The Web Has Just Begun…
It hasn’t been that long since the web started to take off.
I turn 30 today. Like many people, I tend to look back on my birthdays to see where life is taking me. It reminds me back 10 years ago, when I was a student at The University of Texas.
It was regarding 10 years ago that I registered my first domain name. I paid $70 of beer money to Network Solutions to register the domain.
In retrospect, those were the early days of the web. Consider my freshmen dorm. The web was taking college campuses by storm, and everyone tried to connect to the internet over dial-up modems. There were only a hundred outgoing lines at my dorm of 1,000 students. We would dial-in on our computers with auto-redial turned on and then wait a couple hours until we got connected. All for a 28.8 connection.
Back then, it wasn’t cool to do much on the web. It was geeky to plan your weekend by going to a web site to look for events. And you certainly wouldn’t try to pick up a girl online. Compare that to today, when college kids hookup via Facebook and MySpace (not to mention dozens of dating sites). I remember talking to my friends online via some old-school chatroom software. Or if someone was online when you were, you’d e-mail them back and forth constantly. Instant messaging? What’s that?
I’m not trying to sound like a grouchy old man. Following all, I’m only 30. But it makes me realize how far the web has come in only a decade. And, for all intents and purposes, the web as we know it has only been around for a third of my life. But it is quickly becoming central to our media intake and our social outlet.
That trend is only going to intensify. That, my friends, is good news for those of us that are investing in the “maps” that lead us on the web.
