Slashdot Mirror
15 Websites That Changed the World
nuke-alwin writes "To mark the web's 15th anniversary, The Guardian is reporting on 15 websites that changed the world. Everything from commercial sites like eBay and Amazon to social collaboratives like Wikipedia and Slashdot made the list." From the article's comments on Blogger: "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."
1. eBay.com 2. wikipedia.com 3. napster.com 4. youtube.com 5. blogger.com 6. friendsreunited.com (School reunion site) 7. drudgereport.com (News site) 8. myspace.com 9. amazon.com 10. slashdot.org 11. salon.com (Online magazine and media company) 12. craigslist.org (A centralised network of online urban communities) 13. google.com (Popular search engine) 14. yahoo.com 15. easyjet.com (Budget airline)
Where's my website?! Didn't my Slashdot F.A.Q. change the world? :P
Where is 2chan and 4chan?
15. easyjet.com
how did this slip in? did they sponsor the article?
Founded: 2004 by Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm
users: alot
What is it? One of the only filesharing sites able to stick it to the man. Even after dealing with police.
Hopefully eventually able to trigger positive discussion and evolution in copyright laws.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Great, misformatted and I forgot to check 'Post Anonymously'. Great.
scanning the list I was prepared to be angry, but they did a pretty decent job of calling out the list correctly; though it feels a little web 2.0 heavy to me. And... blogger.com, really? I would think that livejournal would have been a better choice for the "dragging down journalistic standards/bluring the line between infotainment and slice of life." category...
Not all these changes have been positive. In terms of large-scale changes along those lines I'd probably include the nasties such as doubleclick and whatnot. They've definately had a lasting impression on how advertising is done on the 'net (regardless of poor motives or whether it was a possitive impression)
Where's Digg...
..just ain't that influential.
Barely a blip on the radar screen.
That changed my world, permanently.
How can you trust a list like that when it doesn't include goatse. Where have they been?
napster.com wasn't really a website that changed the world, napster was a bit of software that changed the world.
#3 - Napster.com
Ummm... I don't think anybody was going there because of the website. Napster was technically a program that you downloaded and installed on your computer. It used different ports than good ol' 80 and it was not a website in any recognizable way.
Nothing wrong with Napster, I'm just sayin'!... If we let napster.com in, then why not let microsoft.com in?
Electric Monkey Pants
I'm sorry but how did slashdot "change the world"? Especially compared to all the other sites out there?
The original Napster program, as a groundbreaking P2P app, certainly was very important in changing the way the Internet is used.
The website itself, however, was just a place to download the program.
If a music-sharing site needs to be on the list, the original MP3.com is a better choice.
It wasn't Napster, the website, that changed the world. It was Napster, the software. Everyone I know went to the site exactly once--to download the app. It was not a "file sharing site."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
1. eBay.com - a big Flea Market
2. wikipedia.com - Brittanica on the bathroom wall
3. napster.com - for about three minutes
4. youtube.com - eh
5. blogger.com - they wanted to acknowledge blogging, this is their surrogate
6. friendsreunited.com (School reunion site)- never heard of it. probably helpful for stalking that girl who spit on you in 10th grade.
7. drudgereport.com (News site)- not really a News Site. A link aggregator with an agenda.
8. myspace.com - for about three MORE minutes
9. amazon.com - changed shopping, anyway.
10. slashdot.org - WHO?
11. salon.com (Online magazine and media company)- changed the world? How about "provides a home for whining elitists"?
12. craigslist.org - supermarket community bulletin board with more eyes
13. google.com - changed the Internet maybe. The WORLD? nah
14. yahoo.com - see #13
15. easyjet.com (Budget airline)- see #6
If this is how the Internet has changed the world, please have it changed back promptly.
Silly, that's because a cat owns the Internet.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
kuro5hin.org;digg.com;techreport.com (just because it has the audacity to ask for donations);mathworld.wolfram.com;news.bbc.co.uk
Suck.com, the site that basically invented the idiom of political blogging five years early, and mocked salon.com and drudgereport.com on those sites' rise into faddishness among the "old media".
But, of course, a site like Suck would never show up on a list like this. An article about this is basically a shrine to media enthusiasm about the internet-- a validation of the idea that the importance of a website can be measured by the significance that established pre-internet information sources (like The Guardian) attach to it. In such a context, we are of course not going to reward the people who tried to look at the internet as what it actually was, rather than what the media made it out to be.
