KimCrawley.com- Bright Ideas

My name is Kim Crawley, and my blog features intriguing ideas and interesting information, whenever they occur to me. A lot of my posts are about web design, as I'm a freelance web designer and my website's for my services. But I'm also interested in other 'nerdy' pursuits- anime, video games, IT stuff, you name it. I also like to talk about pop culture, world issues, and other interesting ideas. I welcome readers to comment on my posts and contribute to the dialogue.

Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

A Brief History of the Web- Part eight...

Here it is, the much awaited part eight of my 'A Brief History of the Web' series. I've been super busy, between the lab, Blogcritics and Dragon Blogger, but I apologize for the delay.

Here's your opportunity to catch up with the series, my most popular to date:

In this part, we return to the browser wars.

In the 1990s, the fight was between Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Netscape's browser debuted in 1994, and IE debuted in 1995. People used to design web pages better for the standards of one browser or another. Many web designers thought, if you're using Netscape, for instance, and their site says 'Best Viewed In Internet Explorer', you would of course click on the download link, and install IE just to view their website! Of course, their website was so awesome that you'd be compelled to do just that. Well... no, not really.

Ha, I think this is the only time I'll ever use an animated GIF in this blog...

As the year 2000 passed, Netscape quickly lost market share. But, that wasn't the end for Netscape's Mozilla user agent string!

Mozilla was originally a codename for Netscape Navigator. As of 1994, the main web browser was Mosaic (see parts one and two) and Mozilla meant 'Mosaic Killer'.

The Mozilla Organization was founded in 1998, by Netscape programmers, to create a successor to Netscape Navigator. By 2003, it became a funded non-profit organization renamed the Mozilla Foundation.

In 1998, the source code behind the Netscape Communicator suite was released open source under the new Netscape Public License. The first web browser to come out of the new Mozilla project was Phoenix 0.1, released in September 2002, but only as a binary for testing.

This image, and the other browser shots here are courtesy of Wikipedia

The first publicly available version was Firefox 1.0, in late 2004. They couldn't use the Phoenix name, a company named Phoenix Technologies weren't very happy. So then, Mozilla tried the name Firebird, but the Firebird Database Server wasn't happy with that either. Firefox was the next option, and the one that stuck.

Here's what that very first public version, Mozilla Firefox 1.0 looked like:

   As Firefox 2 and 3 were released, the browser quickly gained market share, taking a major bite out of IE. The browser wars were changed, forever.

  Firefox was the browser to introduce tabbed browsing, something I would've loved to have as a teenager in the 1990s. I used to run multiple browsers, so that I could enjoy a web page while waiting for another to DOWNLOAD. It was kind of taxing for a system using 128 MB RAM. Ah, those were the days.

   Opera, which didn't gain major market share, but has a significant sliver of the pie (about 4%), was actually introduced in December 1996 by Norway's Opera Software. They are now up to an initial alpha release of 11.

Aside from Opera's relatively lean code, what also sets Opera apart is their focus on accessibility. Options include having key commands for all actions, mouse gesturing, and voice control.

Apple entered the browser wars a lot later than Microsoft did. Their Safari browser publicly debuted in January 2003, and became the default web browser for Mac OS X 10.3 'Panther'. Before Safari, the web browser most frequently used on Macs was the Mac version of IE. Microsoft no longer supports a Mac version of their browser, so IE now only runs in Windows OSes.

Safari is now up to 5.0.2. It's a pretty good browser, it works really well with HTML5 and CSS3. They started a Windows version in 2007. The main reason why I wouldn't recommend Safari is because it's Crapple! (See Why I'll never spend a dime on Apple products...) There's no version of Safari for GNU/Linux OSes like the one I'm using, as Apple likes to pretend that Linux distros don't exist. I could run Safari for Windows in Wine, but why would I want to?

My 'A Brief History of the Web' will continue soon. Until then, I have lots more in store for you!

kimcrawley.com

twitter.com/kim_crawley

blogcritics.org/writers/kim-crawley/

Friday, October 22, 2010

A Brief History of the Web- Part five...

Welcome back to my popular 'A Brief History of the Web' series, much spoken about on Twitter, BlogEngage.com, and Bloggers.com. I feel like I have some fans now who look forward to new articles in this series, and I don't want to let you guys down!

Here's a re-cap, in case you've missed one of the articles:

As I left off in part four, more and more ordinary people started surfing the web. The new, popular search engines made that feasible.

Netscape launched their Navigator web browser, based on Mozilla framework, in 1994. Microsoft saw a market they had to enter, so they launched Internet Explorer in 1995, along with MSN, to originally compete with AOL, which was once mighty.

And GeoCities, Tripod and Angelfire launched, making it easier for web surfers who weren't technically proficient to publish their own content.

