Timeline of popular Internet services

This is a timeline of popular Internet services listed in reverse chronological order. The Internet service that first reached popularity in a category is listed. This may not always be the service that started the category. In addition the one or two currently most popular services in a category may also be listed. The current year is omitted to avoid dynamic inconsistency.

2013

• Mega, a cloud storage and file hosting service.

2012

• Wikidata, a collaboratively edited knowledge base operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.
• Coursera, a site offering mostly free massive open online courses.
• Outlook.com, the new free web-based email service from Microsoft, that replaced Hotmail.
• Vine, a six-second video media platform.
• Tinder, a social discovery dating mobile application.

2011

• Google+, a social networking system by Google, integrating several of the company's existing services, such as Google Buzz and Picasa Web Albums.
• Duolingo, a free language-learning website and crowdsourced text translation platform.
• Snapchat, a photo messaging application.
• Twitch.tv, a live streaming video platform.

2010

• OnLive, a cloud gaming platform where the video games are synchronized, rendered, and stored on remote servers and delivered via the Internet.
• Diaspora, a free personal web server that implements a distributed social networking service.
• Flattr, a microdonation system.
• Instagram, an online photo-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take a picture, apply a digital filter to it, and share it.
• Pinterest, a pinboard-style photo sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, hobbies, and more.

2009

• Google Docs, a free, Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, form, and data storage service offered by Google goes out of beta.
• Wolfram Alpha, an answer engine
• Kickstarter, an online threshold pledge system for funding creative projects
• Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, a service to automatically delete private content and friend relationships from many social networking sites at once
• Quora, a question-and-answer website
• Bing, a web search engine from Microsoft
• WhatsApp, a free mobile messaging app
• Bitcoin, the first practical digital currency and cryptocurrency

2008

• Encyclopedia of Life, a free, online collaborative encyclopedia intended to document all of the 1.8 million living species known to science.
• GitHub, a web-based hosting service for software development projects that use the Git revision control system.
• TinEye, a reverse image search engine.
• Spotify, a DRM-based music streaming service offering unlimited streaming of selected music from a range of major and independent record labels.
• Jinni, a semantic search and recommendation engine for movies, TV shows and short films.
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a cloud computing platform that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications.
• Dropbox, a file hosting service that uses cloud computing to enable users to store and share files and folders with others across the Internet using file synchronization.
• Android Market, then an app store; now merged with Google Music and known as Google Play.

2007

• Google Street View, a technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth that provides panoramic views from various positions along many streets in the world.
• Kindle, the e-book reader by Amazon.com is launched together with the e-book virtual bookshop. In July 2010 Amazon announced that e-book sales for its Kindle reader outnumbered sales of hardcover books.
• Tumblr is a microblogging platform that allows users to post text, images, videos, links, quotes and audio to their tumblelog, a short-form blog.
• Experience Project, a free social networking website of online communities premised on connecting people through shared life experiences.
• SoundCloud, an online audio distribution platform which allows collaboration, promotion and distribution of audio recordings.
• Nimbuzz, mobile messaging platform with more than 150 million users providing free messaging, free calling, free video calling, social games and Avatars.

2006

• WikiLeaks, an international non-profit organisation that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources and news leaks.
• Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates, tweets, which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.
• IMSLP, the International Music Score Library Project.
• Spokeo, a social network aggregator web site that aggregates data from many online and offline sources launches, raising many privacy concerns.
• Mint.com is a free web-based personal financial management service for the US and Canada.
• Khan Academy, free educational video repository with more than 3,000 micro lectures, automated exercises, and tutoring.
• PlayStation Network, a multiplayer gaming service for use with the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 4.

2005

• YouTube, a video sharing website.
• Google Earth, a virtual globe computer program.
• Megaupload, allows users to upload and download files.
• Musopen, an online music library of copyright-free (public domain) music.
• OpenID, an open standard that describes how users can be authenticated in a decentralized manner.
• eyeOS, an open source web desktop following the cloud computing concept.
• Etsy, an e-commerce website focused on handmade or vintage items as well as art and craft supplies.
• Pandora Radio, an online radio and music recommendation system based on the Music Genome Project.
• Reddit, a social news and entertainment website.

2004

• OpenStreetMap, a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world
• Gmail, a free web-based email service from Google
• Facebook, a social networking site
• World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game
• Wikia (formerly Wikicities), a free web hosting service and a wiki farm for wikis
• Flickr, a photo and video sharing website.

2003

• Skype, a software application that allows users to make voice calls over the Internet.
• iTunes is an online store which sells music and videos in downloadable form.
• MySpace is a social networking website.
• Steam, a digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer and communications platform for computer games developed by Valve Corporation.
• Second Life is a virtual world.
• 4chan, an English-language imageboard website.
• CouchSurfing, a hospitality exchange network.
• The Pirate Bay, a Swedish website that hosts torrent files.

2002

• Moodle, a free software e-learning platform.
• Tor, a system intended to enable online anonymity is released.
• Last.fm, a music recommender system.
• LinkedIn, a business-oriented social networking site is founded and launched next year.
• TinyURL, a URL shortening service.
• Skyscanner, a flight search engine that allows users to browse for flights via price and location.
• Xbox Live, an online multiplayer gaming service, originally and previously available for the Xbox, now for Xbox 360, Xbox One and some Windows operating systems.

2001

• Wikipedia, a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free Internet encyclopedia.
• StumbleUpon, a discovery engine that uses collaborative filtering to recommend web content to its users.
• PartyPoker.com, a set of online poker card rooms.
• Meetup, an online social networking portal that facilitates offline group meetings in various localities around the world.

