
Hypertext: Web 1.Zero
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a graduate of Oxford Universityand software engineer at CERN (the European particle physics laboratory), had the concept of the usage of a new sort of protocol to percentage documents and statistics throughout the neighborhood CERN community. Instead of moving ordinary textual content-based totally documents, he created a new language referred to as hypertext markup language (HTML). Hypertext was a brand new phrase for text that goes past the limits of a single report. Hypertext can encompass links to different files (hyperlinks), text-fashion formatting, pics, and a extensive style of other components. The primary concept is that documents may be built out of a selection of hyperlinks and can be considered simply as though they may be at the user’s laptop.
This new language required a new communication protocol in order that computer systems could interpret it, and Berners-Lee determined on the name hypertext switch protocol (HTTP). Through HTTP, hypertext files may be despatched from pc to computer and can then be interpreted via a browser, which turns the HTML files into readable web pages. The browser that Berners-Lee created, referred to as World Wide Web, was a combination browser-editor, allowing users to view other HTML files and create their very own (Berners-Lee, 2009).
Tim Berners-Lee’s first internet browser become additionally a web web page editor.
Modern browsers, like Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, only permit for the viewing of web pages; different increasingly more complicated tools are now advertised for creating web pages, even though even the maximum complex web page may be written entirely from a program like Windows Notepad. The purpose web pages can be created with the only equipment is the adoption of certain protocols by means of the most commonplace browsers. Because Internet Explorer, Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and different browsers all interpret the equal code in greater or less the identical manner, developing internet pages is as easy as studying how to talk the language of those browsers.
In 1991, the identical year that Berners-Lee created his web browser, the Internet connection service Q-Link turned into renamed America Online, or AOL for quick. This carrier might sooner or later develop to hire over 20,000 human beings, on the premise of making Internet get admission to available (and, significantly, simple) for anyone with a phone line. Although the internet in 1991 became now not what it is today, AOL’s software program allowed its users to create groups primarily based on just about any problem, and it simplest required a dial-up modem—a device that connects any laptop to the Internet thru a cellphone line—and the phone line itself.
In addition, AOL incorporated technologies—chat rooms and Instant Messenger—into a unmarried software (in conjunction with an internet browser). Chat rooms allowed many customers to kind stay messages to a “room” full of human beings, whilst Instant Messenger allowed two customers to communicate privately through text-based totally messages. The most essential aspect of AOL turned into its encapsulation of most of these as soon as-disparate applications into a single user-friendly package deal. Although AOL become later disparaged for customer support problems like its users’ inability to deactivate their provider, its position in bringing the Internet to mainstream users turned into instrumental (Zeller Jr., 2005).
In contrast to AOL’s proprietary offerings, the World Wide Web needed to be considered via a standalone web browser. The first of those browsers to make its mark was this system Mosaic, released by means of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications on the University of Illinois. Mosaic became offered totally free and grew in no time in popularity because of functions that now appear crucial to the internet. Things like bookmarks, which permit customers to save the area of precise pages without having to take into account them, and pictures, now an vital a part of the web, had been all inventions that made the net greater usable for many humans (National Center for Supercomputing Appliances).
Although the web browser Mosaic has not been updated for the reason that 1997, builders who labored on it went on to create Netscape Navigator, an extremely popular browser in the course of the Nineties. AOL later bought the Netscape enterprise, and the Navigator browser became discontinued in 2008, in large part due to the fact Netscape Navigator had lost the marketplace to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer internet browser, which came preloaded on Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows working system. However, Netscape had long been changing its Navigator software into an open-source software referred to as Mozilla Firefox, that's now the second one-maximum-used web browser on the Internet (particular in Table eleven.1 “Browser Market Share (as of February 2010)”) (NetMarketshare). Firefox represents approximately 1 / 4 of the market—not horrific, thinking about its loss of marketing and Microsoft’s herbal gain of packaging Internet Explorer with most of the people of private computer systems.
Table 11.1 Browser Market Share (as of February 2010)
For Sale: The Web
As net browsers became extra to be had as a less-moderated opportunity to AOL’s proprietary carrier, the web have become something like a unfastened-for-all of startup corporations. The net of this period, frequently known as Web 1.0, featured many strong point web sites that used the Internet’s potential for worldwide, instant conversation to create a brand new form of enterprise. Another name for this loose-for-all of the Nineties is the “dot-com growth.” During the growth, it appeared as though nearly anyone could construct a website and promote it for thousands and thousands of bucks. However, the “dot-com crash” that occurred later that decade regarded to mention in any other case. Quite some of these Internet startup corporations went bankrupt, taking their shareholders down with them. Alan Greenspan, then the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, called this phenomenon “irrational exuberance (Greenspan, 1996),” in massive component due to the fact buyers did now not always realize how to research these unique commercial enterprise plans, and businesses that had by no means grew to become a profit could be offered for millions. The new enterprise models of the Internet might also have accomplished well within the stock marketplace, however they had been not necessarily sustainable. In many methods, buyers collectively failed to investigate the enterprise prospects of these organizations, and once they found out their errors (and the businesses went bankrupt), tons of the latest market growth evaporated. The invention of recent technologies can convey with it the belief that antique enterprise tenets not follow, but this risky perception—the “irrational exuberance” Greenspan spoke of—is not always conducive to lengthy-term growth.