Social networking is also a phenomena that has caused significant growth of the web. Most people think social networking on the web started in the 2000s with MySpace and the like.

Actually, AOL, GeoCities, and Tripod all had some social networking functionality. Users could meet other users through their chat services and their personal pages.

But the very first 'proper' social networking website wasn't MySpace of Friendster. It was now defunct theGlobe.com. That also very nicely leads into the 'dot com bust' theme of this article. It was actually launched in 1995!

It became very popular in the late 1990s, especially in 1998, when they launched their IPO, becoming publically traded.

A screenshot of theGlobe.com from 1998, the oldest I could find from archive.org.

  Two Cornell students, Stephan Paternot and Todd Krizelman, started theGlobe.com when they got a brilliant idea. They found the early chatrooms on Cornell's network were very popular. They saw a moneymaking opportunity. They raised $15,000 over Christmas 1994 to buy their first web server and launch their company.

  Their website went live on April 1st, 1995, and quickly became very popular. But any money they made didn't go into equity, it went to more and more growth. More employees, more web servers, and more of everything else.

  They had to go public to raise more funds. Their IPO launched on November 13th, 1998.

   Their target share price was $9.00. But, investors thought they saw the new AOL! (Well, they kind of did, in sense. AOL lost AOL Time Warner massive amounts of money in the early 2000s. But in 1998, AOL could do no wrong, and investors thought any 'dot com' launch was a huge moneymaking opportunity.)

  During theGlobe.com's first trading day, their share price rose as high as $97.00, more than ten times the target share price. Astonishing!

  Paternot and Krizelman's new corporation bought a number of other properties, in their bouts of spending enthusiasm. They bought Chips and Bits, Computer Games magazine, and happypuppy.com. You never heard of those names? That explains everything!

  From The Guardian in 2001:

Theglobe.com founder Stephan Paternot, has written a book called A Very Public Offering. In it he recalls a CNN interview from 1999 which captured him dancing on a nightclub table in shiny black pants with his model girlfriend, Jennifer Medley and saying, "Got the girl. Got the money. Now I'm ready to live a disgusting, frivolous life."
Nowadays Paternot is more circumspect. "I became the whipping boy of Silicon Alley, a symbol of the internet's success, excess and then the bursting of the internet bubble."

  Between 1999 (when most experts believe the 'dot com bust' began) and 2001, theGlobe.com's shares went from a high of $97.00 to a low of 10 cents. Ten cents!

  Paternot and Krizelman were forced out of the company they founded, in 2000. TheGlobe.com shut down in August 2001. In 2003, TheGlobe launched GloPhone, to compete with Skype. That was another commerical failure.

  As of March 2010, the company reported that they had a mere $7,618 in assets toward their $3.1 million worth of liabilities. Sounds like every entrepreneur's worst nightmare, as far as I'm concerned.

  Friendster's beta launched in 2002.

Friendster beta page from May, 2002

Friendster beta page from May, 2003

Friendster launch page from December, 2004

   Friendster was the very first of the new style of social networking websites, predating MySpace, Bebo, Linked-In, Facebook and Twitter.

  Friendster is still online, as of this writing. As of June 2010, they have about 8,200,000 users. Friendster was founded by two computer programmers, Jonathan Abrams and Cris Emmanuel. It kind of functions like Facebook, but with a lot fewer extras.

   Compared to Facebook's current over 500 million users, and Twitter's current 30 million users, Friendster is now a minor player in the social networking scene.

   But, Friendster's model of user pages and linking to friends set a paradigm for most social networking sites that launched later on.

  Case in point- in August 2010, Facebook confirmed that it acquired 18 patents from Friendster.

  In part six of my 'A Brief History of the Web' series, I will go further into the 'dot com bust' of 1999-2001, mentioning the AOL Time Warner debacle, Pets.com and others. I will also go into the social networking sites that launched after Friendster, and 'Web 2.0'. Also, Netscape falls, and Internet Explorer gets a little competition in the browser market!

  In the meanwhile, I forgot to mention a pre-bust venture that was founded in 1994 and launched online in 1995. It has been a huge commercial success since then, and up to this day.

  You must have heard of Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com, haven't you? Amazon started exclusively as a bookseller, but now Amazon retails in as many different areas as a department store.

  Here's what Amazon's home page looked like in 1995:

And here's what Amazon's home page looks like today:

Stay tuned for part six, coming up on Monday! In the meanwhile, over the weekend, there will be a couple of new posts here.

kimcrawley.com

twitter.com/kim_crawley

blogcritics.org/writers/kim-crawley/

Monday, October 18, 2010

A Brief History of the Web- Part four...