I must have been absent in geek school the day they talked about friendsreunited.com. I had never even heard about it until I read the list.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
It was much BETTER...
anon.penet.fi was a classic- more of a service than a website, but it was just one of those things that made anonymnity accesable (and yes, I did post this as AC)
have changed the world. Not as individual sites. What is remarkable is how little claim most of these sites have to world changing status.
Google is the strongest contender. But even Google did not invent the search engine, it "merely" improved it greatly. The Altavista engine, in its day, was a marvel, and it introduced on-line translation. But at the same time Altavista launched, there was Lycos and Excite.
As a class search engine sites have certainly changed the world. But they appear to me to be a natural development of the web.
It is possible that a web site like the Drudge report might tip an election and change the world but it hasn't happened.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
TFA lumps bloggers together as collectively having a huge influence although any individual blog may not have such a large audience. Speaking personally, that rings true. Many/most of the sites I visit regularly would be classified as blogs. The standard media often omit important stories or omit important facts about those stories. Blogs represent a way to get at the truth. My favorite is Groklaw. My guess (WAG) is that it killed off SCO's FUD factory a year earlier than it would otherwise have died. (OK I know SCO is still alive but nobody believes them any more.)
What the hell does 5.5m users per month mean? AFAIK the user IDs aren't even at 1m yet.
Until I read this, I didn't know that the wikimedia foundation had even registered the .com domain (though, it does make sense). It appears to be nothing more than a redirect to wikipedia.org.
Badass Resumes
Comments.
noone will agree with all of the sites they list, should make for robust discusson.
nonetheless, bear in mind they are not talking about current influence, they are talking about the sites that shaped the web as it is today. slashdot may have less visitors/subscribers than digg (i have nfi, actually), but it was a groundbreaker.
though napster, the software, was the thing, not napster.com. okay, lots people went to napster.com to get it, but i think thats stretching - mirror sites dont get included as they shold by that criteria.
i think it is an interesting and quite surprisingly good list. for a change - these things are usually a bit light/trite.
Nothing - well thats something.
What gives? Give the Hun some props, eh wot. He's made it with the same format through thick and thin, through the dot bomb years, etc and still cranking it out. Very similar to drudge, plain page, links to content, nothing changes, what you see is what you get, successful. Even though people won't speak of it as much. You CAN'T tell me he isn't popular.
I was a /.er for a while beforehand, but when the Columbine shootings happened and then the massive backlash against kids who "don't fit in" sparked the Hellmouth series I was hooked. Slashdot helped to change the world due to those two stories.
Katz was a fucktard but the Hellmouth series were groundbreaking.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Hey -- someone else remembers. I wondered.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
1. Google.com; 2. Slashdot; 3. arXiv.org (preprints galore); 4. HoTMaiL (back when it was good); 5. Amazon.com 6. Wikipedia; 7. Flickr; 8. del.icio.us; 9. The Internet Archive; 10. Cryptome; 11. goatse.cx 12. MathWorld; 13. eBay/PayPal; 14. MySpace; 15. Timecube.
Interesting, he's going to go down in history with similar status as Gutenberg. One of the very very few people alive who will still be referenced in 500, 1000 years where even kings, prime ministers and presidents will be forgotten.
Deleted
....There is also the Slashdot effect, where a site is swamped by heavy traffic from a Slashdot link and....
Maybe I've just missed the boat on that one, but it doesn't seem to have more of an impact than any of the sites listed below it... and EasyJet? First time I've heard of them, but again, could've just been out to lunch for that one, but both seem more like advertising plugs than deserving of being on the list. If anything, those modding group websites that release patches like good old Hot Coffee for GTA seem to have made a much larger impact. Shit, if you're going to put up Napster as a website, then you might as well add iTunes.com too. I do wish Cryptome was up there, but... not too surprised it isn't.
Oh well. I suppose most irk-worthy point is that artists haven't found a large, well-organized central hub on the web to gather around. I suppose Deviantart counts, but... not really. Friends that are far more talented than I can't find any good groups (and technically, the site discourages forming groups. Brilliant.) to organize projects with or easily find people of the same caliber, or just the same level of dedication (hobbyist vs. career artist).