Some lucky dot-com groups fashioned during the growth survived the crash and are still around today. For instance, eBay, with its on-line auctions, turned what regarded like a dangerous exercise (sending cash to a stranger you met over the Internet) right into a daily occurrence. A less-fortunate enterprise, eToys.Com, were given off to a promising start—its inventory quadrupled at the day it went public in 1999—but then filed for Chapter 11 “The Internet and Social Media” financial ruin in 2001 (Barnes, 2001).
One of those startups, theGlobe.Com, provided one of the earliest social networking services that exploded in popularity. When theGlobe.Com went public, its stock shot from a target fee of $nine to a close of $sixty three.50 a share (Kawamoto, 1998). The web page itself became began in 1995, constructing its enterprise on marketing. As skepticism about the dot-com growth grew and advertisers became increasingly more skittish about the cost of online ads, theGlobe.Com ceased to be worthwhile and close its doors as a social networking web site (The Globe, 2009). Although advertising is pervasive at the Internet nowadays, the modern model—in large part based totally at the notably centered Google AdSense carrier—did not come around till a great deal later. In the earlier dot-com years, the equal ad might be proven on heaps of different internet pages, while now advertising and marketing is often in particular focused to the content of an character web page.
However, that did now not spell the stop of social networking at the Internet. Social networking were happening when you consider that as a minimum the discovery of Usenet in 1979 (distinct later in the bankruptcy), but the habitual hassle become always the identical: profitability. This model of loose access to consumer-generated content material departed from nearly anything previously visible in media, and sales streams might need to be just as radical.
The Early Days of Social Media
The shared, generalized protocols of the Internet have allowed it to be without problems tailored and prolonged into many distinct sides of our lives. The Internet shapes the whole thing, from our daily habitual—the potential to study newspapers from round the sector, as an example—to the manner studies and collaboration are carried out. There are 3 important aspects of verbal exchange that the Internet has modified, and these have instigated profound adjustments within the way we connect to each other socially: the rate of records, the extent of records, and the “democratization” of publishing, or the capablity of anybody to publish thoughts at the net.
One of the Internet’s biggest and maximum modern changes has come about through social networking. Because of Twitter, we will now see what all our friends are doing in actual time; due to blogs, we will remember the reviews of whole strangers who may additionally never write in traditional print; and due to Facebook, we are able to find people we haven’t talked to for many years, all with out making a single awkward cellphone name.
Recent years have seen an explosion of recent content and offerings; despite the fact that the phrase “social media” now seems to be synonymous with web sites like Facebook and Twitter, it's miles worthwhile to bear in mind all the methods a social media platform affects the Internet experience.
How Did We Get Here? The Late Nineteen Seventies, Early 1980s, and Usenet
Almost as soon as TCP stitched the numerous networks together, a former DARPA scientist named Larry Roberts based the company Telnet, the primary industrial packet-switching corporation. Two years later, in 1977, the invention of the dial-up modem (in mixture with the broader availability of personal computer systems just like the Apple II) made it possible for all people round the arena to get right of entry to the Internet. With availability extended past only educational and army circles, the Internet quick became a staple for laptop hobbyists.
One of the results of the spread of the Internet to hobbyists was the founding of Usenet. In 1979, University of North Carolina graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis connected 3 computers in a small network and used a series of programming scripts to post and acquire messages. In a totally quick span of time, this device spread all around the burgeoning Internet. Much like an electronic model of network bulletin boards, all of us with a laptop ought to put up a subject or respond on Usenet.
The institution turned into basically and explicitly anarchic, as outlined with the aid of the posting “What is Usenet?” This file says, “Usenet isn't always a democracy…there may be no person or organization in price of Usenet …Usenet can not be a democracy, autocracy, or another sort of ‘-acy (Moraes, et. Al., 1998).’” Usenet was now not used simplest for socializing, however, however also for collaboration. In a few ways, the provider allowed a brand new kind of collaboration that seemed like the begin of a revolution: “I become able to join rec.Kites and collectively human beings in Australia and New Zealand helped me solve a trouble and get a circular two-line kite to fly,” one user informed the UK’s Guardian (Jeffery, et. Al., 2009).@ Read More minisecond