The year Was 2000, the internet was just taking of as a global phenomena, google had not yet gained market control in the search engine division. Everything was new and shiny, including drive by downloads, and many of us where first getting hooked up to the internet. Indeed the growth of the internet as a phenomenon can best be appreciated here (i):
Below we see both how usuage has developed in different regions of the world in the past 10 years and how the top ten internet using countries, by absolute numbers, in the world, is markedly different from how it was 12 years ago (i).
As can be seen there are now at least five times as many users as there was in 2000, which shows us how much the internet grew virally and branched out from its initial niche market of tech-types with an avid interest in personal computers to the average person on the streets with little or no technical knowledge of the inner workings of either the net or their machines. Indeed I was, myself, somewhat of a late adopter as I did not get a home internet connection till 2004, but I had experienced the internet at school in 2002 and at a relatives in 2003.
Back when I first got the Internet, and my judgement may well be partially clouded by youth, but when I first discovered Macromedia Shockwave Player, I was amazed at what it could do; the idea that a computer could display "good" graphics and interactivity was amazing. Prior to discovering flash I had only seen computers used as word processors or tool for deploying spreadsheets. Indeed BBC computers where still in my school and where used for games! I remember having kb of memory for an old mackintosh we owned and MB's of hard drive space.
Back in 2003 my favourite site was yahoo, by a country mile. It used to be a place where it was easy to find what you were looking for such as games and music applications. It was not a search engine as we know them today, it was simply a directory; much like how a telephone book is a directory of numbers and addresses. The directory was exceedingly well organized into games, music, software and travel etc. For each main category there were sub categories and each main category in 03/04 had only thousands of sites! The sub categories often contained single digit or entries in the teens!
What I loved about it, and which did not appear to be anywhere else, was the games and software you could get back then. All of the people I knew used yahoo back then. I would navigate to Software>Music>Online and I would find some great Shockwave flash applications that still excite me to this day. The sites of course I can no longer find, I never bothered to bookmark them, indeed I never knew what a bookmark or favourite was back then. I hadn't heard of Google. In 2004 no one I spoke to had.
I am sure many people, mainly older people, DID know about Google, but even back then many of the people who knew of it where still the type that also knew about other exotic search engines that us younger people were to young to remember and too young to significantly use a computer when they were popular. In the late nineties and early 2000's it was not part of the mainstream culture for PC's and laptops to be used by the average child unless there parents were into computers,or the computers we speak of were games systems!
For one thing computers were still expensive, internet connections where also expensive and charged, often, by the MB (yes MB....lol) . Indeed, to me, the whole internet explosion is a typical example of how it is to the average companies economical benefit to provide a low cost product to a lot of people rather than provide an expensive service for a few people. The introduction of reduced fee's and manageable monthly fee's where the one thing that probably did most to help bring the internet to a much wider audience than that which accessed it in 1999.
Returning to yahoo, a lot of people have criticised it, said that a directory system is not as good as Googles powerful search engine, however I can think of a few ways a simple directory service IS better than a search engine.
1. You can go specifically to an area of interest rather than have multiple spurious results.
2. You do the filtering, a human mind for me is still better at finding what it wants than any algorithim that attemps to find what your searching for.
Specifically in yahoo, I loved the sites they listed. In particular they had an online music mixer where you could mix in parts,mute parts, solo parts, it was a game but I thought it was pretty good and that particular site I used has yet to be matched by anything that has come since. Sure there are professional online tools that blow it out the water in the field of music production and there are tools that are even more casual for non-musicians to use than that was however for something that made instantly great music, allowed you to make your own track, not with fiddly wave samples but instead with instantly preloaded samples and instantly made you feel like a pro, I have yet to come across anything like it. It was just casual enough to rope thousands but just advanced enough to keep you going back for more and more and more.
