The Internet 2002-2012: What a difference a decade makes

In my personal experience the Internet and technology changed way more from 92-02 than it did from 02-12. In '02 I had already had broadband for the past 3 years, and so did many of my non-technical friends. I even remember some of them having multiple computers in their home; a family computer, computers in the bedrooms, etc. Everybody used Internet Explorer 5 or 6, and those who were more technically savvy also used ad-aware (or something similar).

The biggest differences in my opinion (aside from smart phones) is the impact of social media and the abundance of streaming video/music that's available today. In '02 it seemed everyone used AIM or Hotmail with an obscure screen name. Now people are open with their real identities, and it's easy to find acquaintances through friend's "friends lists". Also we have Netflix, Pandora, Spotify, WatchESPN, etc, that just wasn't available 10 years ago.

I recently watched a miniseries from 2002, it seemed like another era. There were cell phones and the Internet of course, but no text messages, Twitter, smart phones, touch screens... Everything seemed slow and primitive. A journalist had to "get back to the office" to check her email, and start calling people in order to disseminate information. It was like watching horse carriages in the streets instead of cars.

But I don't think it's because technological revolutions are becoming more frequent. IMO, the quick change witnessed in the last decade is exceptional, and a direct outcome of everyone, all over the world, coming online during these years; a situation which helped actualize the Web's potential.

It seems quite appropriate that this page is one giant gif!

I have to say, I miss the internet of the 90s and early 2000, just before it got all "too" popular and "regular people" started widely using it. Them using it is not a bad thing at all, maybe it is just nostalgia on my part but there was something cool and new about it back then, even though the 90s was sort-of late already anyway when considering how old the internet was back then. But you had mostly techs and geeks using it and that made for a certain interesting atmosphere and most people were trying to learn and/or do something new and had a lot of new things to discover... nowadays it feels like finally the masses are catching up to what every self-respecting "geek" was already doing back then and it has become this huge opiate to kill time with idle leisure. There were "social networks" even before the term was coined, even before "friendster" and you had "cloud storage" and streaming but typically it was some old pc you had a friend of a friend setup in some ISP's dark server room because getting a T1 or T3 was out of question, at least here in Europe.

Sorry to be ranting incoherently, I just miss those days and feel a tiny bit jealous at how unbelievably easy, fast and accepted to the point of taken for granted things have become. I think it is really a lot harder now to come up with something completely new and revolutionary, most things have been done and done so well, you have an abundance of libraries and services to build on and to me it feels like there are hardly any areas left that have not been covered very or extremely well yet. It has all changed to this huge pool of entertainment and "background noise", millions and millions of totally unimportant borderline-conspicuous-consumption tweets, posts, blog entries...