2000-vs-2010
2000-vs-2010

This graphic is from here

Where were YOU on the internet 10 years ago?

Did you have an email account?

What were you doing?

Let’s see.

In 2000 I got my job at the Economist in New York City, at eiu.com. This was before the newspapers and magazines started getting really scared as the internet slowly took over their revenue streams.

I had had an email address since 1994. I had just gotten my yahoo email address.

All of my peers had a telnet email address.

And I had been blogging for a year, ever since I lived in England and wanted to keep my friends up to date on what I was up to.

I didn’t have a cellphone, but my grandmother had a carphone.

I had been a computer geek for awhile, and had already beat a few games. I even had a job in the computer labs at my college.

The internet was a much smaller place back then.

Google was competing with Altavista, Netscape, and Dogpile as serious search competitors.

Everyone I knew in college read one internet comic: Pokey the Penguin.

pokey the penguin
pokey the penguin

(If you were reading pokey too, did you know that there is now a book of pokey comics you can buy?)

Most people had brochure sites, or the inklings of Web 2.0.

It was a much simpler time.

And looking back, I have think that in ten year’s time, we’ll say much the same about 2010.

It’s incredible, the way we’ve grown in the past 10 years, the way people anywhere in the world can have cellphones that connect them to everywhere. The way the one laptop per child project has helped so many children and their families gain access to so much knowledge.

I am so grateful that we’ve come so far. I’m grateful that I’ve learned what I have about this rapidly changing field of internet marketing. This is the wave of the future that we need to embrace if we are going to change the world and be able to tell the right people about our causes, our products and our services.

How about you?

What were YOU doing on the internet 10 years ago?

0 Responses

  1. Your post cracked me up – I worked for a university and had an email address in 1993, pre-Windows. Almost none of my friends had one unless they worked in education, too, so actually getting emails was rare. We used the accounts at first to keep in touch with other people we worked with on campus (big campus) and with the national organization that funded us (NSF). I totally remember getting a Windows computer with a graphics-based email interface and thinking it was THE COOLEST THING 🙂 It crashed all of the time. So, by 10 yrs ago, I was just happy that most people I knew finally had accounts, could open attachments, and that you didn’t have to type code to use your account!

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