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."

Comments

Someone's gotta do this, and I don't like whoring

[Enselic]

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)

Re:Someone's gotta do this, and I don't like whori

[wizbit]

Apparently, they were the first airline to offer tickets on budget flights online:

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.'

FriendsReuni...what?

[Itninja]

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.

It's a little uk/euro centric

[grahamsz]

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.

Re:missing websites

[27,000]

Anonymous Web BBS, both born from the original 2ch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2channel

2chan is a Japanese offshoot, while 4chan is the English language board (started by SA goons). 4chan alone has more comment traffic than /. with some 50,000 posts daily. 4chan saw hundreds of fans at the recent Otakon conference. Not world changing, but easily more popular than the lower ranks on this list. From 4chan has come Onechan, WTFux, fChan, not4chan, iichan, 420chan...

Re:one man's summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Well The Guardian is a British newspaper and both friendsreunited and easyjet are uk-based.
Easyjet and other low-cost airlines definitely changed travel in a significant way, at least in Europe. Maybe that's not the world, but if the US can have a World Series then we can grant The Guardian a little leeway, no?

Re:Someone's gotta do this, and I don't like whori

[dtobias]

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.)

Re:one man's summary

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Changed the web, yes, ...

And Usenet. Be fair.

Google just took over the Deja News database.

Re:one man's summary

[pthisis]

No, Altavista at the time worked about as well as Lycos did before it. You could find stuff, kind of, with a handful of carefully crafted attempts, but it took a fair amount of time and care (trying many different queries) to find almost anything.

Google was the first search engine where you would often get the right result on the front page for the first naive query you tried. In other words, the first one that was workable for non-techies.

There's a reason Google was the first engine to have an "I'm feeling lucky" button. Putting that on the alternatives, pre-Google, would've been like playing Russian roulette with 5 bullets in the revolver.

Re:one man's summary

[pthisis]

Or you could use the Aliweb search engine (which predated Yahoo) or Lycos (which came out within a couple of months of Yahoo), or one of the dozens of other link categorization sites that were prevalent at the time (and were the reason that the first two letters in Yahoo stand for "yet another"...)