What websites make your list of paradigm-shifting or milestone sites?

January 6, 2005 6:39 PM

What websites throughout net history would make your list of paradigm-shifting or milestone sites that established new patterns and possibilities for www content and functionality. Recent examples on my list are Flickr and Del.icio.us but I’m trying to identify the advent of similarly ground breaking websites over the past 15 years. Also do you know of any representations/timelines of this kind of thing?
posted by atom71 to Computers & Internet (57 answers total)

evilpupil.com was the first website that made me think, wow there's something more to the internet than email, news and porn.
posted by efalk at 6:49 PM on January 6, 2005

amazon.com - shopping
superbad.com - wtf
mp3.com (RIP) - music

uhhh...

bloglines.com - aggregating a totally new medium
drudgereport.com - pretty much broke the Lewinsky affair and established the Internet as a "credible" gossip forum.
probably dell.com - making computer purchases far too easy
albinoblacksheep.com - duh, the sol.exe for the next generation.

any of a dozen webcomics for breaking the syndication model.

metacritic.com - useful, if not quantifiably so
aintitcoolnews.com (before it ... deteriorated)
match.com (or, with more community focus, lavalife.com)

... there are so many... Is there anything more specific you want to know (are you trying to discover the points at which the web moved from, say, Lynx to HTML3.2 to HTML4.0 richness to Flash to CSS revolution to ...)?
posted by socratic at 7:12 PM on January 6, 2005

Yahoo offered free email and web pages/groups about 96. While not the first, I think they bought Rocketmail, it defined that whatever it is that yahoo did beyond search. Everyone else had to follow.
posted by mss at 7:14 PM on January 6, 2005

blogger.com and metafilter.com both fit that description for me....
posted by TuxHeDoh at 7:18 PM on January 6, 2005

GeekLife.com - the source of E/N pages, the grandpappy of blogs.
posted by BradNelson at 7:19 PM on January 6, 2005

Response by poster: Socratic: Not interested in technology/platform changes, am thinking of innovations around interface and concepts for putting the technology to good use.

The examples so far are pretty much what I had in mind. Thankyou.

Was hoping others could help me to catch examples I've forgotten about.
posted by atom71 at 7:23 PM on January 6, 2005

geocities.com would have to be huge. Probably news.com(.com) and the associated C|Net sites as the first real "network" of Web content.

Dialpad.com for in-browser internet telephony.

Microsoft's Typography On The Web pages for their valiant attempt to move beyond Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana, Trebuchet, and Comic Sans.

Deviantart.com

Online purity tests (and the meta collections of them). I wonder if anyone ever completed one of the 4,000 question ones.

Salon.com (for surviving when everyone said they'd fail).

DejaNews.com (now groups.google.com) for opening up and killing off usenet in one swoop.

weather.com

This thread is like years and years of market and trends research that I did in my prior life all vomiting out.. heh.. Good thread.
posted by socratic at 7:31 PM on January 6, 2005

IMDb has been around (in Usenet form) since 1990 and was an early pioneer of internet reference.
posted by ALongDecember at 7:31 PM on January 6, 2005

1. google.com [no-brainer, redefining the search]
2. fark.com [for better or worse, community-based weblog]
3. expedia.com [changing the airline business]
4. etrade.com [stock-trading, ecommerce, yaddayadda]
5. ask.metafilter.com [moreso a revolution than mefi itself-- older help forums now seem plain outdated]
6. epinions.com [consumer reporting]
7. ebay.com [an auction, online? bizarre but perfect concept]
8. paypal.com [it's money]

This is moreso the content than the delivery... I guess some of the best changes in that regard are:

1. webpagesthatsuck.com had one of the only useful implementations of frames (other web sites just needed a separate environment)
2. amazon.com's "users who liked _____ also bought ______" seems to have been very imporant
3. Whatever the hell "trackback" is, it must be pretty important because I see it everywhere I go.
4. I should be able to think of more...
posted by themadjuggler at 7:35 PM on January 6, 2005

moviefone.com / fandango.com

priceline.com

rottentomatoes.com

travelocity.com / expedia.com are travel agents not nearly obsolete?

fark.com


Although theyre gone: Webvan, Suck, and kvetch.com
posted by pieoverdone at 7:41 PM on January 6, 2005

Robot Wisdom - We miss you Jorn!
posted by caddis at 7:42 PM on January 6, 2005

ps. kvetch was the precursor to grouphug-like sites. I miss it so.
posted by pieoverdone at 7:43 PM on January 6, 2005

Yeah, Yahoo and Amazon are the two obvious. Yahoo used to look like this . From a design standpoint there was Zeldman and later Praystation, letting people know that the web was not bereft of style.

