Timeline of popular Internet services

2007

• Google Street View, a technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth that provides panoramic views from various positions along many streets in the world.

2006

• Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates, tweets, which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.
• IMSLP, the International Music Score Library Project.

2005

• YouTube is a video sharing website.
• Google Earth is a virtual globe computer program.

2004

• Podcast: A downloadable audio file for listening to on a portable media player. A bit like a radio program that you can save and listen to at your convenience. "Podcast" is a portmanteau of the words "iPod" and "broadcast". Podcasting began to catch hold in late 2004, though the ability to distribute audio and video files easily has been around since before the dawn of the Internet.
• Facebook is a social networking website.
• World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).
• Flickr is a photo/ video sharing website.

2003

• iTunes is an online store which sells music and videos in downloadable form.
• MySpace is a social networking website.
• Second Life is a virtual world.

2001

• Wikipedia.

1998

• Google Inc. launched a search engine for web sites of the World Wide Web, subsequently extending search facilities to many types of media, including books, magazines, forums, email, news.
• Yahoo! Groups a community-driven Internet communication tool, a hybrid between an electronic mailing list and an Internet forum starts off as Yahoo! Clubs
  

1996

• Ultima Online (UO), a graphical massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).
• Internet Archive is an archive of periodically cached versions of websites.

1995

• Ebay is an auction and shopping website.
• Wiki: A website that anyone can edit.

1994

• Amazon.com is an online retailer, best known for selling books, but now sells all kinds of goods.
• GeoCities a free web hosting service, now defunct, founded as Beverly Hills Internet (BHI) by David Bohnett and John Rezner .
• The Yahoo! website started off as a web directory and soon became a webportal offering all kinds of internet services.

1993

• Blog: A blog (a contraction of the term weblog) is a type of website which resembles an online diary. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. Originally hand-coded, there are now blogging tools (a kind of content management system) to facilitate searching and linking to other blogs.
• Hutchison Paging email gateway allows emails to be sent to message pagers in the UK. This same system worked with Orange mobile phones when they were launched in 1994, emails would arrive as texts.

1992

• HTML was developed by a British engineer, Tim Berners-Lee while working in CERN. This was devised so that reports from CERN, including photographs, graphs and tables could be shared (served) across the web.

1991

• Gopher: A hypertext system which was soon largely replaced by the World Wide Web.

1990

• ARPANET was retired and merged into the NSFNET.
• IMDb, the Internet Movie Database.

1988

• Internet Relay Chat (IRC): A form of real-time Internet text messaging (chat) or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message.

1986

• LISTSERV the first electronic mailing list software application,

1983

• Internet: A global computer network which was created by interconnecting various existing networks with the TCP/IP protocol suite.

1982

• First standardization of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, a network transmission standard for the transport of email.

1979

• Usenet: A distributed threaded discussion and file sharing system; a collection of forums known as newsgroups, that was a precursor to today's web-based forums. One notable difference from a BBS or web forum is that there is no central system owner. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers which store and forward messages to one another.

1978

• MUD: First real-time, multi-player MUD adventure game was developed by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at Essex University, England.
• In 1978 a team of programmers at the Post Office Research Station in Martlesham heath, Suffolk. Were recruited from within the Post Office Data Processing Executive to produced PRESTEL the first semi-graphical interface to the internet. Prior to this a service called 'Telecom Gold' - a bulletin board system like the AOL and compuserve systems popular in the US was used.

By 1982 the Prestel system was used throughout the UK for online purchace of Books, shopping, holiday bookings etc. It used a 'page' system to navigate. Typing in the page number or clicking on the page number (Only Apple's Lisa computer had windows and mouse in 1982) took you to that page, like HTML's hyperlinks do today.

1973

• E-mail: First proposal for standardization of electronic mail message format in RFC 561.
• ARPANET made it's first international connection between University college in London and Royal Radar establishment in Norway.

1971

• FTP: File Transfer Protocol
• Project Gutenberg, a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works.

1969

• Telnet: A system for logging in, over a network, to a computer situated in another location.
• ARPANET connected Stanford research Institute in Santa Barbara to the University of Utah, the internet was born, although the first attempt actually crashed on the 'g' of the word 'Login
• 1960s
  
• Email: Electronic mail applications are developed on timesharing main frame computers for communication between system users.
• The beginning of the internet can be traced back to 1962, when the RAND (America's military think tank) tackled the problem of how they could communicate in the aftermath of a nuclear attack, their thinking was prompted by the Cuban Missile Crisis.

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