Nothing I have came across in 2012 has come close, though there are many many exceptional services for the more serious musician, offerings in the "casual" department remain exceedingly crap. Now you may be saying how is yahoo responsible for the content of websites? Well yahoo listed it in a logical way that made it easy to find, and many other products in the computer software>music>online where similarly of high value and great design. And many of the games in the games category where fun. Everything was laid out neatly and there were not so many sites that you were overwhelmed, unlike today. Using the internet way back when machine I have taken a screen shot of how many links there where in various categories, as yahoo would have appeared in 2004 (ii).
Back when I first got the Internet, and my judgement may well be partially clouded by youth, but when I first discovered Macromedia Shockwave Player, I was amazed at what it could do; the idea that a computer could display "good" graphics and interactivity was amazing. Prior to discovering flash I had only seen computers used as word processors or tool for deploying spreadsheets. Indeed BBC computers where still in my school and where used for games! I remember having kb of memory for an old mackintosh we owned and MB's of hard drive space.
Back in 2003 my favourite site was yahoo, by a country mile. It used to be a place where it was easy to find what you were looking for such as games and music applications. It was not a search engine as we know them today, it was simply a directory; much like how a telephone book is a directory of numbers and addresses. The directory was exceedingly well organized into games, music, software and travel etc. For each main category there were sub categories and each main category in 03/04 had only thousands of sites! The sub categories often contained single digit or entries in the teens!
What I loved about it, and which did not appear to be anywhere else, was the games and software you could get back then. All of the people I knew used yahoo back then. I would navigate to Software>Music>Online and I would find some great Shockwave flash applications that still excite me to this day. The sites of course I can no longer find, I never bothered to bookmark them, indeed I never knew what a bookmark or favourite was back then. I hadn't heard of Google. In 2004 no one I spoke to had.
I am sure many people, mainly older people, DID know about Google, but even back then many of the people who knew of it where still the type that also knew about other exotic search engines that us younger people were to young to remember and too young to significantly use a computer when they were popular. In the late nineties and early 2000's it was not part of the mainstream culture for PC's and laptops to be used by the average child unless there parents were into computers,or the computers we speak of were games systems!
For one thing computers were still expensive, internet connections where also expensive and charged, often, by the MB (yes MB....lol) . Indeed, to me, the whole internet explosion is a typical example of how it is to the average companies economical benefit to provide a low cost product to a lot of people rather than provide an expensive service for a few people. The introduction of reduced fee's and manageable monthly fee's where the one thing that probably did most to help bring the internet to a much wider audience than that which accessed it in 1999.
Returning to yahoo, a lot of people have criticised it, said that a directory system is not as good as Googles powerful search engine, however I can think of a few ways a simple directory service IS better than a search engine.
1. You can go specifically to an area of interest rather than have multiple spurious results.
2. You do the filtering, a human mind for me is still better at finding what it wants than any algorithim that attemps to find what your searching for.
Specifically in yahoo, I loved the sites they listed. In particular they had an online music mixer where you could mix in parts,mute parts, solo parts, it was a game but I thought it was pretty good and that particular site I used has yet to be matched by anything that has come since. Sure there are professional online tools that blow it out the water in the field of music production and there are tools that are even more casual for non-musicians to use than that was however for something that made instantly great music, allowed you to make your own track, not with fiddly wave samples but instead with instantly preloaded samples and instantly made you feel like a pro, I have yet to come across anything like it. It was just casual enough to rope thousands but just advanced enough to keep you going back for more and more and more.
Nothing I have came across in 2012 has come close, though there are many many exceptional services for the more serious musician, offerings in the "casual" department remain exceedingly crap. Now you may be saying how is yahoo responsible for the content of websites? Well yahoo listed it in a logical way that made it easy to find, and many other products in the computer software>music>online where similarly of high value and great design. And many of the games in the games category where fun. Everything was laid out neatly and there were not so many sites that you were overwhelmed, unlike today. Using the internet way back when machine I have taken a screen shot of how many links there where in various categories, as yahoo would have appeared in 2004 (ii).
