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)

#16 The Pirate Bay?

[Keruo]

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.

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

[Enselic]

Great, misformatted and I forgot to check 'Post Anonymously'. Great.

Myspace, blogger, youtube

[phorm]

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)

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.'

What about goatse?

[Anonymous Crowhead]

That changed my world, permanently.

napster.com?

[muftak]

napster.com wasn't really a website that changed the world, napster was a bit of software that changed the world.

Re:napster.com?

[Anonymous Crowhead]

Here's how Napster changed the world: It made a generation of young people think that getting music for free was practically a birthright.

Quibbler

[Paladin144]

I'm gonna have to quibble (stand back everyone!).

#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?

one man's summary

[acvh]

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.

Re:one man's summary

[PMuse]

From profound to negligible, they are:

• 13. google.com - Search engines indeed changed the world, but Google has never claimed to be the first.
  
• 9. amazon.com, 1. eBay.com, 15. easyjet.com (Budget airline) - Online commerce is important, but there were many pioneers. Expedia.com or one of it's bretheren might deserve a mention, but the importance of budjet airlines like easyjet wasn't their websites.
  
• 5. blogger.com , 4. youtube.com - Content from the masses -- writing, video, and music, too. With the cost of publishing, distribution, and holding inventory reduced to near zero, change is indeed afoot.
  
• 6. friendsreunited.com (School reunion site), 8. myspace.com - Social networking sites certainly deserve a mention. The strength of their effect on social organization is not yet known.
  
• 2. wikipedia.com - Online collaboration in software is changing the world, but outside the software field it hasn't proven itself yet. The field is still young, though.
  
• 3. napster.com - Herald of the era of online music and of music -sharing lawsuits.
  
• 14. yahoo.com - Unable to point to a great iconic achievement, the portals will wind up sharing a footnote with AOL.
  
• 10. slashdot.org - A fine example of its kind, but 'changed history' is a little much.
  
• 12. craigslist.org - Ditto.
  
• 11. salon.com (Online magazine and media company) - Ditto.
  
• 7. drudgereport.com (News site) - Ditto, sort of.

Re:one man's summary

[DerekLyons]

14. yahoo.com - Unable to point to a great iconic achievement, the portals will wind up sharing a footnote with AOL.

What made Yahoo different than other search engines back in that day was their directory - links chosen and edited by human beings and arranged by category with a description. Rarely used today, but powerful in it's day.

There was a lot about cats in the early blogs.

[overshoot]

Silly, that's because a cat owns the Internet.

15 Years ago...

[Nuclear Elephant]

To get a handle on the scale of what has happened, think back to what the world was like 15 years ago.

It was much BETTER...

• John Romero wrote better games
  
• People still built robot girlfriends
  
• Nobody posted Goatsie on fidomail (and if they did, you had plenty of time to cancel the download)
  
• If you didn't have anything interesting to say in a chatroom, you could just ask, "hey isn't this cool?"
  
• Chicks digged us, cos we could hack their school grades and launch global thermonuclear wars
  

anon.penet.fi

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Slashdot's standing...

[Lord Kano]

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

LiveJournal

[mdwh2]

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.)

Not everyone bothers getting an account

[Colin Smith]

He said flashing his 4 digit UID. Oi you, get off my lawn.

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:No dupe?

[Pharmboy]

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.

The real innovators

[Animats]

Here are some of the real innovators. The links given are all to their earliest pages, from 1996.

• Fedex.com FedEx had the first major web site that did something - you could track packages and get an immediate response.
• Viaweb.com The first web site that supported page creation via the web. The first general-purpose shopping cart. Eventually became Yahoo Store. Implemented in LISP.

"Sticking it to the man"

[Infonaut]

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.

napster.com is not a website ...

[pan_sapiens]

.. and yet the mainstream media persist on calling it one, along with kazaa, grokster etc etc.

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):

• Napster / Kazaa etc are not websites. They were peer-to-peer filesharing networks, and associated software. After they were shutdown by legal action, the trademarks were retained and used to market services which sell music.
• They were filesharing networks. This means potentially any data stored on a a computer, legal or illegal, can be shared. Not just music.
• It's not file swapping, it's sharing. In a swap, two parties exchange goods. If I share a file with you, I do not lose a copy of it, and you don't need to offer me anything in return.

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 ..

Geocities

[Trespass]

Yeah, Geocities. A lot of people made their first (crappy) webpage there and got their feet wet that way.

Missing what got the internet started

[jeffsenter]

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

Re:No dupe? (happy?)

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

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.