The first version of Google, Facebook, YouTube and more (and what they can teach us about starting small) 6.5K Flares Filament.io 6.5K Flares × “The best things we know and love started as tiny things.” — Joel Gascoigne Buffer’s CEO, Joel, wrote a post not too long ago about the importance of starting small with new projects. He makes some great points about how easy it is to see the finished product of someone else’s hard work and forget about how long it took them to get to that point: “It’s difficult to understand how the evolutionary process of products and brands contributes and is vital to what they are today.” Joel goes on to say that success is more likely when we execute on small projects. “Don’t even try to build startups. To give us a little insight into just how simple some of the today’s juggernaut web companies were when they started out, I thought it would be fun to do some time traveling in the Wayback Machine. So let’s take a look at how these major companies evolved from their humble beginnings: Facebook — “Be in it for the long haul.” Google — “Do one thing well” Yahoo! Yahoo!
3 Nov 2006 - @ | rsa: @ buzz - you broke your thumb... 2006 | The first-ever hashtag, @-reply and retweet, as Twitter users invented them Twitter is pretty simple, but it started out even simpler. The 140-character messaging service launched on March 21, 2006 with no way to send a reply or retweet someone. And it certainly didn’t have hashtags. Those peculiar conventions, which make Twitter both irresistible and confounding today, were invented by its users. After a while, the company picked up on each trend and adopted it as an official part of the service. Now, the @ and # symbols are among the most crucial elements of Twitter’s identity. The first @-reply @ buzz – you broke your thumb and youre still twittering? The at symbol has a long history of indicating replies on the internet, from message boards to chat rooms. Anderson’s tweet was hardly the first to include an @, but the previous uses were mostly shorthand for the word “at,” usually in reference to a location. The emergence of @ to mean a reply was a crucial development in Twitter’s history. @-replies caught on quickly from there. The first hashtag
Minitel Research Lab, USA 1998 - In the Garage Where Google Was Born It all started in a garage that you can still find with minimal effort — especially if you're using Google Maps. Less than one mile off U.S. Route 101, the highway that links San Francisco to the rest of Silicon Valley, you'll come to a quiet neighborhood a stone's throw from Stanford's beautifully manicured campus. The duo spent the winter of 1998 in the now famous garage, building the tech company that would change search, and consequently the Internet, forever. That was 15 years ago, and Google has since become a multi-billion dollar corporation that answers all of our questions and may soon even drive our cars. To celebrate the company's 15th birthday, Mashable put together a slideshow looking back at the company's earliest days and the garage where it all started. What is your favorite memory of Google from the past 15 years? Image: Kurt Wagner/Mashable
2006 Silicon Valley’s All Twttr Dodgeball is so New York! In Silicon Valley, its all Twttr! Twttr is a new mobile social networking application written by Noah Glass (and team), an Odeo-guy, a long time compadre of Blogger founder Ev Williams. (Twttr is a side project.) It is not a very complicated application – and which is what makes it so addictive and at the same time annoying. Twttr has married Short Code Messaging, SMS with a way to create social groups. Jason Goldman, Blogger product manager calls is presence tense blogging. While I was smoking/talking outside the Zoomr/Valleyschwag party last night, I was introduced to Glass by Nitin Borwankar, a good pal of mine. The annoying SMS messages from nocturnal friends is not the only thing which bothers me about this service, but also the fact, that the texting a message(reply) to twttr ends up on their website.
1971 The @-symbol, part 1 of 2 In 1971, Ray Tomlinson was a 29-year-old computer engineer working for the consulting firm Bolt, Beranek and Newman.[1] Founded just over two decades previously,[2]BBN had recently been awarded a contract by the US government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency to undertake an ambitious project to connect computers all over America.[3] The so-called ‘ARPANET’ would go on to provide the foundations for the modern Internet, and quite apart from his technical contributions to it, Tomlinson would also inadvertently grant it its first global emblem in the form of the ‘@’ symbol. The origins of the ARPANET project lay in the rapidly advancing state of the art in computing and the problems faced in making best use of this novel resource. In the early days, leaving a ruinously expensive mainframe idle even for a short time was a cardinal sin, and a so-called ‘batch processing’ mode of operation was adopted to minimise down time. Some of the heavyweights of the time did not even bid.
1994 comic sans | "People who don't like Comic Sans don't know anything about design" Interview: ahead of his talk at London's V&A museum on Friday, typographer Vincent Connare talks to Dezeen about creating the typeface that designers love to hate. Vincent Connare was one of the early pioneers of digital typeface design, working on fonts for Agfa and Apple in the early 1990s before joining Microsoft, where he designed both the web-friendly Trebuchet font family and the now infamous Comic Sans MS. "It was important at Microsoft to show people how things could be done. The group back then were doing things five years or more ahead of everybody," Connare told Dezeen. "We were addressing issues with various types of screens and devices. Today we are actually doing less internally in the code of fonts than we did 15 years ago." "I was asked to comment on what I thought of the use of typography in this new application. In 1995 it was included in the company's standard font package for Windows, putting it in the hands of millions of computer users. What the Font?