That, and as it was noted before, the job-finding/headhunting websites are ridiculously inept in comparison to what they could achieve and help others achieve.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
They can't have changed the world that much, as this is the first I've ever heard of them. I've barely heard of DrudgeReport, and that only through someone else's parent. I'd be hard pressed to consider the Blogger.com web site itself to have changed much either, since blogging as a whole took off through a myriad of web sites as far as I recall. *shrug*
I was wondering... ;^)
Hey, don't forget me!
and they didn't change it in a good way:
Goatse.cx
tubgirl.com
lemonparty.org
While I agree with the content of the list, I don't really agree with the order. "friendsreunited.com" higher that "google.com"? Give me a break. Pretty cool that slashdot and wikipedia made the list though.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
... Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software movement and author of the GPL, says that while he doesn't support the philosophy of "open source" ...
Joe, tell me it ain't so!
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I agree. I used to read the website frequently, before the forced ad, and I like it a lot. But has it changed the world? Please. Probably only 0.001% of the world's population has even heard of it. By the way, where do you find these (liberal) elitists? I only see them on television, and read about the in right-wing publications.
Better to be the content than to be teh ghey.
And... blogger.com, really? I would think that livejournal would have been a better choice for the "dragging down journalistic standards/bluring the line between infotainment and slice of life." category...
I was wondering why not LiveJournal, too. They were both created in 1999 (and according to Wikipedia, LJ was March compared with August for Blogger). LiveJournal also combined it with the social networking aspect, which I don't believe Blogger does(?). It wasn't the first social networking site - but are there any earlier ones still going today? And were there any earlier social networking sites that combined it with "blogging"/journalling?
Not to mention the source being open, and having spawned many other sites. Does that apply to blogger?
(Though I disagree it's "dragging down journalistic standards" - LiveJournal is primarily used for journalling and discussions with friends, not "pretending to be a journalist" like many blogs - but nonetheless, LJ can be used for stereotypical standalone blogging if you wish.)
He said flashing his 4 digit UID. Oi you, get off my lawn.
Deleted
FriendsReunited is a school reunion site, or probably a Web 2.0 social networking paradigm. I can only think of about 1 person in my high school class that isn't listed, it's got phenomenal scope. Unfortunately they started charging to contact people, and quite honestly i dont care that much about contacting old friends... after all I lost contact with them for good reason.
OTOH easyjet are huge. I'm not sure how you could miss them, they pretty much changed the european airline industry.
I thought it was actually a fairly good list. Considering i've used almost every one of those sites, and at least half of them would be in my personal top 10.
How come Slashdot is only listed once?
And both Friends Reunited and EasyJet are very popular UK web sites.
Deleted
www.zombo.com??!!!
the mods may say you posted flamebait, but to me it's a flame that warms my heart. rock on, brother! --chebucto
The top 15 "top 15 lists" that no one cared about.
Gosh... how many of these things are out there.
How many of these sites actually changed the world ?
The whole Pez/eBay is fake.
"The frequently repeated story that eBay was founded to help Omidyar's fiancée trade PEZ Candy dispensers was fabricated by a public relations manager in 1997 to interest the media. This was revealed in Adam Cohen's 2002 book and confirmed by eBay."
Okay, /. is neat and all, but all you guys do is cut and paste news articles and provide a comment system. Hardly earth shattering.
Although There were a few browsers around before Netscape. Netscape is the #1 website that transformed the Web, and the world. Everything else is derivative, or made possible by Netscape.
I mean... I don't deny that (some) of those websites left quite an impact but I sure don't believe that there aren't any pr0n related websites which had a big enough impact to place them right on that list. Sure, maybe they didn't get the massive amounts of users (or maybe we simply don't know) but a fact remains that pr0n has drawn many people to the Internet.
Just take a look at the most often used search strings on Google for example....
From Wikipedia:
Upon reopening on June 3, 2006, its number of visitors has doubled, the increased popularity attributed to greater exposure through the recent media coverage. This has in turn increased the advertisement revenues to the founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij. The advertisements now generate about 75,000 USD per month according to speculations by Swedish newspaper SvD.
I guess you could call that "sticking it to the man." You could also call it profiting. Perhaps a bit less Robin Hood and a bit more ticket scalper.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
notice that even though this is a british site, all but one of the sites mentioned is american.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
www.rodeogirlsinbondage.com
OK, maybe it didn't change, like, the WHOLE world, but it sure rocked mine.
If by the whole world you mean, EEUU, Canada, UK, Australia, ok go ahead the rest is meaningless.
cualquier vaina hagase el muerto
I guess the author never really leaves his room/basement/cabin/cave often, because 84% of the people in world still don't know what internet is, how it looks and what it eats.
