Deep impact, part 2
16/09/2008
Which website has had the biggest impact on your life?
Legal expert
Struan Robertson
Pinsent Masons
For me it was Shawn Fanning’s Napster (ie the original Napster). It brought P2P to everyone’s attention and suddenly any music you could think of was free on the web and easy to find. So it was also clear from the start that it would disrupt an entire industry and get sued into oblivion. Its demise was inevitable but depressing. Like many, I had hoped to see the music industry work with Napster, not against it.
Napster didn’t rewrite copyright law but it did make it a lot more interesting and it’s part of the reason why I followed a career in internet law.
Software expert
Ian Moulster
Microsoft
There’s one website that I spend the most time on every day, and have done so for the best part of a decade. It’s a site that’s become a social hub for me, and is something I’d struggle to do without. I’m of course talking about www.hotmail.com, the website that really made web-based email popular and remains far and away the most popular email service on the planet with over 400 million people using it every month. Hotmail changed the way I thought about personal email: it released me from the constraints of an email service provided by my ISP and proved that all I needed was a web browser to communicate via email. For business email I still prefer Outlook of course – even the very best web-based email service, Outlook Web Access, isn’t really suitable for the kind of sustained use that business scenarios need. But for personal email there’s nothing better, and since its inception in the mid 90s it’s evolved into a service that I’m still delighted to dedicate a huge chunk of my web-surfing time to every day.
Hosting provider
Neil Hodson
1&1 Internet Ltd
Well, if we’re talking long term it’s probably Google, but in recent years a number of other, less obvious sites appear to be shaping my life just as much. www.cbeebies.co.uk has had a huge impact on my life most recently.
I cannot now gain access to my home PC as my three- and six-year-olds control the network, using CBeebies for activities, education and entertainment.
The site is actually brilliant, offering educational activities, printing instructions on things to make and do – I now have a standing order for printer ink (courtesy of the children using this site), music and songs as well as CBeebies episodes to watch.
I’m also impressed with the ‘Grown-ups’ section, which provides great ways to get the most out of the site for children and their age groups – developing language, maths, art and computer skills.
Tech journalist
Scott Carney
Freelancer
Has anyone yet mentioned the instant and omnipresent influx of pornography that’s streaming though our inter-webs at this very minute? There’s not just one site that encapsulates all internet porn in one place, but clearly this is a huge break with our past. For better or worse, it has revolutionised the way we think about sex, unhitched taboos, and generally made us unfazed by a constant presence of inter-racial-multi-group-gangbang-bukkake-anime-gay-sex-orgies.
As someone who came into adolescence when the web was picking up steam this must have had a profound effect on my own life. Not, you know, that I would ever look at porn.
Social media and comms expert
Rachel Hawkes
Elemental Communications
When I first started using the internet and using search engines, I used a combination of Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and Alta Vista, primarily the latter. I was an expert at advanced searches; you remember those, when you had to really drill down to minute details to find what you were looking for? Then Google came on to the scene, and I stopped using advanced search and became a lazy searcher, relying solely on one engine to find our information (the same is true today for the majority of us). “Did you try and search for it?” became, “Did you Google it?” Occasionally I feel somewhat guilty and decide to share the love around the other engines, but I always end up coming back ...
Another site that’s had a big impact on me and changed the way I use the internet is News.com.au. Owned by News Corporation (which owns all of the major newspapers in Australia), I get to have all my Australian and international news under one roof and even better, because Australia wakes up before most of the planet, I get to read all the latest breaking news without waiting for the UK to start its working day.
Next on the list would be Netvibes, a browser that stays open from the moment I turn the computer on in the morning, until the moment it shuts down. Until something that trumps it comes along, I couldn’t be online without it.
Hosting expert
Steve Holford
Fasthosts
Wikipedia has to be the website with the single biggest impact. The volume and variety of content compiled by millions of users is vast yet well organised, updated and presented. The concept of a database of detailed content formed and refreshed collaboratively by individuals was a very different approach back in 2001 and was a bold move for a new venture.
Its appeal is worldwide and it has a massive fan base, but it’s also had to learn how to manage the negative aspects of opening its website up to everyone. Wikipedia has suffered from a number of scandals based on incorrect information being published by users, leading to critics claiming it has no place in serious information gathering. It has shown how to grow beyond this, though, and while such attacks are inevitable for a service with such a varied user base, its own users will help check and verify the accuracy of new content to keep the service alive.
Wikipedia is a key example of how a simple idea can be implemented and executed to grow into one of the most popular websites in the world, touching millions of people every day. It’s a great success story and, more importantly, a huge resource for the public to have free access to.
Content specialist
Stuart Dean
Cognifide
I hate to be predictable, but without question Google (as a whole) has had the biggest impact on the way I use the internet. For the last eight years, Google Search has provided me with the best search (as the majority of us would agree), enabling me to find the information I’m looking for with minimum fuss.
For some time now, we’ve been starting to migrate our business admin with Google Apps – merging email, calendar, Google docs together. The beauty of this is that as a company we can easily share and view each other’s calendars and modify and share documents with the team (even if they are all based on different sites, and even in different countries).
Then there are services such as Google Maps, which just seems to get better every time I use it. I needed to download some driving directions for a route I don’t normally take. Entering in the ‘to’ and ‘from’ locations, I can then tell Google Maps to avoid highways and even toll booths. It calculates my route for me and an estimated driving time. It’s an intuitive service and so easy to use that it doesn’t even warrant me visiting AA or RAC route planners any more. To top it all off, it provided me with a street level view of the Manhattan hotel I’ll be staying at in a couple of weeks. Google’s web presence is providing real life services reliably and all for free (if anything can really be free).
Web standards expert
Christian Heilmann
Yahoo
Evolt.org. When looking for mailing lists to learn more about web design I stumbled upon CSS discuss, A List Apart and Evolt.org. Evolt was special as it was much less US-centric than the other sites and it had a wonderful brevity mixed with great information. It inspired me to write articles about web development and subsequently blog. Right now, it’s more or less discontinued as all of the staff are busy with other work and we actually had too many web design articles sites at one point. For Evolt, however, I’ll always have a soft spot.
Content specialist
Craig Hepburn
RedDot
I’d have to say Amazon. In my opinion it’s one of the most valuable online ecommerce propositions of the past 10 years. Amazon has developed an incredibly innovative online distribution platform for books, CDs, DVDs, electronics and much more, attracting over 600 million visitors per year. Amazon was only one of a few major companies to survive the dot com bubble in the late 90s and has pushed the boundaries of web innovation with a range of web services and online merchant APIs. It also developed some of the first Web 2.0 features, such as user reviews and customer comments. A true eCommerce leader and champion of the web – something that many have tried and failed to emulate.
