It's a fast moving interweb...

Hat tip to Mike Lavigne for forwarding the link, but I was briefly transfixed last night looking at this gallery of screenshots posted on The Daily Beast of the web in all its 1.0 (or even pre-1.0) glory. Highly worth checking out the gallery.

The Daily Beast calls it a flashback to "ugly" websites, but that doesn't seem fair. They weren't badly designed, that's what everything looked like early on. This one though was my favorite, especially since it was taken in 2005.


That's an entire decade after the Netscape IPO (usually credited as the Lexington & Concord of the dot com era) and well into the Web 2.0 era. Things sure do move fast, checking Google's handy de facto EKG meter for the news media you can see that it wasn't long before it was one of the biggest tech phenomena going.

And a year from now the story is bound to have changed and morphed yet again. We have a suspicion our client SuperFan.com might just be a big part of it, but in any case if you can forgive the cliche -- the one thing that's certain to be constant is constant change.

And a side note, this image was my runner up favorite. It may not have resonance unless you were living in Manhattan in 1999-2000 or so, but the Kozmo/UrbanFetch wars were epic. My first apartment in the city was a lovely single room with a sweeping (nearly half block wide) first floor view of the Lincoln Tunnel entrance on 34th street.

But one thing I had going for me was being about 100 yards from the old UrbanFetch distro facility next to Javits. Ever find yourself at 2am needing two razor blades, a snickers bar, and a 60 watt GE lightbulb delivered to your door, at low prices with no minimum order, and tipping strictly prohibited? That one's still sorely missed.