1998 Google! google.stanford.edu Searching the Web has increasingly become a two-stage process--execute a search, then wade through the results trying to find what you're actually looking for. Google!, an ongoing research project at Stanford University, helps you access the most relevant finds more quickly, and rivals Yahoo! The site's unique PageRank function indicates how many Web pages point to a particular document. Google!' If you're used to performing complex Boolean searches, you'll find Google!'
1974 | RFC 675 - Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program [Docs] [txt|pdf] Network Working Group Vinton Cerf Request for Comments: 675 Yogen Dalal NIC: 2 Carl Sunshine INWG: 72 December 1974 December 1974 Version This document describes the functions to be performed by the internetwork Transmission Control Program [TCP] and its interface to programs or users that require its services. RFC 675 Specification of Internet TCP December 1974 A pair of sockets form a CONNECTION which can be used to carry data in either direction [i.e. full duplex]. RFC 675 Specification of Internet TCP December 1974 At a GATEWAY between networks, the internetwork packet is unwrapped from its local packet format and examined to determine through which network the internetwork packet should travel next. 2. 2.1 The TCP as a POST OFFICE The TCP acts in many ways like a postal service since it provides a way for processes to exchange letters with each other. RFC 675 Specification of Internet TCP December 1974 2.2 Sockets and Addressing 2.3.1 A Note on Style
1982 Happy 30th birthday emoticon! :-) - News - Gadgets & Tech Regardless of your view, as emoticons celebrate their 30th anniversary this month, it is accepted that they are here stay. Their birth can be traced to the precise minute: 11:44am on 19 September 1982. At that moment, Professor Scott Fahlman, of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, sent an email on an online electronic bulletin board that included the first use of the sideways smiley face: "I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways." More than anyone, he must take the credit – or the blame. The aim was simple: to allow those who posted on the university's bulletin board to distinguish between those attempting to write humorous emails and those who weren't. This weekend, the professor, a computer science researcher who still works at the university, says he is amazed his smiley face took off: "This was a little bit of silliness that I tossed into a discussion about physics," he says.
1982 Les smileys ont 30 ans, et leur créateur n'est pas content ;) Ce 19 septembre, le smiley fête ses 30 ans. Cet émoticône utilisé dans les messages électroniques aurait été inventé par Scott Fahlman. Ce professeur de l’université Carnegie Mellon de Pittsburgh cherchait à simplifier les messages en interne entre collègues. Le 19 septembre 1982, il envoie le message suivant à ses collègues: «Je propose d’utiliser la séquence de lettres suivants pour indiquer les blagues : :-) » Ce signe :-) permettait de signaler qu’il s’agissait d’un message humoristique ou d’une blague. «C’était 10 minutes dans ma vie. On connaît aujourd’hui le succès de ce symbole, qui a été décliné des milliers de fois pour exprimer différents états d’esprit. «Je les trouve moches, et ils ruinent la tentative de trouver un moyen intelligent d’exprimer des émotions en utilisant les caractères standards des claviers.» La paternité du smiley est vivement contestée. Certains affirment que les émoticônes ont été inventés bien avant 1982. «Il est douteux que Scott E. publicité
19 February 2007 | Davidville More than 100 million blogs will be online in 2007. The count continues to double every 5.5 months. About half of the blogs created are ever maintained after being created. That’s still gobs of great blogs out there. But for so many of us, it’s work. It’s quite like editing your school newspaper. Last year, a site called project.ioni.st showed us a completely different form. Sharing. The long editorials with meticulously formatted links and images we were used to seeing on blogs seemed absent. The editors seemed to post with zero obligations. A tumblelog isn’t better than a blog. It’s something we knew we wanted the moment we laid eyes on it. Yeah, it’s still a blog.
1992 | The First Photo on the Web The first photographic image ever uploaded to the Web was a Photoshop disaster. It was created to sell something, and featured attractive women in a come-hither pose. In short, photo-uploading was born with some original sins that have never quite washed away. Here it is, in all its glory: Next Wednesday, July 18th, the photograph at the center of that image — a homemade promotional shot for Les Horribles Cernettes, a comedy band based at the CERN laboratory near Geneva — will turn 20 years old. “It’s sort of terrible and charming,” said Lesley Martin, a photo scholar at the Aperture Foundation, after being shown the image for the first time. “They’re always semi-accidental and seemingly inconsequential at the time,” Martin told me. The first Web photo was no exception. On July 18th, 1992, de Gennaro was backstage at the Hardronic Music Festival, an annual event thrown by CERN’s administrators, waiting for the Cernettes — whom he managed, and whose songs he writes — to come on stage.