turned the media
upside down.
Content was once made by companies for passive consumption by people.
After Blogger, people were the content. They wrote about and read
about their friends, their opinions, their cats. (There was a lot
about cats in the early blogs.) None had a huge audience but
collectively they were massive. 'Now you see TV networks saying:
"We've gotta get on the web because that's where the audience is,"'
says Williams.
There is no accurate count of the number of blogs in existence now.
There are millions. One is created every minute. The revolution might
have been possible without Blogger but it would have taken everyone a
lot longer.
'Something like it would have existed anyway,' says Williams. 'And
lots of things like it do exist. It was a combination of helping push
an idea as well as just being in the right place at the right time
when the idea was right.'
Rafael Behr
Founded: Steve and Julie Pankhurst, 1999, UK
Users: 15m
What is it? School reunion site
In July 2000, as the dreams of the internet boom crumbled around them,
a husband-and-wife team were busy launching a rough and ready web
phenomenon. Friends Reunited, which was sold to ITV for £120m last
December, was Julie Pankhurst's brainchild. While pregnant, she became
obsessed with finding out what her old friends had been up to since
they left school. Her husband Steve, a computer programmer, had been
brainstorming with his business partner Jason Porter for an original
internet-based idea, and Julie suggested a website to cater for her
newfound obsession. It took her some time to convince them. 'In the
end,' says Steve, 'I designed Friends Reunited just to shut her up.'
The site took off slowly, getting half a dozen hits per day, but
everything changed at the start of 2001 when its lone server
collapsed. 'The Steve Wright show on Radio 2 had made us their website
of the day. Tens of thousands of people had tried to access the site
at the same time.' Within a month membership rose from 3,000 to
19,000; the couple were working 18-hour days. Friends Reunited quickly
became a household name and membership soared into the millions.
Killian Fox
Founded: Matt Drudge, 1994, US
Users: 8-10m page views per day
What is it? News site
What began as a gossipy email newsletter has, since its first post in
1994, developed into one of the most powerful media outlets in
American politics. Today the Drudge Report has evolved into a website,
drudgereport.com, and its threadbare, no-frills design belies the
scale of its influence. It received an estimated 3.5 billion hits in
the last 12 months; visitors regard it as the first port of call for
breaking news.
Fedora-wearing founder Matt Drudge monitors TV and the internet for
rumours and stories which he posts as headlines on his site. For the
most part these are direct links to traditional news sites, though
occasionally Drudge writes the stories himself. In 1998 he was the
first to break news of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Named this year as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people,
the 38-year-old regards himself as a maverick newsman working free
from the demands of editors and advertisers. Others, particularly
critics from the left, view his reportage as biased towards
conservatives, careless, malicious and frequently prone to error.
A report in 1997, alleging that White House assistant Sidney
Blumenthal physically abused his wife, generated a $30m lawsuit
against Drudge, which was dropped in 2001. In June 2004, Drudge
apologised for a February 'world exclusive' claiming that John Kerry
had had an affair with an intern.
Drudge has been labelled a 'threat to democracy' and an 'idiot with a
modem' as well as 'the kind of bold, entrepreneurial, free-wheeling,
information-oriented outsider we need more of in this country' (by
Camille Paglia); his importance in the US media is undisputed.
KF
8. myspace.com
Founded: Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, 2003, US
Users: 100m
What is it? Social networking site
When business-school alumnus Chris DeWolfe set up the social
networking site MySpace with his partner, ex-band member and film
studies graduate Tom Anderson, three years ago, there was little
indication that the one-stop online friend-making shop would soon
boast 100 million members and more page visits in Britain than the
BBC. The pair envisaged a site that would bring together all the
qualities of existing online communities such as Friendster, Tribe.net
and LiveJournal, with added features including classified adverts and
events planning.
They got the formula just right: the MySpace-opolis is growing by
240,000 a day, making it the fourth most-visited website in the world.
DeWolfe believes that the key to the site's success is its founders'
rapport with the people who use it. 'We looked at it from the point of
view of how people live their lives,' he says.
One of those features is the ability to upload and listen to music,
which has attracted 2.2 million new bands and artists to the site,
some of whom - most famously Lily Allen and Arctic Monkeys - can
attribute their chart success to having spread the word through
MySpace.
MySpace's parent company, Intermix, was bought by Rupert Murdoch's
NewsCorp last year for $580m, causing consternation among some of the
music world's more politicised acts, but no large-scale boycott. The
site is simply too valuable and effective - and ubiquitous - to
ignore.
