The Seven Wonders of the Internet
Once upon a time, a long time ago it was, the newspaper called The Guardian published and article called, “The Seven Wonders of the Internet”. Well, here is a minor wonder of the internet, the article is still online and indexed by search engines.
There was much good in this article, and I can’t believe I am the only one who loved it. Anyone with any wit, as I think Wyndham Lewis said somewhere, will read between the lines of a newspaper—the frowns, the finger crooked and wagging at you. Newspapers, and the magazines that wander and are unsure, are at their most endearing when they range free through the scrub of culture that obsesses them on a day—and this is one of those articles. The authors are gripped by their subjects, choose them with knowledge and thought, spin somersaults in their eagerness to explain what is good about their picks, and why they are important.
…and what the future hold
But, goodness, the article was written in 2001. To set the scene, Windows XP, the first operating system anyone would nowadays recognise as modern, had been released for a month. A month. And the release of Windows XP, with it’s desktop background of a field of grass rolling over a hill—part of a future trend of computers referencing a romance of the ‘natural’—was one month after 9/11.
As for the web, it’s tricky to say where it was at. By about 1995 the heavy organisations of society, such as the White House, were beginning to build sites. The dot.com goldrush was over. Behind or underneath that, some companies had made headway commercializing mundane subjects such as event tickets. But there were ideas to come. I think the article by The Guardian stands, though the writers maybe did not know it, in a place of development for the web. That place was the last of the early web—passive, a place of information, instruction and fun. You can see that in the even balance of the sites they chose for the article.
Ah, the list
What has become of them? I think the choices were inspired, but the stories vary. There’s learning in here, but I doubt anyone is listening.
Google, of course, has gone on to be a powerhouse of computing. They now rival Microsoft, I recall Bill Gates saying something about this, in a reflective moment, but can’t track the quote. And sometimes the company have managed to match the inspiration of their first release—the search engine. Though, looking back at the writeup, I would say yes, the search code needed to be backed up by good results. But perhaps what has been most enduring was the design, that design, of a box in the middle of the window, all modest invitation, all enabling. Hang it from the wall of an art gallery and everyone would know what they were looking at. It was what was needed, it was the whole of what was needed, and no more than what was needed.
Yahoo!
Yahoo formally dropped it’s exclamation! and slithered into desperate attempts at sales, They were large, but once the novelty died nobody needed a tourist guide, so they had no product. In the following decade, they declined, or stood still, while others moved on. That is kind of conceded by the writer in the original article, who was there at the falter. This covered up strong programming—their spin‐off email system was excellent—but it did no good. Nowadays the Yahoo homepage looks like a news feed. Like IBM, eight years before the article, Yahoo still exists, a reserve of capital whose place is limited.
Project Gutenberg
Thankfully, Project Gutenberg is still alive and moving, nervous but unheeding of what is about it. Most of the world is unaware it exists. But it does, and the project has grown in size at a rate like a slow‐motion landslide. It’s tried to update it’s look, and now publishes variations on ebook formats. It still has the feeble academic search, librarian looks, and is a throwback to the web the way it was.
Multimap
Multimap is one of the lost territories of the web. I don’t know where it went to. As the article says, it was impressive. Imagine, this was the web doing something that could not be done before. I love maps, paper maps, but with Multimap I could scroll endlessly, zooming in and out, like flying. But I seem to recall all these map services—Digimap is also mentioned—were destroyed by the devastating achievement of Google Maps. See the next article, when it arrives.
EBay
EBay has gone on to become a part of everyday life. You want cheap jogging bottoms, plastic fluorescent spray paint, or a bronze spaniel for the mantelpiece? Nobody ever talks about EBay’s continuing and scaling profit, the many people involved, or that it it was step‐father to PayPal, which deserves an entry of it’s own. But EBay, and it’s memorable logo, which is surely up there with classics like the old British Telecom, has always been notable computer code—how do they get all those images onto the screen so fast? Most social media and a few commerce sites feature programming enough to make you punch the screen.
Amazon
Amazon Near everything you can say about Amazon is said in the original article. Except this, that the company has continued to move on, returning increasing profit and becoming a major worldwide shipping operator—the biggest earner connected to computing. The company also owns a host of associated firms including, a year after the article, web‐storage and web‐analytics solutions. Also, that Amazon Prime, their loyalty scheme, is a throwback, successful but a presentation that amounts to entrapment that will I suggest one day be illegal. And that their mobile interface is choked with help and (2021) becoming unusable. Amazon has been criticised continually, in a low‐key way, but the company is bigger and more public than anyone. And I should mention that Amazon’s ‘You might like…’ recommendations may be a cosmic joke, yet are a better use of screen space than most come up with. People love them—analytics don’t lie.
Blogger
Blogger Ha! Who remembers Blogger? A premium website of the time, and a key step in the story of social media. As the article says, Blogger eased open a column of creativity for anyone. Unfortunately, the article was, I suggest, at the beginning of the era when computers became a home necessity, and the web moved from a pull‐presentation of information to a push for sales. Blogger’s quiet virtue subsequently declined, then Google bought it. Nowadays the site is pleasant, the easiest way to post content online, and crammed with sincere but kitsch daydreams of the comfortable.
The great shift
Also, since then, the look of the web has changed. At first, it was enough to get links onto a page. Then there was the famous DHTML era, when colours were rainbow and objects jiggled up and down on the screen, while animated fire flickered in the corner and spiders crept up and down from the ceiling. Various retreats and advances have been tried. The look now seems to have settled. Most sites adopt something close to a magazine, with grids or columns of photos and taglines leading short articles. Instantaneous response comes from discreetly pushing more information to the screen. In the background, personal data is used to suit adverts and, more mundanely, aid form filling. I suspect this convergence with the older medium of print shows a maturity, but I may yet be wrong. And there is years of work to do in making this consistent and easy to produce.
I don’t want to replace the original article or update it. It’s a wonder in itself. I’ll note that, since the article was published, the web and perception of what it can do and how it comes out has changed. But that’s for another article.