Personally the folks at Sito were a major inspiration, creating an online community of artists doing stuff that didn't exist in the real world.

Don't forget the amihotornot site and it's many spinoffs, leading the way in database driven popularity contests.

The now defunct Kozmo, the online delivery service, for making people think that you would always be able to order powdered sugar donuts online and have them delivered to your door in an hour.

The original Justin Hall links page. Online bootlegs of Janes Addiction in 1994 was mindblowing. Online exhibitionism. Blogging. All wrapped in one.
posted by jeremias at 7:46 PM on January 6, 2005

socratic: Is LavaLife any good? I've used Match before, which has been fine, but I hadn't heard of LavaLife before.
posted by Handcoding at 7:46 PM on January 6, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks, Some on my list:

wikipedia
quokka (for sports/visualisation)
theyrule
hotornot.com
craiglist
fuckedcompany
praystation
archive.org
egroups/yahoo groups
everything.com
dmoz
meetup
filepile

Not sure exactly what my criteria is they are just sites that stand out as significantly interesting, new or useful if I pullback and try to do a big picture timeline of my www experience.

I'm interested in what others see/remember if they do a similar exercise.
posted by atom71 at 7:51 PM on January 6, 2005

p.s.

content
memepool [father of the meme?]
netflix [not the first, but most successful renter]
seanbaby [college humor's debut]
bluemountain.com [online greeting cards, again the web's capacity for evil]
switchouse.com [goods for goods trading, now dead]

functionality
amazon's shopping cart
wikipedia and the history of the wiki

on preview: amihotornot is totally clutch
posted by themadjuggler at 7:51 PM on January 6, 2005

Justin.
{fray}.
posted by drpynchon at 7:52 PM on January 6, 2005

1. suck. This completely changed what people thought could be done on the web.
2. salon. ditto.
3. www.dsiegel.com. Crazy design revolution ahoy.
4. amazon.
5. etrade.
6. msnbc.
7. slashdot / metafilter
8. 37signals / zeldman / alistapart
9. k10k
10. flickr.
11. delicious.
12. craigslist.
13. blogger.

I don't actually think there are too many more than that--and I would quibble with lots of candidates, like priceline or moviefone--I don't think those are paradigm shifts. I think that before these sites made it big, it really didn't seem that what they did could be done on the web. Afterwards, it was second-nature.

Other candidates: the well, fray, wikipedia, and hotwired. I'm just not sure that those sites have had / will have a lasting impact the way the others do.
posted by josh at 7:56 PM on January 6, 2005

And I have to say--I think it's completely hilarious that dsiegel.com is now a completely generic blog site. Unless you were designing at the time, it is hard to imagine how big an impact his now-defunct High 5 site had.
posted by josh at 7:57 PM on January 6, 2005

memepool [father of the meme?]
Robot Wisdom preceded MemePool by at least a year.
posted by caddis at 8:00 PM on January 6, 2005

A lot of what others have said, as well as Arts and Letters Daily (for content).
posted by melissa may at 8:01 PM on January 6, 2005

See, I would say, for example, that ALDaily is in the same 'genre' as metafilter or slashdot. This is true for lots of retail sites--once you had one, it was obvious you were going to have them all.

Another candidate: jennycam. But it may be that the whole webcam / exhibitionism thing has been completely wiped out as a viable medium by blogs or replaced by flickr. There was a time, though, when people said in hushed tones, "some day everyone will have a webcam on ALL THE TIME!"
posted by josh at 8:06 PM on January 6, 2005

I think jodi.org was at the forefront of novel uses of html.
posted by Marit at 8:09 PM on January 6, 2005

There was (and I guess still is) anacam.
posted by caddis at 8:10 PM on January 6, 2005

BLOGS
Robot Wisdom - Jorn ruled and started this whole thing
SlashDot - blogs for nerds (at least at first)
Meta - Matt (along with SlashDot) pioneered the group blog - the best thing to ever hit the internets.