LH
9. amazon.com
Founded: Jeff Bezos, 1994, US
Users: More than 35m customers in over 250 countries
What is it? Online retailer, primarily of books, CDs and DVDs
The earth's biggest bookstore was originally called Cadabra, but Jeff
Bezos thought again after his lawyer misheard it as 'cadaver'. He
chose Amazon as something large and unstoppable and so, with current
annual revenues of $8bn, it has proved. It was just a trickle to begin
with though: the first office was in a Seattle suburb with desks made
out of old doors. But it quickly became the headline act of the dotcom
miracle and Bezos was Time magazine's man of the year in 1999.
Amazon's continued dominance rests on price-slashing that would make
Wal-Mart wince, and a reputation for reliability. Though selling books
(and now almost everything else) on a vast scale, it has tried never
to forget the value of intimacy.
Tim Adams
10. slashdot.org
Founded: Rob Malda, 1997, US
Users: 5.5m per month
What is it? Technology news website and internet forum
'I'm just a geek that likes to poke around with hardware,' says Rob
Malda. His site, Slashdot.org, hosts news and discussion for techies
and is one of the most visited websites in the world. Time magazine
included him in its top 100 innovators, stating: 'Malda has taken the
idea of what news can be, hacked it open and rebuilt it for the
internet age.'
Most of the site is written by users; posts include a short synopsis
paragraph, a link to the original story and a lengthy discussion
sometimes running to 10,000 comments a day. Slashdot pioneered this
user-driven content, and influenced sites including Google News,
Guardian Unlimited and Wikipedia. In 2002 the site leaked the ruling
of a court case involving Microsoft before the verdict had even been
delivered to Microsoft or the US government. There is also the
Slashdot effect, where a site is swamped by heavy traffic from a
Slashdot link and its server collapses.
In 1997, 21-year-old Malda started what we would now call a blog,
hosted on his user account at university. As the site picked up users
he divided his time between college, paid work and the site. 'It was a
blur. There were many nights when I did not sleep.' Two years later
Andover bought Slashdot for $5m, shared between Malda, co-founder Jeff
'Hemos' Bates and other partners. They also shared $7m in stock
between them. In 2000 VA Linux (now VA Software) bought Andover for
$900m. Slashdot now has 10 employees dedicated to maintaining the
site, most of them based in California. Malda has remained in
Michigan, where he grew up and went to college. He is director of
Slashdot. He proposed to his wife Kathleen on the site in 2002.
Katie Toms
11. salon.com
Founded: David Talbot, 1995, US
Users: Between 2.5 and 3.5m unique visitors per month
What is it? Online magazine and media company Salon grew out of a
strike. When the San Francisco Examiner was shut for a couple of weeks
in 1994 a few of its journalists taught themselves HTML and had a go
at doing a newspaper with new technology. They found the experience
liberating, and David Talbot, the Examiner's arts editor, subsequently
gave up his job and launched the kind of online paper he had always
wanted to work for. Salon was originally a forum for discussing books,
but the editors quickly realised it had to be more journalistic than
that. They aimed at creating a 'smart tabloid', not afraid to be
mischievous while maintaining a rigour with news. Talbot believes that
online journalism came of age with the death of Princess Diana and the
Lewinsky scandal. It proved with those events that it could be nimbler
and more gossipy, it could update itself continually and, crucially,
let readers join in. Salon's Table Talk forum established a new
relationship between a news outfit and its audience, letting readers
write themselves into the story.
Salon was not afraid of muck-raking. When Talbot decided to run a
story about Henry Hyde, who was to sit in judgment of Bill Clinton
after the Starr report, he was roundly criticised not just by the
entrenched Washington media but also by some on his own staff. The
story concerned Hyde's extramarital affair of 30 years before, and the
more august sections of the American media, not to mention the
right-wing impeachers of the President, thought this was beyond the
pale. Talbot recalls how Salon 'got bomb threats, I received death
threats... [but] I think if as a new organisation that comes into the
world, a new media operation, you don't take risks with stories that
no one else does, then what's the point?'
For all its journalistic success, Salon has always struggled
financially. A couple of times the site has nearly gone under; on one
occasion Talbot was forced to fire his wife who ran a women's page. A
subscription system saved it, along with the growth in online
advertising. These days Talbot sees Salon's competitors as the big
news organisations, the New York Times and so on, who have strong
online presence. Having shown a few of them how it's done, Salon now
faces a daily battle to stay ahead of the game.
TA
12. craigslist.org
Founded: Craig Newmark, 1995, US
Users: 4bn page views per month
What is it? A centralised network of online urban communities,
featuring free classified advertisements and forums
Craigslist is one of the most deceptively simple websites on the
internet. It is also one of the most powerful. It is - pretty much -
simply a free noticeboard. But its astonishing popularity has given it
immense power. Want to rent an apartment? Sell a car? Find a job? Meet
someone to spend the night with? Craiglist will provide the answers.
