thegenius1
16th August 2006, 06:44 PM
TOP 5 Sites That Changed the World !
1. eBay.com
Founded: Pierre Omidyar, 1995, US
Users: 168m
What is it? Auction and shopping site
You cannot buy fireworks, guns, franking machines, animals or lock-picking devices on eBay, the internet's premier auction site, but almost everything else is OK: sideburns, houses, used underwear and of course Pez dispensers.
Pez is where it is said to have all begun for eBay's ponytailed founder Pierre Omidyar when he responded to his fiancee's worries that she would no longer be able to expand her toy collection when they moved to Silicon Valley. Omidyar developed a car boot sale anyone could use wherever they were, and without the need for getting dressed. The name sprang from Echo Bay Technology Group, Omidyar's consultancy company, and the first sale was a broken laser pointer.
Things have moved on a little since then. We spend more time on eBay than any other internet site. There are more than 10 million users in the UK. And eBay is far from just a second-hand stall. New items are sold by global companies; many people have abandoned their jobs to eBay full time, and normally sane people fret about 'negative feedback' and being outbid by 'snipers'. eBay owns PayPal and Skype, making dealing almost effortless.
2. wikipedia.com
Founded: Jimmy Wales, 2001, US
Users: 912,000 visits per day
What is it? Online encyclopaedia
As a young boy growing up in Hunstville, Alabama, Jimmy Wales attended a one-room school, sharing his classes with only three other children. Here he spent 'many hours poring over encyclopaedias', and faced the familiar frustrations: their scope was conservative; they were hard to navigate and often out of date.
In January 2001 he created a solution. Wikipedia was a free online encyclopaedia and differed from its predecessors in one fundamental regard: it was open to everyone to read, and also to edit. If you had something to add - from a pedantic correction to an entire entry on your specialist subject - the Wiki template made this easy. The software enables entries to be updated within minutes of new developments. There is nothing you cannot find - how best to make glass, the use of the nappy in space exploration - and if something isn't there, you may wish to take matters into your own hands.
Like any fast-moving venture - the site attracts 2,000-plus page requests a second - it has not been slow to attract criticism. Occasionally a libellous article will lie undetected for months, as happened with an entry linking one of Robert Kennedy's aides with his assassination. But Wales says his creation is abused only rarely, and swiftly corrected by other users. 'Those who use Wikipedia a lot appreciate its true value and have learnt to trust it,' he says. 'Sometimes a prankster will substitute a picture of Hitler for George Bush, and within an hour someone would have changed it back.'
3. napster.com
Founded: Shawn Fanning, 1999, US
Users: 500,000 paying subscribers
What is it? File sharing site
Shawn Fanning created Napster in 1999 while studying at Boston's Northeastern University, as a means of sharing music files with his fellow students. Of course, it was entirely illegal (home taping kills music, remember) and was quickly attacked by a mainstream music industry already struggling to make profits on its money-guzzling artists. Its popularity reached a peak in 2000 with over 70 million registered users before Fanning's company was forced to pay millions of dollars in backdated royalties: a move which bankrupted the original, free-to-use Napster the following year. By then, however, the premature leaking and sharing of hotly anticipated albums by some of the major labels' most bankable artists had proved to be a stimulant, not a thief, of sales once the CD version was released. The new Napster - effectively a renamed version of a pay-to-download MP3 site owned by the original Napster company's buyers, the German giant Bertelsmann- has never recaptured its original cool, precisely because it is now legitimate. What it did in its brief period of illegal notoriety was popularise the notion that making music freely available on the internet - through MySpace, one-off downloads or artist-sanctioned 'leaks' - does artists no harm at all; indeed, it's helped to launch the careers of many.
4. youtube.com
Founded: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, 2005, US
Users: 100m clips watched a day
What is it? Video sharing site
When Chad Hurley and Steve Chen began working out of a garage in San Mateo in late 2004 to figure out an easy way to upload and share funny videos they'd taken at a dinner party, they had no idea just how huge an impact their creation would make. The former PayPal employees launched the user-friendly site in February 2005 and it has since become one of the most popular sites on the net, with YouTube claiming that 100 million clips are watched every day. Through the grassroots power of the internet and good word-of-mouth, the site quickly went from a place where people shared homemade video clips to users posting long-lost TV and film gems such as bloopers from Seventies game shows to ancient music videos. It has also taken off as a place for amateur film-makers to show off their talents - take David Lehre, a teenager whose MySpace: The Movie became such a popular clip he's already fielded job offers from major movie studios.
