We are officially in 2010 completed the first 10 years of the new millenium, let us take a look back at the Internet: our information highway of last decade.
1. Google It.
You can not skip talking about Google when discussing Internet in 21st century. The up rise of a new breed of search engine began way back in mid 90′s, however people did not start ‘googing it’ until 2004 where you begin to see google everywhere and as everything. Google now provides more than 100 products from Browser, Operation System to Net-phone, mobile phone.
2. eShopping
Before online payments was mostly for purchasing Internet based subscriptions, but eBay and Amazon.com have introduced us to a brave new world of online shopping. Purchase item online now seems easy and personal; no need for spending 1 day doing grocery when you can finish shopping online within an hour. With 3rd party payment gateway, you won’t need a credit card to make online payments, which potentially drop the average age of eShoppers.
3. Freemium
Free online services with charges on advanced features, that is the game of multi-million dollar companies that provides free products. It is no surprise when you see match makers, social networks and web applications give you access to their services/products for free and allow you to pay premium when you crave for more.
4. Social is Everything
With tremendous numbers of success in social business, Internet has truely took human social to a new level. MatchMaker.com, MySpace, Facebook are few example of websites that connect people to people. As for tech savvies, we have digg, StackOverflow, Wikipedia to keep our knowledge streaming.
5. Connectivity between Services
Similar to online social network, the Internet we in today related everything to everything using widgets and 3rd party services. We now able to list our tweets and flickr photos in personal blog, find (or suggests) your friends when joining a new social service (OAuth) and use 1 credential to access multiple sites using OpenID.
6. Read and Write
Online articles are getting personal, with multiple perspective angles and less professional? Problem with news, articles, whitepapers are they become out of date and lost in touch with time and audience. Information is now coming from blogs by jounalist, software developer and mother of 4. And as the amount of information increases, the details we want to absorb shrinks down to 140 characters as twitter introduced micro-blogging.
7. User Generated Contents
Similar trend to blogs, informative websites are high in voluntary writers and low in running cost. The best way to attract traffics from viewers is to provide them with contents generated by users of their own.
8. Standard Standard Standard
In the dev world, cries for standardisation for web technologies have been continously answered: HTML5 proposed and shipping toward; Web browsers enters another war for standardisation; CSS frameworks were introduced to prompt tidier stylesheets and Javascript frameworks were developed further explore protential of client-side events.
9. Back is going nowhere
As more websites practise high interactive web technologies like Flash and AJAX, the fate of ‘Back’ button in web browsers is to become worse than useless as client side events are not captured by web browser and navigators are provided on the webpages.
10. Applications gone to Web
We now have more and more applications that made available without need for installing or for some: paying for it. Simply use your web browser, you now can open word document, speadsheets or slideshow from any computer, in any operation system.
Do you have your favorite 10 look backs? I would like to hear from you!