SEARCH
Yahoo, then
AltaVista, then
Google

COMMERCE
Amazon
eBay

POLITICAL BLOGS
the individual players are less important than the fact that so many voices are now heard.

and Drudge broke the Monica dress story - and no one believed him for weeks, maybe months.
posted by caddis at 8:20 PM on January 6, 2005

similarly ground breaking websites over the past 15 years

For the record (and off-topic, admittedly), the web as we know it (with a graphical user interface via a web browser) goes back only to 1993 - less than 12 years ago. (NCSA Mosaic)
posted by WestCoaster at 8:25 PM on January 6, 2005

Response by poster: WestCosater: I base 15 years on this
"in 1989 he invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing. while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first web client (browser-editor) and server in 1990."

But your right, GUI www is not that old. In anycase I've definately only known about it for 10.
posted by atom71 at 8:37 PM on January 6, 2005

Deviantart came later, the first real big gfx site was customize.org
posted by riffola at 8:40 PM on January 6, 2005

This is a really interesting question, and my answer is clearly too weblog nerd centric.

Suck has probably had the greatest impact in content, format, and style of anything on the web other than perhaps Tim Berners Lee's original "what's new" page.

Blogger changed the way people thought about website management, who could publish, and shifting from page-oriented models to paragraph/chunk/post models. But Andrew's Pitas and Diaryland (which predate Blogger) also deserve immense credit in this area, as well as the old school weblogs. The ones that come to my mind first are JJG's Infosift, Peterme and Camworld.

Justin Hall's links.net was important in pushing boundaries for personal web content, and in encouraging personal publishing.

Although all the kids are talking about LiveJournal and Movable Type these days, Greymatter was an important step in weblog tools -- especially since it was a decentralized tool that ran on your own server.
posted by adam at 8:42 PM on January 6, 2005

1. Google
2. Amazon.com
3. eBay
4. Weather Underground
5. Internet Archive
6. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
7. Yahoo!
8. Hotmail

(I think these have already been mentioned.)

9. Merriam-Webster Online (or dictionary.com)

I like the availability of an online dictionary and thesaurus.

10. CNN.com
11. Half.com
12. The New York Times
13. Slashdot
14. PayPal
15. MapQuest

Can't get by without driving directions...

16. Price Watch

Or maybe Froogle is more appropriate now.

17. tvguide.com

Free online tv listings? Oh yeah...

18. Hollywood.com

Free local movie showtimes.

19. Expedia.com

Or travelocity, or orbitz, etc...

20. Monster.com
21. WebMD

Or whatever other clone you prefer.

22. Snopes

Best friend for refuting forwarded email garbage.

23. Etrade
24. Craigslist
posted by achmorrison at 9:02 PM on January 6, 2005

I have to give a shoutout to my very first HTTP transaction: syrinx.umd.edu, a "website" (lynx was the only common option) devoted to the band Rush. (This was about 1993-ish.)

Google is a paradigm-maker, as it improved Altavista's babelfish transaltion service, reasserted the power of a "simple" search interface (over the bloated but still revolutionary Yahoo), and introduced ads that don't annoy people in the form of the little text ads.

As a general proposition, the Web changed when movie studios discovered that websites didn't have to be header-leftnav-rightbody creatures.

Wtf is trackback anyway? The madjuggler (up there somewhere) gave me a hearty guffaw with his observation of its importance and ignorance of its function.

A special place should be reserved for bulletin boards (BBS), which aggregated people and content over electronic media long, long, long before websites became popular.

The web-based metareality of the marketing campaign for AI was brilliant, even if none of the constituent sites were.

As for LavaLife (Alex Handcoding), I've never used it, but I have a friend (stifle, she exists) who swore by it.

As another general proposition, I think the Web really came of age on 9/11/2001, when CNN showed a remarkable ability to thin itself out in a crisis to keep delivering the news.