So, as I mentioned in part three, Yahoo!, WebCrawler, Lycos, and other search engines became huge in the mid-1990s. More and more ordinary people began to surf the web for the very first time, and those services made the web friendly and accessible. I can imagine how I would have felt those days if I had to continue web surfing by finding random URLs from Prodigy Online. Back in 1994, the WWW was so new and exciting, and I would visit random webpages just to see how everything worked.

If you've missed previous posts in my 'A Brief History of the Web' series, here they are:

  With more and more non-academics on the web, it was obvious that many of those people wanted a web presence of their own. HTML, JavaScript, paying for a web host, and FTP uploading were all daunting tasks for people who aren't technically inclined. I started learning how to do that stuff when I was ten years old (1994), but I'm more 'nerdy' than most.

   Well, if necessity is the mother of invention, capitalists will go on inventing with dollar signs in their eyes.

   Does anyone here remember GeoCities? Geocities launched in 1995 as Beverly Hills Internet. Users could host their webpages in 'cities' that were vaguely related to the users' content, all with Los Angeles/Hollywood related names, such as 'Baja', 'WestHollywood', 'SunsetStrip', etc. As BHI quickly grew in popularity throughout 1995, they changed their name to Geocities. Here's what Geocities.com's homepage looked like, way back when:

A typical GeoCities URL would look ugly and unprofessional. I made this one up, but I'm following the old GeoCities URL formula to a T.

http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/CollegePark/1313/YayIHaveAWebsite.html

How would you like your business to have an address like that? Even in the 1990s, it looked unprofessional. But, it gave users a web 'home' in a 'neighborhood', I suppose.

And GeoCities had handy web design tools for users who were afraid of HTML. It did kind of herald an age of ugly web design, though. Imagine garish backgrounds and crazy animated .GIFs everywhere.

Do you want a trip back into time? Check out the Geocities-izer at http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/. Just go there and enter a URL for a website you'd like to see 'Geocities-ized'.

Here's what my freelance web design website, kimcrawley.com looks like, Geocities-ized:

And here's this blog, KimCrawley.com- Bright Ideas, Geocities-ized:

Amazing. It's better than dropping acid.

Well, in the mid to late 1990s, so much web traffic went through GeoCities, it was incredible. Yahoo! wanted a piece of the action, so they bought GeoCities out in January 1999 (the month I turned 15!) for $3.57 BILLION dollars.

It was a poor move on Yahoo!'s end. Throughout the 2000s, GeoCities couldn't change with the times. As of 2009, Yahoo! was forced to close GeoCities for good. GeoCities now only exists for Japanese users.

If you want to walk through a time warp, check out ReoCities.com, an archive of old GeoCities sites.

I hate to admit it, but in 1996, some of my early web design work was hosted by Angelfire. I would never want my readers or web design clients to see what work I did when I was 12. Perish the thought! Unlike GeoCities, angelfire.com is still around, as of this writing.

1996 was when Angelfire launched. It was bought by WhoWhere in the 1990s, and then WhoWhere was bought by Lycos.

Compared to GeoCities, I suppose Angelfire gave users more attractive URLs.

Here's a typical old Angelfire URL I made up:

http://www.angelfire.com/xz/OMGihaveawebsite/index.html

So, old Angelfire URLs had two letters, then a /, then your Angelfire username. Angelfire's old editor was also designed for newbies. I remember how I used to be very frustrated by it.

Here's Angelfire's old homepage from 1996:

And here's Angelfire's old login screen, the one I remember using when I was twelve. Memories!

Special thanks go to http://www.archive.org/.

The third major 'easy for newbies' web host of the 1990s was Tripod. Tripod is actually older than both GeoCities and Angelfire. Tripod existed before tripod.com. It was started by two Williams College classmates, Bo Peabody and Brett Hershey, and Professor Dick Sabot in 1992. It started as a service for students that had nothing directly to do with the Internet.

The tripod.com domain name was registered in September 1994, and the website launched in 1995. Web hosting services were initially an afterthought, but it became their one service that quickly grew in popularity, and was soon available to anyone, not just students.

Here's what the tripod.com homepage looked like back in 1996, when web hosting was still only a part of what they offered.

This drop-down menu from Tripod in 1997 highlights how web hosting was just one of many services offered. Tripod used to offer a lot of informative content of their own, as well.

Once again, this archival content is courtesy of the Wayback Machine at archive.org.

Like Angelfire, Tripod was eventually bought by Lycos, and still offers services. They now have new web hosting, web design, and blogging services.

In a couple of days, you may look forward to part five, where I get into the mighty 'dot com' bust!

In the meanwhile, go ahead and enjoy my new articles at Blogcritics. There's a lot to look forward to soon, dear readers!