After watching these videos I feel like I don’t know nearly as much about the Internet as I would have once claimed. The story and history behind the Internet is abundant and very fast pace and I grew up while it was all happening. Fortunately, I adapted with the times but that also means that I didn’t get the biggest grasp of what was going on while it was happening.
The first thing that popped out at me that I found interesting was that Microsoft did not have a head start on the whole browser issue. The fastest growing software company and Bill Gates was not interested in getting a jump on the Interent sensation, is surprising. The fact that Netscape was actually quoted as being one of Microsofts competition as soon as the launched their browser was eye opening to me. I remember having netscape on my desktop when I was really young but for the majority of my life it has always been Internet explorer (and then you download something better).
The part that I found interesting, in part two of this film, is that yahoo was the one that was able to figure out how to make money on the internet. Again, since I’ve had the Internet ever since I was a child I can’t remember the Internet without any ads unless you have an ad blocker. Yahoo took a chance, because no one knew how ads would be perceived on the Internet, and ended up winning. They pioneered a way to make money on the internet helping others like Google and even Facebook later on.
The last thing that caught my eye was at the end of the last chapter of the film was that they were talking about the MySpace and Facebook feud and how MySpace wasn’t going to give up with out a fight. I on the other hand remember MySpace dying out pretty quietly. I am never an innovator and tell others to join a new social media site, I usually wait until someone tells me to switch over. With Facebook that is exactly what happened, for me at least, and I never touched MySpace again. It did not seem like a fight to me.
There wasn’t a lot of talk about the newer social media because it wasn’t invented yet. Snapchat and Instagram were not mentioned which are booming. Snapchat even denied to be bought out by Facebook for a fairly big chunk of change. The future of social media is just beginning.