15th anniversary of the WWW

i am talking about the world wide web here ok, not shaziman’s wild wild web (which is only 3 days old).

do you know that 15 years ago in this month, to be precise on 6 aug. 1991, a man named tim berners-lee started the internet/WWW? as the WWW grows and grows, suddenly we find that we can get any information we want, make any transactions we want… just about do anything, right at home, seated comfortably in our chair. the world on the web in the comfort of your home! ain’t that great?
the observer made a well, what else but a good observation that we had taken the WWW for granted. we buy books from amazon, book airline tickets from air asia, check definitions/spellings from online dictionaries, search for jobs, put up our stuffs for sale at ebay, post our holidays pictures on flickr, we have our own publishing – blogging!… and so on… all these we do with a blink of an eye. just imagine 15 years ago without the WWW:

Amazon was a large river in South America. Ryanair was an Irish airline that flew to places nobody had ever heard of. eBay was a typo. Yahoo was a term from Gulliver’s Travels. A googol was a very large number (one followed by a hundred zeroes). Classified ads were densely printed matter in newspapers. ‘Encyclopedia’ was a synonym for Encyclopedia Britannica. And if you wanted to read what your MP had said in the Commons yesterday you had to queue at the Stationery Office in London to buy Hansard. Oh, and there were quaint little shops in high streets called ‘travel agents’.

to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the WWW, the observer had came up with a list of 15 popular websites that almost everybody visit and take them for granted. here are the 15 websites. do go to the observer to read the explanation (when it was founded, how many users and so on).

1. ebay.com
2. wikipedia.com
3. napster.com
4. youtube.com
5. blogger.com
6. friendsreunited.com
7. drudgereport.com
8. myspace.com
9. amazon.com
10. slashdot.org
11. saloon.com
12. craigsliest.org
13. google.com
14. yahoo.com
15. easyjet.com

seems that this list is more suitable for the people in UK since well, the observer is based in UK. i have not heard of no. 6, friendsunited. perhaps to us malaysians, it is friendsfinder that is more popular. nos 7, 8, 11, 12 and 15 too, i have not come across them. the rest, i agree are very popular of course like amazon, google, youtube.
personally, what is your own top ten most popular websites? do you visit them often, or you just know they are popular but seldom visit them? for me, i would pick google.com as no. 1 popular since i visit it daily! (search, email), but despite amazon being popular, i hardly visit it. well, i don’t usually buy books online.