Sure search engines, are,overall,superior. However, if a search engine like Google had the layout of the old yahoo site in 2004, and allowed you to search through the subcategory you are looking for with its powerful search engine, you could find tens, hundreds of links that offer you what you are after, without one page being recommend that is spurious. As with many things, I feel a hybrid approach could yet be the way forward for Google, as hybrid approaches allow you the best of both worlds. The answer to a question is often not A or B but a combination of the two.
So When did Yahoo start to loose its spark?
It was around 2006 or possibly the tail end of 05, after one of its many redesigns I noticed that there was no longer the music site I used to love. The old, straightforward, directory style I had so adored was gone replaced by a mess of images wrapped up in an ungainly design. I also noticed that,to my mind, the site had been "dummed down" now the software link was no longer present and the music page (Which could also take you to the site I used to use) was no longer a place for creating or playing with music but was instead a place to listen to other peoples music, usually some vacuous pop act. It was becoming "celebritsed", a phenomenon I fail to understand, far less approve of.
A great geeky directory service had almost overnight, it seemed, turned into a vain, superficial and commercialized entity. A place with loads of cool sites and games and been transformed into a place with no soul, an ungainly layout and had strayed so far from what had made it a success: its simplicity of use and engaging content.
Maybe the web was becoming to big to simply list sites, after all no one wants to view 10 million sites and search through them all to find the one you want. Maybe it is a throwback to a distant age where things were simpler, people where more straightforward and the planet had a lot more soul. People were getting excited about the internet spreading, and it becoming a tool used to educate and inform the globe.
What we have now is a lot of unfunny, poorly spelled images of cats being posted online, and a group of teens who should have been unheard of "4chan", influencing cultures around the globe and turning it into a monolithic culture of "sameness". Diversity to me is what yahoo used to be all about, it lost that many years ago and it has stuck with a similar theme since. Then again with the revolution in Tunisia and Egypt we are reminded that the internet can be a force for good, a uniting force and a way of expressing your freedom of speech all rolled into one, although that in itself could be a topic for another article.
References:
(i) http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/10/22/incredible-growth-of-the-internet-since-2000/, accessed 2012 1st september
(ii) http://archive.org/web/web.php, accessed 2012 1st september
So When did Yahoo start to loose its spark?
It was around 2006 or possibly the tail end of 05, after one of its many redesigns I noticed that there was no longer the music site I used to love. The old, straightforward, directory style I had so adored was gone replaced by a mess of images wrapped up in an ungainly design. I also noticed that,to my mind, the site had been "dummed down" now the software link was no longer present and the music page (Which could also take you to the site I used to use) was no longer a place for creating or playing with music but was instead a place to listen to other peoples music, usually some vacuous pop act. It was becoming "celebritsed", a phenomenon I fail to understand, far less approve of.
A great geeky directory service had almost overnight, it seemed, turned into a vain, superficial and commercialized entity. A place with loads of cool sites and games and been transformed into a place with no soul, an ungainly layout and had strayed so far from what had made it a success: its simplicity of use and engaging content.
Maybe the web was becoming to big to simply list sites, after all no one wants to view 10 million sites and search through them all to find the one you want. Maybe it is a throwback to a distant age where things were simpler, people where more straightforward and the planet had a lot more soul. People were getting excited about the internet spreading, and it becoming a tool used to educate and inform the globe.
What we have now is a lot of unfunny, poorly spelled images of cats being posted online, and a group of teens who should have been unheard of "4chan", influencing cultures around the globe and turning it into a monolithic culture of "sameness". Diversity to me is what yahoo used to be all about, it lost that many years ago and it has stuck with a similar theme since. Then again with the revolution in Tunisia and Egypt we are reminded that the internet can be a force for good, a uniting force and a way of expressing your freedom of speech all rolled into one, although that in itself could be a topic for another article.
References:
(i) http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/10/22/incredible-growth-of-the-internet-since-2000/, accessed 2012 1st september
(ii) http://archive.org/web/web.php, accessed 2012 1st september
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