Internet Trends

richj

Deactivated Account
Most of us have been using the internet for a while now. I am very interested to hear how people think things have changed, why they have changed and how they will change.


I started using the net before google went public. Yahoo was my main search engine, and the results it pulled up were usually geocities pages that were graphic heavy. I had a 33kb/s modem so it could take a minute to load a simple page. The speed of peoples connections has incerased, and for a while it seemed every web page was flash based.

Then things changed towards providing more media like audio and video, take youtube as an example. They went from startup to google aquisition pretty quickly. Payment methods were developed ie. paypal, and market selling (ebay) and wholesale (amazon) became popular.

I have no idea where the internet is heading. As far as I can see it depends on the maintenance of net neutrality. If the internet is divided into teirs, will its advantage to humanity be handicapped?
 

Ceirwan

Ex. Club Member
To be honest i find it a lot harder to find good information these days, back in the early days when it was less easy people only put up what was useful because it was an effort, Google was great till there pagerank system was understood then it became rubbish. Its improved a bit now, but all i ever seem to find are the big media sites, not the small home pages with the useful information.

In someways i like it better, in someways not.
 

Rob..

Ex. Club Member
Yeah i agree with ceriwan, although one feature of internet explorer i really like is tabbed browsing, it just keeps everything that little bit tidier. Something not alot of people think about but i only ever have one internet page open so my taskbar has that little extra space.

I also believe youtube to be one of the greatest inventions since sliced bread considering how you can see so much media without moving from your chair, no need for DVD's to be ordered and delivered, and with sites like zamzar.com you can even download them (I'm not promoting zamzar here, just an example)

But as Ceirwan said there is so much useless junk on the web also it makes it that little bit more frustrating. Thankfully i know where to go when i need accurate info on the micra though :D
 

Arnold

www.alanarnold.co.uk
Moderator
Site Supporter
Tabbed browsing has been around for a while with firefox, but MS borrowed the idea. I couldn't do without it now, makes using the Internet so much easier & tidier on the desktop.

I remeber all those geocities pages, and before MSN messenger, there used to be a program out there called ICQ (It probably still exists), but now taken over by AOL. That was awesome! Ebay was alot better, far less crap on there.. and you had to pay for your ebay fees by cheque.
 

curtis

Ex. Club Member
If it didnt have all the viruses etc....lol

Love free music, videos, games, online banking, car insurence quotes, buying stuff like car audio etc etc
 

James

Chairman
The internet has changed massively since I started using it in December 1996.

We had to pay £14.95 a month to MSN for local call dialup access to the net through a 28.8kbps modem and you also had to view half the internet through their "Microsoft Network" browser.

Being 12 years ago, my first memories are blurred somewhat, but animated GIFs do stick in my mind, along with pages hosted on GeoCities, FortuneCity and Xoom. Like Arnold said, MSN Messenger was a few years off still so we had to make do with Yahoo! Chat for chatting (I remember when they added voice chat and you could go into the 'shout room' to listen to people yelling at each other) and ICQ for private instant messaging - my number was 147100369 (holy crap it's still there! http://people.icq.com/people/about_me.php?uin=147100369 ).

I remember when MSN first came around in about 1998, there was only me and about 3 or 4 friends from school on it at first (one of which STILL has the same Hotmail address to this day!), it seemed to revolutionise instant messaging!

As for the web itself, the fads have come and gone, and of course, who could forget Napster and Audiogalaxy? 30 minutes to download a 5MB MP3!

There has definately been a lot more multimedia popping up on the web since broadband became widespread, who'd have thought 10 years ago we'd be able to watch last nights episode of say EastEnders online?! Or watch some random people become internet celebrities on YouTube.

One side note, I still find Google by far the best search engine out there, you just have to know how to enter your keywords to generate the best results!

I think i've rambled a bit there so I'll leave it at that!

James.
 

Katie

Half Micra Half Primera
Gah, i remember the days before Google become the search site of the day.

Alta Vista, askjeeves and dogpile... oh and all those ####ty geocities personal websites... with those silly little 'sexy' dolls that people insisted on having on them.

I used to quite like ICQ, but got inundated with foreigners and sad old men wanting to try cyber sex... which for my age was just sheer terrorfying LOL

Ah i remember when lycos did all their cool email addresses like [email protected] etc

When Boltblue was free and talk21 sent free text message.

I feel quite old now :down:
 

Katie

Half Micra Half Primera
Coming to think about it must have had loads of them over the years, god, it seems so retarded now.

Ive kinda pretty much kept the same user name since i first started with the net though so thats quite cool i spose.
 

Antony

Ex. Club Member
i remember my old bbc computer.... playing pong.

then my amstrad CPC464 with colour monitor.

not to mention my commadore 64 with brown and cream keyboard (i sold that keyboard for £300..lol)

then the good stuff. dialup connections, my old celeron 400mhz pc with 16bit graphics card.. MMM (i still use the case now although the only component left is the floppy drive)

getting past the net nanny filters using ms word..lol
randomly typing in web addresses with rude words.

Steakandcheese.com!!!!!! wow how long ago was that?

erm...your own website with freepage.com learning how to use phpbb and having your own forum. those were the days.
 

squarepants

Ex. Club Member
bit old for me to rember...i do remember when i first got a computor back in 2000ish never had the internet at first just had duke nucem game, and another crappy one lol, eventually got the internet but ended up with a german yahoo as my dad did somthing wrong :S took us ages to figure out how to work a pc lol.
 

Courior

Fat ppl r harder 2 kidnap
no one has mentioned mIRC!!! that was the first i remember of mass online chatting, and the mIRC clients you could download that included hacking tools.. ah those were the days
 
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richj

richj

Deactivated Account
How do you guys think music retail will change? At the moment it is just big big companies dominating the market. Do you think there will be an online equivalent of the hip music shop in town? I know there are some really good blogs that are amazon or itune affiliates. I havn't seen anyone with there own infrastructure yet.
 

Arnold

www.alanarnold.co.uk
Moderator
Site Supporter
I think there's going to be less desire to purchase music, with the availability of it being online. I mean, you don't need to pay for anything to listen to podcasts, youtube audio uploads and various other audio streams, and even if you do, it's becoming really affordable.

I remember mIRC. "Alan has slapped you with a baseball bat". Radio 1 used to use it for there live chat room, and comments would get read out on air.
 

Ceirwan

Ex. Club Member
Lol i had a well old 14.4kbs modem on my mega powerful cyrix 200mhz. 32mb was it EDO? RAM, and a 2mb RAGE II graphics accelator! its a shame, i used to love the games available then, now when i play them they seem so backwards. At the time they were ace!
 
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