AOL's QuickBuddy was a great (if simple) demonstration of a hosted application.

SuicideGirls and their ilk popularized (or rode on the wave of popularization of) webcams.

This is slightly off topic, but it would be inconsiderate to discuss the paradigms of the web without mentioning Opera, Firefox, and other innovative browsers that brought tabs and mouse gestures to the world, banished popup ads, and exerted a tremendous positive pressure on the development of the Web beyond the constraints of Microsoft's almost abandoned (but unquestionably important) Internet Explorer. Does anyone else remember the buildup to the release of IE4? There were rafts of websites devoted to speculation about what it would contain.

A kissing cousin of the Geocities and self-publishing pheonmena would have to be the rise of cheap hosting providers.

The death of the <blink> tag represents a victory of market pressure over "standards" (when the ideal is normally viewed the other way around).

Timecube, as only the greatest example of the Internet as a forum for the weird.

Phishing sites disguised as Citibank, etc.

Bash.org and qdb.us.
posted by socratic at 9:12 PM on January 6, 2005

I'd also include Jason Kottke's 0sil8 and Michael Sippey's Stating the Obvious.
posted by adam at 9:13 PM on January 6, 2005

PS. I'm sorry that I'm too lazy to provide links, but, hell, some of the sites are today either common knowledge, dead, or so evolved beyond their original function as to be meaningless.
posted by socratic at 9:21 PM on January 6, 2005

Oh, pointcast is one of the more spectacular "ideas ahead of its time." Pointcast was an application that ran on your desktop and delivered "pushed" (heh, remember push?) news, weather, scores, stock prices, and such. Doesn't seem like much, but in, oh, 1996 or so, it was huge. Here's a story about it.
posted by socratic at 9:24 PM on January 6, 2005

In a not-so-positive shift -- Kaycee?

(Yes, I know the link is gratuitous.)
posted by mudpuppie at 9:32 PM on January 6, 2005

How has no one mentioned the CSSZenGarden or Eric Meyer's CSS experiments yet?
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 10:06 PM on January 6, 2005

Wtf is trackback anyway?

How Trackback Works.
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 10:10 PM on January 6, 2005

The Blair Witch Project had a website. People would argue that the movie was a true story because they had read about it on the internet. At once an indication of the credibility the internet had earned and a proof-of-concept for studios and other groups trying to figure out how to use the interweb to get a message out.

Similar to IMDB, allmusic.com has a long history. Wired wrote in 1994 "He hopes that by giving access to the All-Music Guide to the widest possible audience, he will inspire a massive, volunteer "fix-it" effort to close the gaps in his files."
That's vision.
posted by airguitar at 10:30 PM on January 6, 2005

Definitely Mapquest and Yahoo, for serving the non-geeks. If you need to convince someone over 50 that the Internet rocks, show them how to never need an AAA triptych again. Then show them what movies have matinees tomorrow.

Is there a page on search engine history? I remember pre-Google-dominance, when Ask Jeeves was still cool, because it parsed well (for its time). Google adwords, by the way, might have triggered a revolution in web ads.

How about X10.com? (RunAndHideFilter)

And man, Yahoo's old "What's Cool" site, back when you could make a page like that and not get laughed at? Back when you did your design in html?

This thread's giving me major nostalgia for, wow, just a decade. History really is speeding up. I'm opening a thread on my site (self-link notice) to talk about nostalgia. But hey, my site's cold and white, so keep talking about it here instead.
posted by NickDouglas at 10:52 PM on January 6, 2005

archive.org

WebCrawler barely beat out Yahoo! as the first Web search engine.

The early open source/Free Software projects (GNU, NetHack, Linux, etc.) deserve some credit for pioneering the internet as a collaborative medium, although none of them were originally web-centered. SourceForge deserves props for being the breeding ground of thousands of open-source projects, though.

Before there was mp3.com, there was IUMA.
posted by arto at 10:52 PM on January 6, 2005

not in a general sense, but a personal one: dreamless.org.
posted by juv3nal at 11:36 PM on January 6, 2005

Aside from the excellent suggestions already mentioned...

