Perioditizing Web Concepts' Development

From the birth of the World Wide Web to Platform Era

In 2006 the Times Person of the Year was You. Since, Influencers have taken over. In order to provide some context to the Influencer Industry I am researching, I want to discuss how some other aspects have changed in accord.

This table is licenced under Creative Commons to share and adapt, as long as attributed to Tuija Aalto 2022. Please note that this perioditization applies to Western (US, Europe) online development; I appreciate that for instance Japan and China have had their unique trajectories).

In the early stages of WWW, beginning in 1993, websites were accessed with browsers. It was well into the Web2.0 era that smartphones and their app ecosystems went mainstream. Examples typical of the earliest phase were Slashdot and Geocities. Web2.0 gave us the likes of Blogger, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube, while in the platform era the experience is predominantly mobile, seasoned with special camera filters and video effects exemplified by SnapChat and TikTok.

WWW has been around three decades: It was September 1993 when the first internet browser was introduced. The development of the user interface from hyperlinked websites evolved via “activity feeds” of the Web2.0 to the personalized, data powered app experiences we are used to today.

The flows of advertising moneys cannot be addressed in much detail here, but it is my understanding that the platform era emerged in close connection to the rise of programmatic advertising. It was the vast data troves extracted and accumulated from users that allowed the precision ad targeting and the explosion of user-generated content that provided the inventory to place the ads within, as auctioned on the fly in the real-time-bidding process of programmatic advertising.

Please let me know how You would modify the table above - I’d love to learn others’ points of views!