New Media Timeline
The birth of the world wide web happened in 1989 with Tim Berners-Lee producing a proposal for the introduction of first search engine later known as Nexus. This was the beginning of internet as we know it and set the foundations for the virtual world that has become so central to our lives today. All be it at this stage the web was still for a limited group of people such as scientists and intellectual establishments. Going into the 90s the aim was to bring the internet to the mass public which happened in 1990–91. Now the public could interact with the web which then was made even easier to navigate with the introduction of HTML and URL, created to help make searchable content easier to find for the users.
From 1990 to 1994 the world of the web had no major progressions until 1995 when Amazon.com was launched by Jeff Bezos. The site/business was created to initially stock and sell a high verity of books to online customers. It was to become the worlds biggest online bookstore and fit its name well, being named after the river Amazon (the largest river on earth.) The progression of amazon has seen it go from selling books to almost any product consumers would like to buy. Going into 1996 the aesthetics of web pages were about to be effected due to the introduction of Adobe flash,acrobat and shockwave (as we know them today.) These applications gave way to graphic design focused on the web and its content, creating more versatile and interactive websites.
1997 sees the launch of Google.com. First created in 1995 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, google found its beginnings in the form of a class project and was known at this time as “BackRub”. The search engine by the end of 1998 had up to 60 million webpages listed in its index and was becoming ever increasingly used going into the 2000s. Googles minimalist design attracted many people and still does to this day. The name google was born from the idea that Page and Brin wanted a search engine that had a substantial amount of index content, they decided on google from the number Googol which has a physical number of 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. Going into 2001 google was being used substantially with ten million Google searches a day. The search engine has grown to such a giant today that Google is now a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary.
In 2002, one billion home computers had been bought all around the world and this is around about the time the web hits its boom and becomes so entwined with our personal lives. 2003 was the year MySpace was founded and was launched in the start of 2004. The social networking site was to set the path for future social sites and just a month after its release it had one million users. By the end of 2004 it had five million people interacting with the site and others around the world. 2004 was also the launch of the biggest social media site known today, Facebook. Founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin. At this time Facebook was only available to Harvard students and gradually through time extended across collages, universities and high schools across America eventual crossing over to UK University’s in 2005. Facebook then went global in 2006 to anyone who had a valid email address. This globalization of the site hit it off right away and the site has brought a diverse group of people, from everyday working class to Hollywood stars and celebrity’s. In-between facebook launching and going worldwide, 2005 saw the beginnings of another big business website. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen envisioned a website that would be a great platform to upload video content. From there YouTube.com was born. This new site was something different from the startup photosharing sites around this time and Hurley and Chen saw a good opportunity to garb the chance and take matters into there own hands. In 2006 Google bought YouTube, this gave YouTube the boost it needed to become a mega video uploading and sharing site. Today YouTube is the third most visited site on the web and the biggest video sharing website to date. The site receives more than two million views a day and has over 10,000 partner’s business wise.
From 2006 to the present the world wide web and new media have been added to substantially and the verity of social networking sites, search engines, the way graphics are ever evolving on the web and devices is rich in ideas and getting more high tech and sophisticated. In 2016 BBC saw the switchover of BBC Three going internet only viewing. This is a huge step as it shows what progression is sure to come. New media is so intwined in our lives and with the internet and the world wide web involved we see how these are extensions of ourselves, our lives and our knowledge. The future for new media will need to keep up with trends, set trends and revolutionize in a unique way.
