The world wide web turns 30 today.
It has come a long way. The majority of things you and me take for granted today are possible because of the web, whether it’s writing or reading blogs, sharing a video on Snapchat, reading the news from around the world, trading stocks or buying cryptocurrency, tweeting, looking up restaurant reviews, ordering that Uber, or IM-ing your friend. We owe a lot of the convenience we enjoy today to the invention of the web. Thanks, @timberners_lee.
My tryst with the web goes back to the late ’90s when I got access to the internet for the first time, as a kid growing up in India. Since that day, I have been fascinated with the web. The web helped me think about the future and enabled me to get ideas for products and companies. I give credit to the web for giving me an entrepreneurial bent. While I wasn’t born early enough to be an “OG of the web” when things like IRC and websites were just beginning to take off, I feel like I was lucky enough to be born just in time to see companies like Google and Facebook form.
I started building things for the web at a young age. One of the earliest websites I built was a video games review website called GoWirz.com — archive.org captured a screenshot of this from February 2005. At that time, the Web 2.0 movement was in full swing. I was still in school but I wanted to create a website my friends and I could use to express our passion for video games at the time and deliver high-quality editorial content, similar to gamespot.com or eurogamer.net, while generating revenue through advertising or paid plans. It is perhaps my earliest entrepreneurial venture and it taught me a lot.
With 30 years of the web behind us, it’s important to consider where it is headed.
With the advent of smartphones, perhaps the web has not gone in a direction that many of us wanted it to take. Today, if you want to create a useful digital product and put it in the hands of millions, you’re probably going to consider making a smartphone app instead of a website. This is somewhat unfortunate as smartphone app stores are walled gardens that only run apps created for that platform, unlike websites that can essentially run and look the same on any platform with a browser. It’s much easier to learn how to create websites than apps. We still don’t know how this will play out over the long run.
With technologies like blockchain and AI emerging rapidly, how will the everyday-use web change for the normal consumer? What will the next generation of the world wide web look like? What will we be able to do that we can’t do today? These are all pressing questions on my mind that I’d like to devote more time thinking about. However, what’s certain is that these are still the early days of the web and there is much that remains to be done.