Not all television studios immediately embraced the idea of their archived copyrighted footage being shared. 'We're not here to steal,' insists Chen. 'When [US television network] NBC asked us to take something down, we did.' In fact, NBC only last week announced plans to work alongside YouTube, airing exclusive clips and trailers and eventually hoping to post episodes of The Office and Saturday Night Live on it. The company has had several offers to be bought out, but the pair swear they will not sell out. They continue to work out of their San Mateo loft, overseeing 27 employees and developing ways to make the site easier to use while whirling lucrative deals with studios.
Gillian Telling
5. blogger.com
Founded: Evan Williams, 1999, US
Users: 18.5m unique visitors
What is it? Weblog publishing system
There weren't too many computers lying around in the cornfields of Nebraska in the 1970s when Evan Williams was growing up. But he was drawn to them when he found them. He was also drawn west, to California in the 1990s. Williams founded Pyra Labs with two friends. At first it made project-management software for companies. It was not glamorous. Then it made Blogger and changed the world.
'The funny thing was I actually hesitated before working on Blogger because I didn't see the commercial applications,' says Williams. 'We had started a company and we needed to make money. We didn't see how this little hobbyist activity was going to make anyone money.'
The little hobbyist activity was blogging, the art of keeping a weblog - of diarising, theorising, satirising, fictionalising your life and observations online. It had already taken off among the tech fraternity in the Nineties, but it required building and maintaining your own website; the luddites were excluded. Williams created a tool that made self-publishing online as user-friendly as word-processing. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this innovation. It didn't just create a new form of creative expression, it turned the media upside down.
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.
There is no accurate count of the number of blogs in existence now. There are millions. One is created every minute. The revolution might have been possible without Blogger but it would have taken everyone a lot longer.
'Something like it would have existed anyway,' says Williams. 'And lots of things like it do exist. It was a combination of helping push an idea as well as just being in the right place at the right time when the idea was right.'
See the Top 15 Here : http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1843263,00.html
1. eBay.com
Founded: Pierre Omidyar, 1995, US
Users: 168m
What is it? Auction and shopping site
You cannot buy fireworks, guns, franking machines, animals or lock-picking devices on eBay, the internet's premier auction site, but almost everything else is OK: sideburns, houses, used underwear and of course Pez dispensers.
Pez is where it is said to have all begun for eBay's ponytailed founder Pierre Omidyar when he responded to his fiancee's worries that she would no longer be able to expand her toy collection when they moved to Silicon Valley. Omidyar developed a car boot sale anyone could use wherever they were, and without the need for getting dressed. The name sprang from Echo Bay Technology Group, Omidyar's consultancy company, and the first sale was a broken laser pointer.
Things have moved on a little since then. We spend more time on eBay than any other internet site. There are more than 10 million users in the UK. And eBay is far from just a second-hand stall. New items are sold by global companies; many people have abandoned their jobs to eBay full time, and normally sane people fret about 'negative feedback' and being outbid by 'snipers'. eBay owns PayPal and Skype, making dealing almost effortless.
2. wikipedia.com
Founded: Jimmy Wales, 2001, US
Users: 912,000 visits per day
What is it? Online encyclopaedia
As a young boy growing up in Hunstville, Alabama, Jimmy Wales attended a one-room school, sharing his classes with only three other children. Here he spent 'many hours poring over encyclopaedias', and faced the familiar frustrations: their scope was conservative; they were hard to navigate and often out of date.
In January 2001 he created a solution. Wikipedia was a free online encyclopaedia and differed from its predecessors in one fundamental regard: it was open to everyone to read, and also to edit. If you had something to add - from a pedantic correction to an entire entry on your specialist subject - the Wiki template made this easy. The software enables entries to be updated within minutes of new developments. There is nothing you cannot find - how best to make glass, the use of the nappy in space exploration - and if something isn't there, you may wish to take matters into your own hands.