God created man in his own image, but somehow he evolved into a hairless monkey.
Napster had a web site? Honestly, I used Napster heavily for years, and never even thought to go to napster.com for anything...
I guess I made a logical fault in most web sites being universal in the english-speaking world, so I didn't consider UK-specific or euro-specific possibilities. Honest to god, I'd only seen an ad for the reunion thing amongst the plethora of other reunion sites, and I'd never heard the name EasyJet once till now.
Learn something new every day.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
Phrases like "the music swapping website kazza" are all two frequent in the media. I find this really depressing because it highlights the general lack of understanding of technologies which the authors then proceed to make value judgements about.
Most of this is old news to Slashdotters, but just in case a "journalist" reads this post (yeh, right):
When anyone calls Napster a "website", they quickly expose that they have no experience with the software they are talking about.
Eh, got that off my chest, despite being a bit OT
goatse.cx
what about microsoft.com? they currently rule the computer world now.
I mostly agree with them.
I have never been on napster.com, but I see why it made the list.
I have never heard of either "blogger.com" or "friendsreunited.com"
slashdot.org - Yay!
salon.com - What? How did this crappy website change the world?
google.com - Duh.. Why isn't this number 1?
yahoo.com - Really? Yahoo?
15. easyjet.com (Budget airline) -- And out of nowhere. Easyjet? Man, I love Easyjet. I fly them everywhere I can. But I don't see how they changed the world or even influenced any other sites very much. This was a really wierd one to be on this list.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
1. eBay.com -- didn't change the Internet so much as it saved it from the dot.com crash.
2. wikipedia.com -- delivered the information utopia that was fraudulantly advertized as existing 15 years previous.
3. napster.com -- they had a website?
4. youtube.com -- sort of like video.google.com, or a dozen other sites i can't think of right now because i don't care.
5. blogger.com -- anyone who thinks blogging is an important part of the Internet just lost all street cred.
6. friendsreunited.com (School reunion site) -- so revolutionary I've never heard of it.
7. drudgereport.com (News site) -- I'll give em that one.
8. myspace.com -- see #5
9. amazon.com -- see #1
10. slashdot.org -- another computer news recycler. no hardOCP? no tomshardware? no planetquake? no theregister?
11. salon.com (Online magazine and media company) -- i think the true significance of online news is online alternative news.
12. craigslist.org (A centralised network of online urban communities) -- sort of like Yahoo a decade ago?
13. google.com (Popular search engine) -- so popular its #13. seriously, no #1 for the big G?
14. yahoo.com -- agreed.
15. easyjet.com (Budget airline) -- see #1
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
I may be wrong, but I think Suprnova.org was the first big torrent tracking site.
Those who are members of the now largely private torrent tracking communities can understand how revolutionary it was.
Perhaps in another five years, Suprnova.org will replace Napster on this list as the mainstream catches up to whats going on.
For funny, way back when (mid-90's or so) I worked for IXA (now part of Savvis) as a network engineer. There were 2 of us, me and Nikos Moaut (or however you spell his name)
Anyhow, we were the uplink for Amazon and I had to deal with them quite often. One day I asked Nik what "Amazon" was and he told me it was a book store.
I told him it was a really stupid name for a bookstore. Shows what I knew.
Welcome to the power of the liberal market, catastrophe theory and tipping points, or How Things Change. Who says mathematics is completely useless.
Deleted
The Memory Hole is da bomb! http://www.thememoryhole.org/
Another "my take":
1. eBay.com - PayPal is actually the site that made eBay what it is today. If it wasn't for PayPals payment format people would be very suspect of eBay and fraud would be in the double digit percentile
2. wikipedia.com - Come back in about three years and we'll see. It's neat, it has potential, it's not ready for prime time.
3. napster.com - The site was worthless. If you want to list internet software, sure. At that rate include AIM.
4. youtube.com - This is today's stir. Much like wikipedia, wait a few years and see what's left.
5. blogger.com - Shrug. Blogging is neat for the author but for the most part 99% of them are fodder and rightfully so.
6. friendsreunited.com (School reunion site) - Perhaps. I don't know this one well but if it's anything like Classmates.com it should be listed as an annoyance.
7. drudgereport.com (News site) - "I'll compile links to other news sources and occasionally throw in my own 2 cents". Sounds like a blog.
8. myspace.com - What? Only because it's getting press. It's this years Geocities. In time it will go the way of geocities as well.
