Search and People Power

Being only 23 years old, computers have always been around, and I barely remember the first time we got the Internet, but essentially, it has been around my whole life. I don't know what I would have ever needed it for before then. But I must say I am very glad that I live in a time with so much advancement.

Over the past 10 - 15 years, many new innovations have been made to the Internet, primarily in the search and social aspects. First, Jerry Yang and David Filo invented Yahoo! by accident while secretly trying to find a way to find information for a Stanford fantasy basketball league more quickly. They were electrical engineer m

ajors and first named it, "Jerry and David's Guide to the Internet." Yahoo! is obviously much more catchy. All of this thanks to Michael Moritz, the venture capitalist who invested $2 million in Yahoo! For fear of being "sell-outs," and annoyance, they were originally afraid to utilize advertising, but that was how they made their money and it was actually received really well.

Excite was the first big contender for Yahoo! and they would have battles with their innovations, such a

s, one would create e-mail, so the other would provide e-mail, etc. Joe Krause, the co-founder of Exicte seems pretty dumb now, though, because he was given the chance to join forces with Google for the mere price of $1 million, but refused.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin named Google as a play on words to mean 10 to the 100th power in a very fitting manner. How Google differed from other search engines at this time was that they counted links and page visits to determine page relevancy rather than just keyword mentions. Andy Bechtolsheim, venture capitalist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc., believed in Brin and Page and invested $100,000 on the spot. Bill Gross, founder of Idealab, innovated advertising practices and developed the idea to sell keywords to advertisers. Then Google became the most essential player in the web economy. There is the Google search, Google Maps, G-mail, Google Earth, Google Docs, Picassa, Blogger, and eventually YouTube. The motto at Google is, "Don't Be Evil."

Now the video looked to people power. Most of the creators of the latest sites are very young. They discussed how the web not only changed the world, but how the world changed the web, and how it is controlled by no one and shaped by everyone.

From YouTube's purchase by Google for $1.65 billion at the end of 2006 to Digg to Facebook. Web is a two-way medium, and the first time that was really portrayed was with Shawn Fanning, the founder of Napster. Not realizing it was illegal, he created a way to download and share music with peers. When the music industry won the battle against file sharing, this led Steve Jobs to create iTunes with more strict copyright laws and regulations.

Then there was the wave of friend/match-finding sites. Friendster didn't last very long, then Myspace came along and changed the platform for musicians and how they promote themselves. Created in 2003 by Chris DeWolfe, CEO and founder, and Tom Anderson, President and founder, it was a way to connect with friends, but primarily bands and musicians. Then Facebook came along and is paving the way for new social media. Mark Zuckerberg, founder and Harvard dropout uses something he calls a social graph or a social network analysis to find how people are connected and help them connect with each other. Myspace isn't going down without a fight, though.

Finally, Craig Newmark, creator of Craigslist is proof that creation of these sites is not solely for the money. He works out of a tiny office and proves that using the web is about setting communication free. Craigslist is available in about 450 cities worldwide to provide a service for people to buy and sell over the Internet.

In short, there have been many great improvements to something that was already great, and I can't wait to see where it goes from here. As I mentioned in a previous blog, we are in the future.