Like any fast-moving venture - the site attracts 2,000-plus page requests a second - it has not been slow to attract criticism. Occasionally a libellous article will lie undetected for months, as happened with an entry linking one of Robert Kennedy's aides with his assassination. But Wales says his creation is abused only rarely, and swiftly corrected by other users. 'Those who use Wikipedia a lot appreciate its true value and have learnt to trust it,' he says. 'Sometimes a prankster will substitute a picture of Hitler for George Bush, and within an hour someone would have changed it back.'
3. napster.com
Founded: Shawn Fanning, 1999, US
Users: 500,000 paying subscribers
What is it? File sharing site
Shawn Fanning created Napster in 1999 while studying at Boston's Northeastern University, as a means of sharing music files with his fellow students. Of course, it was entirely illegal (home taping kills music, remember) and was quickly attacked by a mainstream music industry already struggling to make profits on its money-guzzling artists. Its popularity reached a peak in 2000 with over 70 million registered users before Fanning's company was forced to pay millions of dollars in backdated royalties: a move which bankrupted the original, free-to-use Napster the following year. By then, however, the premature leaking and sharing of hotly anticipated albums by some of the major labels' most bankable artists had proved to be a stimulant, not a thief, of sales once the CD version was released. The new Napster - effectively a renamed version of a pay-to-download MP3 site owned by the original Napster company's buyers, the German giant Bertelsmann- has never recaptured its original cool, precisely because it is now legitimate. What it did in its brief period of illegal notoriety was popularise the notion that making music freely available on the internet - through MySpace, one-off downloads or artist-sanctioned 'leaks' - does artists no harm at all; indeed, it's helped to launch the careers of many.
4. youtube.com
Founded: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, 2005, US
Users: 100m clips watched a day
What is it? Video sharing site
When Chad Hurley and Steve Chen began working out of a garage in San Mateo in late 2004 to figure out an easy way to upload and share funny videos they'd taken at a dinner party, they had no idea just how huge an impact their creation would make. The former PayPal employees launched the user-friendly site in February 2005 and it has since become one of the most popular sites on the net, with YouTube claiming that 100 million clips are watched every day. Through the grassroots power of the internet and good word-of-mouth, the site quickly went from a place where people shared homemade video clips to users posting long-lost TV and film gems such as bloopers from Seventies game shows to ancient music videos. It has also taken off as a place for amateur film-makers to show off their talents - take David Lehre, a teenager whose MySpace: The Movie became such a popular clip he's already fielded job offers from major movie studios.
Not all television studios immediately embraced the idea of their archived copyrighted footage being shared. 'We're not here to steal,' insists Chen. 'When [US television network] NBC asked us to take something down, we did.' In fact, NBC only last week announced plans to work alongside YouTube, airing exclusive clips and trailers and eventually hoping to post episodes of The Office and Saturday Night Live on it. The company has had several offers to be bought out, but the pair swear they will not sell out. They continue to work out of their San Mateo loft, overseeing 27 employees and developing ways to make the site easier to use while whirling lucrative deals with studios.
Gillian Telling
5. blogger.com
Founded: Evan Williams, 1999, US
Users: 18.5m unique visitors
What is it? Weblog publishing system
There weren't too many computers lying around in the cornfields of Nebraska in the 1970s when Evan Williams was growing up. But he was drawn to them when he found them. He was also drawn west, to California in the 1990s. Williams founded Pyra Labs with two friends. At first it made project-management software for companies. It was not glamorous. Then it made Blogger and changed the world.
'The funny thing was I actually hesitated before working on Blogger because I didn't see the commercial applications,' says Williams. 'We had started a company and we needed to make money. We didn't see how this little hobbyist activity was going to make anyone money.'
The little hobbyist activity was blogging, the art of keeping a weblog - of diarising, theorising, satirising, fictionalising your life and observations online. It had already taken off among the tech fraternity in the Nineties, but it required building and maintaining your own website; the luddites were excluded. Williams created a tool that made self-publishing online as user-friendly as word-processing. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this innovation. It didn't just create a new form of creative expression, it turned the media upside down.
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.
There is no accurate count of the number of blogs in existence now. There are millions. One is created every minute. The revolution might have been possible without Blogger but it would have taken everyone a lot longer.
'Something like it would have existed anyway,' says Williams. 'And lots of things like it do exist. It was a combination of helping push an idea as well as just being in the right place at the right time when the idea was right.'
See the Top 15 Here : http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1843263,00.html