When the web went worldwide some fifteen years ago, little did its founder know what could lie ahead.



Here we trace the journey of the Internet and looking at where the web goes now...



That the world is not enough, thanks to the Internet, is well known. That the web is a part of our day-to-day life is also known. However, what is not known is where the web goes from here. The World Wide Web has come a long way in fifteen years but the hard part is still to come, say experts. Fifteen years ago, the World Wide Web started to live up to its name when its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, posted a message to the alt.hypertext discussion group about his work on The World Wide Web (WWW) project, which aimed ‘to allow links to be made to any information anywhere.’ Thus the web was woven.



But the sheer scale and variety of information sources open to any internet user with a web browser to hand remains astonishing, especially to those of my generation who grew up offline and have seen the world change so much.



Every day we see evidence of the impact that the web has had on the assumptions we make about how information is made available and what forms of access are to be preferred. For example, the online edition of the Doomsday Book has just gone live, providing us all with the sort of access to this supremely important historical document that was previously reserved for scholars. The impact on business is in many ways even more dramatic. Obviously, companies like Google, Yahoo!, Amazon and eBay would not exist without the web, but that is only part of it.



AOL has just announced that it is abandoning its subscription model and will no longer charge people for email, chat and the other services it provides. We should look to the programmers of Generation XML for the ideas that will enable the web to evolve and adapt, and ensure that we still remember Tim Berners-Lee when the real centenary rolls around in 2091.



(1)6 August 1991: Tim Berners-Lee releases first web software.



(2)30 April 1993: World Wide Web can be used for free by anyone



(3)3 February 1994: The precursor to Yahoo! written by two students goes online.



(4)7 August 1995: There are now 18,957 websites online.



(5)4 July 1996: Hotmail was launched and becomes a hit.



(6)17 December 1997: Web commentator Jorm Bargar coins the term ‘weblog,’ later shortened to blog. Since then the idea of community blogs is thought of for the first time.



(7)15 September 1998: Google opens its first office in a garage in California.



(8)16 August 1999: Everquest, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game is released. This is then followed by infinite role-playing games.



(9)14 January 2000: The dot-com bubble reaches its peak.



(10)11 January 2001: Podcasting seen for the first time



(11)11 December 2002: The FBI starts virtual ‘wanted’ post. This is followed by a series of cyber crimes.



(12)28 April 2003: A music download service lauched. 15 May 2003: The first flash mob is organized in Manhattan over the web



(13)5 February 2004: Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction becomes the most searched images in cyber history.



(14)13 February 2005: Video sharing starts and becomes an instant hit. 10 October 2005: 17 million new sites go online.



(15)12 April 2006: Google launches restricted service in China called Gu Ge.



(16)1 August 2006: There are now 92, 615, 3662 websites online and the rest is history as said by them!

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