The main thing on people’s minds right now is the craze that’s going on about the World Wide Web or WWW – Really? It is probably Miley Cyrus or Lupita Nyong’o, but hopefully, you get my drift. If you don’t know what this is all about, not Miley or Lupita, but the World Wide Web, then read on.
So, where did WWWe come from?
Before we can answer the question, where are wwwe? We need to answer where did wwwe come from. To start off here is the first website ever made! Check it out: The first website ever made.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web and he didn’t start the revolution alone in 1989 before him were Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn; commonly known as the fathers of the internet and Ray Tomlinson (the father of email).
What this jointly did is to open up space for new developments. By January 1993, there were only 50 Web servers across the world; by October 1993 there were over 500. That doesn’t seem too big, right? According to Netcraft’s survey done in November 2013, 20 years later, they had counted 785,293,473 sites, with a surprising growth of more than 18 million sites from the previous month. This begs the question, does your brand need to build a strong online identity?
The Growth of the WWWeb
Let’s take a chronological journey of the last 25 years or so.
1990
Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed the first browser called WorldWideWeb, and it was first implemented on a computer by NeXT Software, Inc, a company built by Steve Jobs. This permeated a whole new perception of the web, and now people could better reach and understand how to navigate through data on the web.
1991
On 6 August 1991, the World Wide Web went live – to the world.
1992
Sir Tim choose a picture of French parodic rock group Les Horribles Cernettes and pushed it online, making it the first image ever uploaded.
1994
By this year, over 13,500,000 users worldwide were using the Internet. With such vast numbers, demand for information arose, and Google was the first to come up with a revolutionary algorithm in this space in 1996, with a solution to the puzzle ‘If only there was a single site where you could find information on the web’.
Other search engines like Yahoo and Bing, have also taken up this space.
How 20 popular websites looked when they launched
Where is the WWWe now?
By end of 2013, there were over 7.1 billion Internet users worldwide and Kenya is no exemption. To be precise, the penetration rate of Internet services in Kenya is 47.1 percent according to the Communications Commission of Kenya. The proliferation of mobile devices and mobile data has been a major contributor. We, however, still fall short in local content provision.
What are some of the innovations attributed to these milestones?
Amazon, 1994
Amazon is the world’s largest retailer boasting of a whooping US$ 74.45 billion in revenue as of 2013.
Google, 1996
Google took over the market as the most reliable search engine and now boasts of as many as 12.477 billion searches monthly, with 1.17 billion unique searches every month.
Facebook, 2004
Initially known as The Facebook, Facebook evolved from a college network to today’s world’s most popular social platform. Facebook boasts of at least 1.23 billion monthly users worldwide, with 757 million users logging on to the network daily, as of 31 December 2013.
YouTube, 2005
Founded in February 2005, YouTube, a video-sharing platform, now has more than 1 billion monthly unique users and over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month. In Kenya, it is the third most visited site, according to Alexa.
WhatsApp, 2009
WhatsApp Inc. coined from the term What’s Up? is a messaging app that’s revolutionized the chat industry with as many as 450 million users using the product. To understand what this really means, check our analysis on This Week on Social.
So, where are WWWe heading?
This has been a really huge discussion, and it’s not ending any time soon. The information shared on the World Wide Web is so vast that even Google is not solving the problem – some have argued.
Our biggest hope is that Web 3.0 will solve what Web 2.0 hasn’t. According to Tim, not my workmate but the founder of the WWW, the Web is growing to be this huge clutter of information that consists of totally related information but the question is, ‘Is there a better way to sort out this information?’ Find out that and more in this nail-biting (see what I did there?) video by a bunch of geeky fellas.
