Virtually Here

It’s hard to remember when exactly I was first exposed to the internet but I think it was at an ‘internet cafe’ in the early 90’s. I remember using a browser called Webcrawler and my friend who patiently showed me around ‘the net’ made me believe for a long time that all the internet was good for was to look up porn and random trivia. I guess in a way not much has changed.

As the internet matured, and more and more people started to gain access to it, it rapidly killed off the BBS communities that had thrived for the past four-six years. Nodes were shutting down daily and it became harder and harder to push messages and updates around a network that fewer and fewer computers were connected to. UseNet dwindled away but still have, for various reasons, a devout following and have managed to survive where so many others passed away.

Almost over night social networks started to flourish on the internet. Some of the pioneer were names like Classmates.com (1995) and AOL. At it’s peak AOL provided Internet access to over 30,000,000 people and were one of the first internet providers to establish concepts like chat rooms and private rooms.

What we were about to see the dawn of was - Web 2.0

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