& Commentary

A brief history of the world the Internet and everything. Starting in 1992

In the early 90s just when the online space was exploding, life was grand. Ad budgets flowed like the Mississippi River. Retainers were as big as Mastodons. Pluto was still a planet. Amazon was just a river. Arrested Development was only a band, and Mark Zuckerburg was just starting elementary school.

Some businesses panicked—others cashed in. It was the beginning of yet another revolution in information. The greatest since some dude named Gutenberg.

And if you were a business in 1992, you were hit by a staggering notion. “If I doth not existeth online, to the world I am most surely parished! To the quick! Would any man constructeth thee an interwebbernet paging system!”

Then nerds from all over the world straightened their glasses, mumbled to themselves, and went at it.

We were so young then.

We didn’t have web designers. We had coders. And because of this, if anything online looked good it was a happy accident. Information flow and user-interface people didn’t really exist.

Fast-forward to 1999.

The Euro was established. The Violent Femmes wrote the theme for Sponge Bob Square Pants. The Y2K bug was looming, as well as the “Livin’ La Vida Loca” earworm. We all thought Yahoo was going to take over the world. What came to be known as Wi-Fi, was standardized. Napster was one-year-old. Google finally exists.

Hop to 2000. We kick it off with the culmination of the Y2K panic—which I personally experienced 5 times due to an international flight. Then cur-blewy. The Internet bubble bursts. It was a huge mess. Cleaning crews are called in from Eastern Europe and Chad. Next, high-speed Internet is attainable for customers.

SixDegrees.com—one of the first modern-day social networking sites folded because of enormous amounts of spam and user abuse. Two years later Friendster takes the stage, and does well.

Wasn’t that a nice trip down partial memory lane? I think so. So what can we learn? Bunches. More than I can calculate in this essay. But for the purposes of web design and social networking there’s at least one phrase to note.

1992: If I don’t have a webpage, my business is dead to the world.

Since then we’ve learned a few things. Websites have more of a purpose than to prove validity. They are a communication tool, and any time businesses are attempting to communicate something—they need a plan. So, we’ve gotten smarter. Now we develop plans for how and what we want to communicate with our own little corner of the Internet.

2010: If I’m not taking advantage of social media, I’m dead to the world.

See above. Make a plan. Just because a business has a facebook page doesn’t mean anything unless that business understands why they have a facebook page. Or twitter feed or blog. Or whatever the next big thing is.

Stay tuned for more entries of what that plan can be.

Here’s a somewhat relevant video for you to laugh at.