9. amazon.com - First webstore to turn a profit, finally a really insightful pick. Amazon has endurance and a great business model that most other larger retailers are trying to rip off.
10. slashdot.org - It's kind of like drudge on technology with a forum. Obviously I visit the site but it's a shell of what it use to be.
11. salon.com (Online magazine and media company) - I have never seen anything truly redeeming on salon that hasn't appeared elsewhere.
12. craigslist.org (A centralised network of online urban communities) - Yeah, fine. Probably more known for all the wrong reasons.
13. google.com (Popular search engine) - Unless Google starts really bringing more to the masses and doesn't let us down on the same level as the Segway did I don't think it will matter much over time. What google does have going for it is it's popularity today.
14. yahoo.com - See #13, think the same thoughts about 5 years ago.
15. easyjet.com (Budget airline) - Give me one good reason.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Whore :P
Yeah, Geocities. A lot of people made their first (crappy) webpage there and got their feet wet that way.
To mark the 15 years of WWW and HTTP, there is not one that is 15 years old. What about dejanews. What about hotbot? Yes, they are not around anymore, yet at their time they realy changed at least the online world.
And what about the real first ones? They actually DID change the world.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I am actually being serious - the one thing that the internet did was greatly change the way people accessed pornography. (Not to mention, the pornographic websites were the first to show a profit) You'd think that at least ONE porn site would have made the list... :P
TRHOnline - Staggering Towards Brilliance
I think the list is pretty good, but it is missing what got the web started in large part, porn. I don't mean to be a troll, but early in the web's commercial development porn was a big fraction of the business, perhaps a third of the web. I do not know if there is a single pioneering porn website that could be listed with the likes of eBay, Yahoo, and craigslist, but porn's role should not be forgotten.
P.S. I think Yahoo should be ranked higher. Yahoo was a leader in searching and portalness. Mapquest.com also maybe should have made the list over say Salon.com or easyjet.com
I can't believe Sex.com isn't on that list !
When's the last time anyone was paid $14 million For Sex ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Those guys are apparently too clueless to realize that Wikipedia, a noncommercial project, is quite properly at wikipedia.org, not ".com" as they listed it. (They did, however, correctly note Slashdot and Craigslist as .org sites, so they apparently aren't quite totally dot-com zombies who are unaware of any other top level domain.)
--Dan
Web Tips
Hope this story does not create a sudden rush of vistitors to slashdot, so many so that the site goes down and create a name for that phenomenon ;-)
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It should be more like "10 websites that changed US". I doubt if majority of the websites here made any differences in other countries...
"Great, misformatted and I forgot to check 'Post Anonymously'. Great."
Well, sure; but other than that you did great!
#DeleteChrome
This is just like American baseball's "world championship"...sigh. While some of these sites (ie: google) did (still does) impact a large part of the "world", not all of these sites changed the "world".
There is a world beyond our English speaking western societies that we tend not to consider when making such grand statements. =).
Southwest was selling tickets online in 1996, beating easyJet by about a year.
http://www.southwest.com/about_swa/airborne.html
End of Line.
But when it melts server after server, it is surely changing insurance quotes
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...but she told me I was being silly and to stop looking over her whiskers when she's writing code for IPv8.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I think Etrade.com should have been on the list. This site and other online brokers let millions of people buy and sell stocks from home, providing a huge boost to the economy.
no supernova.org? i think that was a lot bigger then selios..
How many people remember that site..didn't it make torrents mainstream really?
There are and have been priceline,orbit,and about 100 other airline search engines..
yey or neh?
hamsterdance.com
Seriously, time-wasting and silly forwards are a huge part of the Internet. Sure, youtube is listed, but the article emphasizes the usefulness, not the uselessness. The Internet is not such a serious place, after all.
I haven't RTFA so it might mention it in there, but it was Drudge who broke the Clinton - Lewinsky 'scandal', the first time internet-based media had trumped the traditional players on a story of this size.
to find a pioneer of cheap travel.
s tory_id=5518940
:-)
:)
:-)
y s_limited.htm
Now, if he only had had a website (or they existed when he was in business):
http://www.economist.com/people/displayStory.cfm?