2000

• Blogger is a blog publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries.
• Geocaching.com starts its activity. This outdoor sport activity with online support can be considered one of the early forms of geosocial networking.
• DeviantArt, an online community showcasing various forms of user-made artwork.
• TripAdvisor, travel site that assists customers in gathering travel information, posting reviews and opinions of travel related content and engaging in interactive travel forums.

1999

• RSS, the first version of the web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works is created at Netscape.
• Monster.com, an employment website.
• SourceForge, a web-based source code repository. It acts as a centralized location for software developers to control and manage open source software development.
• SETI@home, an Internet-based public volunteer computing project. Its purpose is to analyze radio signals, searching for signs of extra terrestrial intelligence.
• Napster (now defunct) was an online music peer-to-peer file sharing service.
• SurveyMonkey Online survey system providing free and paid customizable surveys.

1998

• Google Inc. launched a search engine for web sites of the World Wide Web, subsequently extending search facilities to many types of media, including books, magazines, forums, email, news.
• Yahoo! Groups, a community-driven Internet communication tool, a hybrid between an electronic mailing list and an Internet forum starts off as Yahoo! Clubs.
• PayPal, an e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet.
• Evite, the first online invitation company, allowing for invitations to be sent via email.

1997

• Babel Fish launched by AltaVista. It was the first language translation service for web content, with technology provided by SYSTRAN.
• Netflix, an American corporation that offers both on-demand video streaming over the Internet, and flat rate online video rental.
• Go Daddy, an Internet domain registrar and Web hosting company.
• About.com, an online resource for original information and advice.

1996

• Ultima Online (UO), a graphical massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).
• Internet Archive is an archive of periodically cached versions of websites.^[1]
• Hotmail, a free web-based email service.
• Ticketmaster, a ticket sales and distribution company goes online and sells its first ticket through their platform.
• Shopzilla, a price comparison service.

1995

• Ebay is an auction and shopping website.
• Wiki: A website that anyone can edit.
• Craigslist, a centralized network of online communities, featuring free online classified advertisements.
• AltaVista, a web search engine. It was once one of the most popular search engines but its popularity declined with the rise of Google. It was bought and later closed down by Yahoo!.

1994

• Amazon.com is an online retailer, best known for selling books, but now sells all kinds of goods.
• GeoCities, a free web hosting service, now defunct, founded as Beverly Hills Internet (BHI) by David Bohnett and John Rezner.
• The Yahoo! website started off as a web directory and soon became a webportal offering all kinds of Internet services.
• Match.com, an online dating company.
• FedEx.com launches, being the first transportation web site to offer online package tracking.

1993

• Blog: A blog (a contraction of the term weblog) is a type of website which resembles an online diary. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. Originally hand-coded, there are now blogging tools (a kind of content management system) to facilitate searching and linking to other blogs.
• CDDB, a database for software applications to look up audio CD (compact disc) information over the Internet.
• Hutchison Paging email gateway allows emails to be sent to message pagers in the UK. This same system worked with Orange mobile phones when they were launched in 1994, emails would arrive as texts.

1992

• HTML was developed by a British engineer, Tim Berners-Lee while working in CERN. This was devised so that reports from CERN, including photographs, graphs and tables could be shared (served) across the web.
• Veronica (search engine) provides an index of files on Gopher servers.

1991

• arXiv, an open access archive for electronic preprints of scientific papers.
• Gopher: A hypertext system which was soon largely replaced by the World Wide Web.

1990

• ARPANET was retired and merged into the NSFNET.
• IMDb, the Internet Movie Database.
• The Archie search engine lists names of files on FTP sites.

1988

• Internet Relay Chat (IRC): A form of real-time Internet text messaging (chat) or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message.

1986

• LISTSERV, the first electronic mailing list software application.

1983

• Internet: A global computer network which was created by interconnecting various existing networks with the TCP/IP protocol suite.

1982

• First standardization of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, a network transmission standard for the transport of email.

1979

• Usenet: A distributed threaded discussion and file sharing system; a collection of forums known as newsgroups, that was a precursor to today's web-based forums. One notable difference from a BBS or web forum is that there is no central system owner. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers which store and forward messages to one another.

1978

• MUD: First real-time, multi-player MUD adventure game was developed by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at Essex University, England.

1973

• Email: First proposal for standardization of electronic mail message format in RFC 561.
• ARPANET made its first international connection between University college in London and Royal Radar establishment in Norway.

1971

• FTP: File Transfer Protocol.
• Project Gutenberg, a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works.^[2]

1969

• Telnet: A system for logging in, over a network, to a computer situated in another location.^[3]
• ARPANET connected Stanford research Institute in Santa Barbara to the University of Utah, an early version of the Internet was born, although the first attempt actually crashed on the 'g' of the word 'Login'.^[4]

1960s

• Email: Electronic mail applications are developed on timesharing main frame computers for communication between system users.
• The beginnings of what would become the Internet can be traced back to 1962, when the RAND (an American military think tank) tackled the problem of how they could communicate in the aftermath of a nuclear attack, their thinking was prompted by the Cuban Missile Crisis.

See also

• History of the Internet
• List of Internet phenomena
• List of virtual communities with more than 100 million users
• Before the Internet some countries had Videotex services such as the UK's Prestel and France's Minitel.

References

1. Cornell University Library (2003). "Digital Preservation and Technology Timeline". Digital Preservation Management. USA. Retrieved August 2015.
2. Vara, Vauhini (5 December 2005). "Project Gutenberg Fears No Google". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 15 August 2007.
3. RFC 495 - Announcement of Telnet protocol
4. "ARPANET – The First Internet", Living Internet