Timeline of popular Internet services

2006

* Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging 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.

2005

* YouTube is a video sharing website.
* Google Earth is a virtual globe computer program.

2004

* Podcast: A downloadable audio file for listening to on a portable media player. A bit like a radio program that you can save and listen to at your convenience. "Podcast" is a portmanteau of the words "iPod" and "broadcast". Podcasting began to catch hold in late 2004, though the ability to distribute audio and video files easily has been around since before the dawn of the Internet.

2004

* Facebook is a social networking website.
* World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).
* Flickr is a photo/ video sharing website.

2003

* iTunes is an online store which sells music and videos in downloadable form.
* MySpace is a social networking website.
* Second Life is a virtual world.

2001

* Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. One of the best-known wikis.

1998

* The Google website started off as a search engine for the world wide web. Now offers search facilities for all kinds of media such as books, magazines, forums, email, Google Earth.

1996

* Internet Archive is an archive of periodically cached versions of websites.

1995

* Ebay is an auction and shopping website.
* Wiki: A website that anyone can edit.

1994

* Amazon.com is an online retailer, best known for selling books, but now sells all kinds of goods.

* The Yahoo! website started off as a web directory and soon became a webportal offering all kinds of internet services.

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.

1992

* World Wide Web

1991

* Gopher: A hypertext system which was soon largely replaced by the World Wide Web.

1990

* ARPANET was retired and merged into the NSFNET.

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.

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

* E-mail: First proposal for standardization of electronic mail message format in RFC 561.

1971

* FTP: File Transfer Protocol

1969

* Telnet: A system for logging in, over a network, to a computer situated in another location.

1960s

* Email: Electronic mail applications are developed on timesharing main frame computers for communication between system users.


http://en.wikipedia.org/