For free. It has revolutionised urban living in America. It has also
undercut one of the main reasons for newspapers: classified
advertising. As nearly all Craigslist's content is free, it rarely
censors ads and its readers number in the millions, it is far more
useful to post an advert on the site than in your local newspaper.
Thus a huge decline in newspaper ads and revenue, triggering
cost-cutting which will see reporters tossed on to the scrap heap...
and the end of a free press and democracy as we know it (if the
critics are to be believed).
The website was founded by Craig Newmark, an ubergeek with a hippyish
mentality. It started as a simple email that he would send around
listing various events going on in San Francisco. From such humble
beginnings Craigslist has grown into a multi-million-dollar business.
Yet Newmark refuses to sell his company or charge for every ad.
Why should you care? Craigslist is all over the world - and coming to
your home town soon.
Paul Harris
13. google.com
Founded: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, 1998, US
Users: A billion search requests per day
What is it? Search engine and media corporation
Its name is listed as a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary. It
commands the largest internet search engine in the world. It is the
fastest-growing company in history and its founders are worth almost
$13bn each.
The search method devised by Larry Page and Sergey Brin was
instrumental to Goggle's success. Rather than ranking results
according to how many times the search term appeared on a page, their
system measured the frequency with which a website was referenced by
other sites. Another key factor was the site's stripped-down design,
which made it speedier and more accessible than its competitors.
From such plain foundations a gigantic empire has sprung and is
branching out into email (with Gmail), news (Google News), price
comparison (Froogle), cartography (Google Maps), literature (with the
much contested Google Book Search), free telephony (Google Talk), and,
most strikingly, Google Earth, an incredibly detailed virtual globe.
Google styles itself as a laidback, hippyish organisation but its
founding motto, 'Don't Be Evil', is already being tested: the
compromise it reached with China over censorship has proved
particularly contentious.
KF
14. yahoo.com
Founded: David Filo and JerryYang, 1994, US
Users: 400m
What is it? Internet portal and media corporation
It receives an average of 3.4bn page hits a day, making it the single
most visited website on the internet, but in recent years Yahoo! has
been eclipsed by Google. Both companies were launched on a very small
scale by Stanford University graduates and, very soon the portal that
Jerry Yang and David Filo had started as a hobby was en route to
becoming the most popular search engine on the web. On the back of its
early success, Yahoo! (an acronym for 'Yet Another Hierarchical
Officious Oracle') branched out into email, instant messaging, news,
gaming, online shopping and an array of other services.
It also started buying up other companies such as Geocities, eGroups
and the web radio company Broadcast.com. Yahoo! survived the internet
collapse at the start of the decade and brought former Warner Bros
chief exec Terry Semel on board in 2001 to navigate the difficult
waters of the post-boom period. Semel began to address the challenge
of making money out of the internet without relying on advertising
revenue alone. Google notwithstanding, Yahoo! is still very much a
contender.
KF
15. easyjet.com
Founded: Stelios
Haji-Ioannou, 1995, UK
Users: 30m passengers last year
What is it?: Budget airline
It's easy to forget what it was like back in the old days, when we
didn't just pay a tenner, pitch up at Luton and pop over to Rome for
the weekend. We mini-breaked in Bournemouth. Travelling to Scotland
was an all-day affair. Airlines issued quaint old-fashioned things
such as meals. And tickets. And seats.
And then along came Stelios. That's Stelios as in Haji-Ioannou,
although he now, alongside Delia and Jamie and Sven, belongs in that
rare category - the surnameless celebrity. He's also that other
elusive British beast - the celebrity entrepreneur. In 1995, after
borrowing £30m from his dad, a shipping magnate, he leased two
second-hand Boeings and began selling flights to Scotland for £29 each
way.
EasyJet was the first low-cost British airline and, presciently, the
first to start taking bookings over the internet, although, as Stelios
admits, he wasn't won over straight away.
'We started off as something very obscure like 1145678.com. And I
said: "This is never going to fill the planes. It's just for nerds."
Then some time in 1997 we bought the domain easyjet.com for about
£1,000 and put up a proper website. At that time we had the telephone
number in big letters on the side of the plane. And we put a different
telephone number on the website. Week after week I watched how quickly
the numbers were growing and that gave me the confidence in April 1997
to launch a booking site.'
It was, he says, the neatest and simplest way: 'you outsource the work
to the customer'. And it turned him into an internet evangelical. The
first company he set up after easyJet was easyInternetcafe and all 15
companies in the easyGroup have some sort of web component.
Carole Cadwalladr
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/
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