Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

15 Websites That Changed the World

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the shake-it-up dept.

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."

3 of 298 comments (clear)

  1. Someone's gotta do this, and I don't like whoring by Enselic · · Score: 5, Informative

    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)

  2. Re:Someone's gotta do this, and I don't like whori by wizbit · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.'
  3. It's a little uk/euro centric by grahamsz · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.