Livejournal, because it gave (what later became known as) blogging a social aspect appealing enough to entice a massive horde of non-geek (or soon-to-be-geek) users from the next internet generation.

Match.com, because it provided a framework in which meeting someone over the internet became an accepted as a piece of our social fabric, instead of a punch line/murder waiting to happen.

Priceline.com, because it proved that a plucky website could not only trump an established industry, but also rework the way they operate from the ground up. Along with other sites in this vein, it raised the bar of acceptable customer service and reminded consumers that it's not impossible for these companies to shape up their act. (Priceline over the other airline sites because it's the one my mom told me about first.)

It may be because I was addicted, but I think Sissyfight 2000 upped the ante for what could be an online video game.
posted by samh23 at 12:14 AM on January 7, 2005

snopes
iMDb
terraserver
cheaptickets
craigslist
a9
allmusic
suprnova
bartleby
b3ta
versiontracker

/2lazy2link
posted by obloquy at 12:35 AM on January 7, 2005

NickDouglas: of course if you're a AAA member you can now get a Triptych online, and they're still better than MapQuest (they include construction info on the route for one thing).
posted by grouse at 4:09 AM on January 7, 2005

does it have to be www? going back a bit before then, i remember archie (which let you search gopher) and various freenet places (pre-www aols for univeristy students, i guess, giving access to usenet, etc.) as changing the way i saw things (i didn't have a home computer, so missed out on bbs).

post www, there was some site (was it an early version of geocities?) where you could get free web pages, based on a geographical grid. that seemed a good idea at the time, but people quickly became accustomed to the url "hyperspace". similarly, vrml seemed like it was going to change everything but didn't.

altavista was the first search that really worked (it was google before google came along). and the mosaic default start screen went, iirc, to ncsa's page which used to have a cool site of the day link. that was pretty influential in helping people see what was out there.
posted by andrew cooke at 5:43 AM on January 7, 2005

anyone else search for .f (or .m) directories on xarchie?

there was also a browser - viola? aranya? - that first moved away from that horrible industrial grey/blue colour scheme...
posted by andrew cooke at 5:47 AM on January 7, 2005

WebMonkey.com, for me, at least.
posted by Alt F4 at 6:12 AM on January 7, 2005

Evite.
posted by kirkaracha at 6:24 AM on January 7, 2005

metababy
posted by timb at 7:12 AM on January 7, 2005

Cool Site of the Day
Original Mirsky's Worst of the Web
The Useless Pages
AltaVista
Babelfish
Justin Hall (remember when it was called Links from the Underground?)
The Open Diary

And the pages that started big Internet crazes: Mahir ("I KISS YOU!!!"), All Your Base Are Belong To Us, etc.
posted by SisterHavana at 8:32 AM on January 7, 2005

JenniCam for being the first(?) cam girl.
posted by gyc at 10:26 AM on January 7, 2005

SaveKaryn spawned a legion of copycat sites. Tell lame sob story, rake in free cash!
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 11:05 AM on January 7, 2005

Oh, and The Oracle of Kevin Bacon. Remember that craze? There were people who wanted me to show them the Internet just because of all the articles about that game.
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 11:12 AM on January 7, 2005

I almost forgot about biancaTROLL and bianca's smut shack. One of the first Web communities I remember.
posted by SisterHavana at 1:10 PM on January 7, 2005

Back when mtv.com was a gopher site run by Adam Curry, it was one of the first sites I can remember actually downloading content from, must have been in the very early nineties.
posted by jessamyn at 2:38 PM on January 7, 2005

I know this is kind of pre-Web, but ISCABBS, which started in 1989, was one of the first internet locations on which people socialized, had threaded discussions, and got topical. This was pretty heady stuff in my college days, when I had to learn Unix to use it and when the only other fun things on the 'net were song lyrics and Shakespeare plays to download via ftp. I think it taught a lot of people that computers could be social as well as technical.
posted by Miko at 3:22 PM on January 7, 2005

QuartzBBS was like that too, on a smaller scale. That was the first BBS I joined and found ISCABBS shortly thereafter. (Quartz in December 1991, ISCA in March 1992) Still have accounts on both, although Quartz is now on a new server.
posted by SisterHavana at 8:54 PM on January 7, 2005