Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
The first web page, ever, was published by Tim Berners-Lee in late 1990. (The server on which it was hosted has long gone the way of obsolete computers, but you can find a copy of it here.)
In thinking about web sites that changed our world, I went back to the wonderful Wayback Machine, the site of Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive project, to see what's still visible from the early web, writes John Naughton, the Observer's internet specialist.
Since the archive project only got rolling in 1995, there's little (if anything) from the early days. The first Amazon page that was archived is from 1999, for example; the first eBay page is dated June 14, 1997.
What's striking about early web pages is how naive and under-designed they are by today's standards. Not so surprising perhaps, but that was because in those days, websites were the province of techies, not designers. And bandwidth was scarce, so the graphics-intensive pages that we now take for granted were viewed as bad form because they stretched users' dial-up links.
Another thing that is striking about the list we came up with is that the overwhelming majority are US-based. Friends Reunited is the only British representative. This isn't really surprising - it reflects a deep cultural divide. Americans tend to be early adopters of most things technological, and British business (not to mention the political and cultural establishment) was much slower to realise the potential of the new medium. Sad but true. Sigh.
Anyway, 15 years on, we've a wide world of pages to choose from for the most influential sites to date.
Top of the list is eBay.com - the auction and shopping site, followed by online community encyclopaedia, wikipedia.com. Third is napster.com, the music file sharing website, followed closely by the video-sharing network, youtube.com. Weblog publishing system, blogger.com, comes in fifth. The next 10, in order: friendsreunited.com,drudgereport.com, myspace.com, amazon.com, slashdot.org, salon.com, craigslist.org, google.com, yahoo.com and last but not least, easyjet.com.
Doubtless you'll have more to add. Please do so.
