We’ve all found it difficult to predict where the internet will be in a few months let alone in a few years. Rather, let’s focus on where we’ve been and see if we can extract some general themes and behaviors that have shaped the internet today.

First, we all remember this…

Original Google Beta

This is from the Wayback Machine. Try it and have fun reminiscing over all the old websites that have been redesigned or perished in the .com bust. When google first started, it quite literally was a prototype that was a total hit or miss. We had such giants at the time like Yahoo! and AltaVista…remember them?

Google: Might-work-some-of-the-time-prototype that is much more up to date.

What lessons can we extract from that time?

First, you can find that many large companies were still trying to understand what it means for their business to exist online. They had a rather benign presence in the web sphere. Besides having poor design athestics during that time many companies served as informational sources. Very few if any at all considered moving any transactional business online. From the screenshot below, you can see that IBM at the time was sharing sponsored news and as expected investor information and such. Nothing particularly groundbreaking here, which happens to be the point. Companies perceived websites that exist outside of their domain of ‘Trusted Networks’ to be rogues or little more than useless personal sites that talked about nothing of value to them. There was no real ‘information’ that was being exchanged or so they thought. There was little information on what was happening on IRC and private chat rooms. The nascent movement of building online communities had been underway at that point. Companies neither realized the power or the culture that preceded their involvement in ‘shaping’ the internet.

Old IBM website - Text Only

The first truly industrious group of companies to exploit the internet were the porn companies. They understood the private nature of the internet and the latent demand for such content. Where am I going with this and why is this important for you to understand?

In the tradition of riveting cliffhangers you’ll find out in my next post.