The Internet at the Dawn of Facebook
Facebook launched in 2004. Today, it has more users than the entire Internet had in 2004.
Before Facebook roamed the web, the digital world was dominated by big, bulky websites that assumed they’d stay big and bulky: Microsoft and its Hotmail, Time Warner and its AOL, Ask and its Jeeves. It’s striking how much the Internet has changed since Facebook sprinted onto the scene — and more striking still how Mark Zuckerberg’s production changed the course of that scene.
Back in 2004,
- the web had some 50 million sites. (Today, it has more than 600 million.)
- the most popular brand on the World Wide Web was Microsoft’s MSN.
- Google was the fifth most popular brand on the World Wide Web, ranking below Yahoo and AOL.
- people still talked about the “World Wide Web.”
- ”blog” — defined as “a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks” — was chosen as Merriam-Webster’s word of the year.
Read more. [Image: Thefacebook, lol]