Top 10 Websites That Have Changed the World
There’s no doubt that life wouldn't be the same if we didn't have the Internet. Think about the great variety of things we do it including writing posts, listening to music, shopping for almost anything we want and even get information about what’s going in the rest of the world. Let’s have a look at the top ten websites that changed the world and have become an essential part of our lives.
10. Craigslist
Craig Newmark created it in 1995 with the idea of being an email distribution list. However, nowadays Craigslist is one of the most famous networks of websites on the net that offers classified ads for free. At first, it had its offices in the San Francisco Bay Area but when it grew bigger it had to look for a better place. At present the site has a list of over five hundred cities in fifty countries and over eighty million new classified ads on a monthly basis.
9. EBay
This multimillionaire company is one of the most important online consumer-to-consumer enterprises that was created by Pierre Morad Omidyar in 1995. The site provides a service depending on what people and companies can buy and as they have a great array of things on offer it is very popular. EBay is the perfect example of the dot-com boom that started in the 1990s.
8. WikiLeaks
Looking into some of the dark policies of the government of the United States and having an effect on the world by its outstanding revelations, WikiLeaks will always be worshiped by users of the net because they had the chance to see how things actually were and what happened “behind the cameras”. Julian Assage, a computer programmer and journalist from Australia, created WikiLeaks in 2006. There’s no other website that has contributed to the world as much as WikiLeaks did.
7. Napster
Worldwide famous for being the first file sharing service on the net that used peer-to-peer technology, Shawn Fanning, a computer programmer, together with his uncle John Fanning created Napster in the late 1990s. Four years ago Best Buy, a consumer electronics retailer from the United States, bought Napster for the staggering sum of 121 million dollars. In spite the fact that it had been successful, there’s no doubt why it changed the world forever when it first opened.
6. Yahoo
Yahoo stands for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle” and it was created at the beginning of 1995 by two students of electrical engineering at the Stanford University called Jerry Yang and David Filo. This gigantic site is more famous for offering different services including a search engine, messenger, web portal, directory and even news.
5. YouTube
Steven Chen, Chad Hurly and Jawed Karim, who all worked for PayPal, had the brilliant idea of creating YouTube, which is a video sharing webpage that most people use and that is famous for showing a great variety of videos created and posted by users. Thanks to this site, people are now more aware of other cultures and countries of the world and they have been able to explore the globe with only a few clicks of their mouse. In 2006 Google bought YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars.
4. Blogger
Pyra Labs, a web apps company from the United States, created the webpage useful to publish blogs on the net in 1999. It is known that in 2003 Pyra Labs sold the site to Google but they didn’t reveal how much they had paid for it. After buying it, Google decided to introduce some important new features to the site to improve it so they added web standard templates, individual files, image control, comments and posting blog posts by email.
3. Facebook
There’s no doubt that Facebook is something taken out from a Harvard mind. Mark Zuckerberg, a not very sociable student who was an expert in Apache and Linux started a long yet fruitful trip of complex coding in his Harvard dorm that led him to the creation of Facebook in 2004. At present, Facebook has over 800 million users from all parts of the world mainly for its simplicity and charm.
2. Wikipedia
Consisting of a staggering amount of more than 19.8 million articles, Wikipedia is a website on the net where people can collaborate. The site is supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, which is a non-profitable organization devoted to doing charity in the United States. It appeared in 2001 after Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger put a lot of effort into making their dream come true. You can read the site in 282 languages and there are more than 90,000 contributors who are constantly verifying new content.
1. Google
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph. D. graduates of the University of Stanford, got together in 1998 and created Google. Many users think that Google is as good as God. Owner of a great online based products and services, Google is more famous for ruling Internet surf, advertising technologies and cloud computing are also great fields for Google.
