Looking at what is called Web 2.0 one could come to conclusion, that it is a recent development from Google, MySpace or YouTube. Nothing could be further from the truth. A start-up in germany can be credited as being the first Web 2.0 service world wide.
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It was in the years 1993 and 1994 when I developed and started 'germany.net', an integrated, advertising financed, web-based online service.
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| Without the benefits of modern development environments like Apache Webservers, MySQL, Javascript or PHP, my team and I were able to built web-based inter-communications applications like mail, forums, chats, file exchange and more. In order to develop those applications, we had to design a capable webserver first. It was able to parse variables and to understand conditional statements so that it could generate dynamic content - 'germany.net' was born.
I started with a sponsored work station (thank you again Sun Microsystems ) and a Mosaic web browser and kicked off a new way of web.
Never heard about germany.net? germany.net ceased to exist in 1999 being swallowed into what is now Arcor Online. At that time, germany.net had more than 600,000 users, ranking it among the "top 3" Online-Services and ISPs in Germany.
What about Amazon.com? Amazon.com surely was among the first to understand the power of the 'web'. But they started a few months after germany.net. WHOIS 'created' records show the creation time for domains. These are the dates a domain was registered and made available on the Internet.
Here are a few popular domains:
| microsoft.com |
May 02 1991 |
| germany.net |
Aug 08 1994 |
| amazon.com |
Nov 01 1994 |
| yahoo.com |
Jan 18 1995 |
| aol.com |
Jun 21 1995 |
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