posted out of historical interest and because Freddie Laker had a cooler name: SkyTrain
I'll leave it to the reader to work out the inflation adjusted 1977 cost of a London > New York flight, with bonus for calculating comparisons to Laker setting up straight after the last oil price shock
also: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2283244.stm
and: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddie_Laker
(but put the Economist obit first because it's the second Google result from my search, and the first is a paywall to the same piece. Go figure
I'd also take issue with the Wiki statement "Laker was popular with the public and regarded as one of Margaret Thatcher's golden boys of industry". I worked for years with a friend who (long after got a check from the class settlement for unfair costs when BA took Laker to the cleaners. BA led the pack, eliminating Laker conveniently just before Thatcher privatized them. Summary of that case: http://www.lfip.org/lawe506/documents/laker_airwa
So, not only did Laker get this whole thing going, he also was the first to trade jurisdictional rules (see RynanAir and other seeking preferred landing fees in backwater EU secondary airports) *AFAIK* First to mass market affordable tickets to normal people, first airline to challenge established national carrier privileges in the court . . . well and to boot he sounded like an all round nice guy. Really makes you think how sucky commercial air flight is compared to what it could be. All good reasons he hooked up with Branson to guide Virgin Airways into success and a big BA challenger. I think that kept him smiling into his old age.
Easyjet was the first airline which sold seats only on its website. You couldn't, and as far as I know still can't, buy an Easyjet ticket from a travel agent. (Not that it has tickets, of course, you just present your ID at check-in. Of course a lot of airlines let you do that now.)
The blurb in the Guardians article is wrong, but the choice is valid. Knowing a bit about how newspapers work, I'd guess that the article as submitted was correct, and the editor put in the nonsense about "first low-cost British airline" etc.
From PErsonal experience, EasyJet are a complete pain in the arse. They DO NOT CARE ABOUT CUSTOMER SERVICE in the slightest.
Why?
I turned up at Luton for a flight 1.5hrs in advance of the flight. There were big queues but I waited in line.
When I got to the fron of the queue it was 30 mins before the scheduled take off time for the flight.
I was told that I was too late for the flight and it had closed.
No matter what I said the staff would not let me onto the flight.
The queues were mainly due to delayed flights due to early morning fog! I was not alone in missing my flight.
Eventually, I gave up and left the airport. On my way out, I saw that the flight wad delayed by 2 hours.
So, why would any system let a flight be closed 2.5 hours before it was going to depart?
They have a system of rules which is so strict there is no room for ANY COMMON SENSE.
I'm sure that in this case any rational system there would be some room for a bit of flexibilty in cases like this.
IMHO, all they care about is getting your money and the really don't care about customer service. They have got your money and thats it.
Needless to say, I don't even attempt to fly with EasyJet anymore.
and on a philosophical note:
.even if it was only to rant to baffled friends about this newfangled CSS thing . . .
.leaving us at least one fewer thing to get in the way of, well . . . normal relations . .
.. )
- we got time to do stuff in the real world whilst out little modems crackled away . .
- our girlfriends & family didn't (on the whole) care for the intarweb and so we didn't have to run about cleaning windows sypware, lest we be accused of evil voodoo for sitting near their machine . .
- world + dog didn't call asking for a myspace / bebo type site thinking they could host it on a virtual account for $20pcm. They did of course want flash animations *everywhere* but that could be fixed by handing the nearest pre-teen a graphics tablet or, if a deadline, drinking waaay too much the night before setting the design . . .
- right up until they got into the advertising game, we could believe Google's altruistic mantra . .
- "thin edge" or highly targeted media sounded a really good thing (at least it did if you worked in print publishing), and being cocooned in a geek world, (or pre - AOL joining the fun) we could still believe - just a bit - that shock jocks, neo-nazis, political wierdos of all kinds might not turn the whole game into a ego-stroking cacophony muffled only by commercial interest plays & lawsuits, and yet more recently internet aware (as opposed to savvy) special interest pressure groups.
- we gave our old (working) crap to charity rather than spending a week answering questions already answered in 72pt bold typeface on an ebay listing. (and corrolary i wonder if we didn't accumulate less crap, because we couldn't flip a ill advised purchase on ebay
- last (well not last, but before i start asking "does anybody here remember Vera Lynn?") only a few of us ever had to debate copyright and trademark law in earnest - and they actually got paid for it. Added because i still see no horizon for such concerns actually becoming a voting issue.
...goat.cx ?
Uh, what about The Best Page in the Universe?
How come Slashdot is only listed once?
It was ABOUT Slashdot, not ON Slashdot. otherwise there would have been the obligatory dupe, listing them twice.
http://outcampaign.org/
Now, on the list that supposedly changed the world, there are site that everyone knows, and there are sites that I even never heard of it (and I'm more IT/web minded then most of my friends).
