The Internet stakes a claim as one of the most important inventions not just of our lifetime but of all time. It makes the world smaller via global connectivity, allowing people to communicate in real-time across vast distances. Like any seminal technology, it has enjoyed several advances that heighten its usefulness. Here are four of the most important ones.
Image via Flickr by dullhunk
Now synonymous with Google, the search engine worked quite differently in its infancy. In the mid-90s, early versions such as Lycos, Dogpile, AltaVista, and Hotbot all gained popularity via similar methodology. They all performed rudimentary crawling of the Internet to determine the most useful links for users.
In 1998, Google debuted and immediately changed the game. Their vaunted PageRank algorithm deduced the importance of individual pages based upon the number of links citing them. The rest is search engine history.
Social Media
While early social media functionality existed years earlier, the debuts of Friendster in 2002 and MySpace in 2003 marked the start of the Internet as we now know it. These sites allowed people to speak easily with current friends, reconnect with old ones, and find new ones via basic functionality. By the time Facebook and Twitter arrived in 2004 and 2006, consumers had experience with the amazing ways they could interact with friends and acquaintances.
Facebook’s introduction of relationship status notifications and the “Like” button added new ways for people to share and communicate their feelings on subjects. Twitter’s focus on brevity further changed the course of conversation, allowing anyone to offer their thoughts not only to themselves but to celebrities as well. In 2014, 74% of Internet users interacted on social media, and the number climbs each year.
Streaming Video
If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many trillions of words has the Internet said about funny animals? Since video operates at 48 frames per second or higher, the number is that much more massive. Simply stated, visuals matter on the Internet, which is why streaming services such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion have captured such massive customer bases. People want to watch what is happening in the world around them, and the Internet empowers them to do this.
Shared Imagery
Despite the predominance of streaming video, image sites such as Imgur, Flickr, and Photobucket maintain popularity since they offer a different type of user experience. They provide the means for anyone with a good idea to bring it to life quickly in an easily understood format.
The pros of interactive content like this are obvious to anyone familiar with Buzzfeed. This site provides charts that the user can manipulate to change the data display. Buzzfeed favors big, splashy imagery that is visually pleasing yet simple enough that a child can use the oversized button.
Buzzfeed is not the only company that builds its brand via interactive charts. Even the NASDAQ provides its data in a responsive manner, allowing stock analysts to evaluate all phases of a company’s business standing in minute detail.
The Internet enriches your daily life by providing entertaining, educational information. None of that is possible without the technological advances listed above