;-) to slashdot; *I* am pretty fond of it and know what it is, but most people will never have heard of it. Or only from hearsay or in the 'visited once or twice' category, like for me with salon.com and easyjet and the like. I mean sure, I've heard of it, maybe even visited it once in my life, but 'changed the earth' - that's hyperbole. And then there are the sites I truelly didn't even hear about, before this: now, I must say - ego or not - that I truelly doubt a site has actually 'changed the world' that I NEVER even heard about. Now, one might claim it's not the importance/popularity that counts, but the 'impact' it has had on the world. To this I say: the greater the impact, the more it should be noticable. The amount of 'new' things, or 'change' it brought, is fully arbitrarily; according to those lines of thought, google should not even be mentionned, because it was nothing more then a searchengine, which existed long before. A new algorithm and less advertisements are hardly groundbreaking 'changes' of the world. Thus, even to the list, it's about the impact according to importance/popularity it has gained. Google, ebay and wikipedia, and probably amazon certainly merrits a place, then, and sites like youtube are rapidly gaining that status.
And then ebay and google get weird places, so I guess the list was not made up according to popularity.
Like, with all due respect (nah, not really
But it's pretty ridiculous to lump together sites like google and ebay (known by most of the entire worldpopulace) with sites hardly anyone knows (on a world-scale, that is). And even google & co can not really claim they changed the world: they changed some aspects of how people do things in the world; but most of these things were not 'new' on itself. (though, granted, they made it much easier to do). If they would say 'they changed the internet', then I would totally agree - but changing the world? Well, maybe in some way, depending on how broad you define that.
In a sense, we ALL change the world every second of our lives. We only don't know how, and it's hardly ever noticed, even by ourselves.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
All the other entries are sites that changed the way we use the internet, easyjet is a company that changed the way we travel (well, around europe at least) It just seems like a bit of a mismatch compared to the other sites
There are two obvious ideas for indexing the Web: automatic full-text indexing (Google) or manually built directory hierarchies (Yahoo, dmoz.org).
...
The first manual directories were the pages maintained at CERN and NSCA - they were small. The first publically editable manual directory system I saw was Oliver McBryan's "Mother of all BBSs". He made it publically available together in 1994, together with his full-text search indexer, the WWWW. They were his tools for taming the Web.
It wasn't clear (at least to me) whether either of the approaches would scale.
They competed for a while. McBryan didn't develop his systems further, but Yahoo copied the "Mother of all BBSs" concept and became very popular, while Webcrawler was the first popular Internet-wide full-text indexer.
Even at that time Webcrawler, which I believe covered about 10% of all web pages, was already superior to Yahoo, which couldn't match its completeness and lack of user bias. Later, Lycos and Altavista took over from Webcrawler and seriously aimed for 100% coverage. By then, I regarded Yahoo's pupularity as a matter of ignorance. Their directory tree is always helpful, of course, but if you can think of any search terms to use at all, even related ones, full-text search is so much better.
Novices don't understand that. To them, a manually created directory tree looks good: they don't realize how much is missing and how much is in there in places where they'll never think to look. Full-text search looks bad to them because all of the worthless results. They don't look past the bad results, they don't realize how many more good results they're getting, and they don't realize how easily they can experiment with the search terms to improve results, because they are not aware that keywords are just text strings found on a page.
So Yahoo's business was based on ignorance. But hey, that's where the users were
You did just fine as far as you went with the 15 winners. But when the concept of Imitation Energy becomes more widely understood, http://www.newpath4.com will be added very quickly & appropriately as Number 16.
Industrial Age 2 + How-to Stop Malignant Cancers.
Honestly, if you're the first person to post the list, and others (such as myself) want to see the list quickly and without having to visit the actual site (which is likely super-ad-ridden), then you're doing a service to the discussion and I don't think you should be afraid of "whoring." You should get credit for it, in my mind. I don't know why people are so concerned about it...
:)
The formatting, though, well, that's a different issue.
Particularly since the BBC started online before CNN (1994 vs 1995), and if you judge by Alexa, these days bbc.co.uk is *bigger* - BBC ranked at 24, CNN at 30.
Without Tim Berners-Lees very first web site at CERN no one would have seen the potential and the web wouldn't exist. Without any argument this site by its very nature was the most influential web site that ever has and ever will be created.
Many of those sites are well known only in USA. I hardly see how they can change world.
Check out easyjet.com for finding that blonde from the 2nd grade.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
How come Slashdot is only listed once?
It was ABOUT Slashdot, not ON Slashdot. otherwise there would have been the obligatory dupe, listing them twice.
(Hey, it's usually good for at least three levels deep around here)
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
Historically, it's how trolls go about building their karma so they're not always posting -1. Personally, I refuse to step that low. I make some legitimate posts, *then* troll. ;)
Remember back when planning a party/gathering involved taking far too much time making sure everyone had directions to get there? Now its just "give me the address and the computer will find it". I'd say this had a genuine impact on many people's lives.
heh, I really thought these made a bigger inpact than, lets say easjet. oh yes, the news.bbc.co.uk being like the leading news site too, but I guess that would be rated 20 somthing :)
I have morals, If you dont like them, I have other ones.
What ? No hotmail ?? No Altavista ???
also missing... tucows, download.com, suprnova and piratebay...
European Linux user, living in Antwerp
No, I'm serious: Before the coffee pot, a typical web page was
The coffee pot was an a-ha! moment. It made Jenny-cam possible.
Missing sites
Because the web is all about the power to annoy
Zombo.com
Badger Badger Badger
and of course
Hamster Dance
1) Mosaic -> Netscape -> Mozilla Firefox
First browser, nuff said
2) IE
Made Internet security an important part of every day life
3) Napster (and bittorrent and limewire, etc)
Share (steal) things for free
4) AOL/MSN messenger/Yahoo/ICQ -> Trillian
Chat chat chat your life away
5) Outlook (though pine, et al was much earlier)
Would your business still work w/o email?
6) Skype
Free phone service w/o the phone.
7) Vonage
cheap phone service w/ the phone.
8) SETI@home
distributed computing for X-files fans everywhere.
9) ftp
That program you never knew you were using to download all that stuff you get. And the one you don't use to update the website you don't run.
10) weatherbug
Many of you don't know about it, but its simple, and it gives you a seamless way to know what the weather looks like when you have an office with no windows.
Ira
I remember that.
Didn't it basically let you broadcast the presence of and search other member's NT shares?
SMB/RPC in the open over the Internet. Man, those were the days.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
4, 6) They were first.
5) Blogging HAS changed things. Not that I like that, but I accept it.
10) Slashdot was the first to do that PLUS a threaded discussion system that was 1) anonymous if you wanted 2) immune from moderators who could edit/delete contents
12) Craigslist was the first new site (not born of a oldworld BBS) that became the defacto BBS for whole cities. This was before "local" websites were all the rage.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
It actually has effects felt outside the Internet.
Bands are now made and broken across Tom's goddamn friend list counts.
Movies like Step It Up rake in totally unexpected profits due to MySpace promotion.
Kids who would never get laid in HS 4 years ago are now gettin the hookup, dawg.
Its size dwarves LJ, Xanga, and the others.
Even I was coerced into getting a profile. ME! That says something.
(Then again I only use it to spy on other people)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
\(_o)/
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
At this point, I estimate more sites deploy Wakaba or Kareha (the revised engines that power the US *chans) than Slash and Scoop combined.
They're easy to setup, easy to administer and fit most people's needs.
I wonder where the Wiki engines fit in all this
(I really should do a codebase engine breakdown one day with an automated crawler...)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
(that is: mod up)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Reads more like a current UK based most popular rather than a most influential; myspace & youtube are enjoying their 15 minutes but whether they will have long term impact remains to be seen.
What was significant about Napster was the P2P software not its website.
Hotmail should be in the list for pioneering web based email.
Much as I hate to say it eBay would be nothing if Paypal hadn't created an secure system for small online payments.
The BBC is one of my most visited sites and certainly the best news site, but not sure it has been influential.
Salon? Good but just another on-line magazine Wired News http://www.wired.com/ was probably more influential before it went corporate.
Finally multimap.com pioneered on line mapping at - least in the UK.
"I deny nothing, but doubt everything." Lord Byron
Back when only government agencies and research institutions had direct Internet access, uunet was the most important email gateway in the world. Every bangpath email address started "uunet!..." These guys have embarassingly short memories.
They had only offices in the airports where they work.
They build up their bussiness with the Internet at the heart of their bussiness strategy.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The discussion is about websites that changed the world. Nobody is judging Easyjet in the context of affordable traveling, but in the context of important websites...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Paul was arguably the creator of ecommerce. This is a great read http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html/.
Love The Blub Paradox.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy