The Internet ‘Thang'

A personal take on the world of goodies offered by the world wide web through Explorer, Mozilla, Opera and Co

Circa 2000, it arrived with a boom pulling Yahoo Messenger and mIRC in, now it is still going zooming across every one's life, regardless of any leikai or leibak you belong to. FYI, internet has redefined the essence of broadcast and transmission, from simple texting to sharing the ingredients of lafu-eromba with your friends. Circa 2010, the communication revolution has taken the world by storm. The size is getting bigger every time you hit the refresh button — with a whole new lexicon and mystifying acronyms being churned out each day. R8?

AFAIK, it took just five years for the internet to reach 50 million users. This same milestone took radio 38 years, and took television 13 years. This sensation was conceptualised during the heyday of the Cold War. Ever since the boom around the early 90s, there has been an exponential growth in the number of users as well as graphics-studded pages. According to the Internet Usage and World Population Statistics as for September 30, 2009, the total number of internet users is pegged at 1,733,993,741, with a growth of 380% from 2000; meanwhile, Google’s index now stands at eight billion pages. Can you guess where the internet will be in the next 100 to 1000 years? Just something to ponder as you gaze at that cursor!

A screenshot from internetworldstats.com

 

We are living in a networked world. Now you know where your ex-girlfriend went to party last Saturday, whilst you are busy updating your blogs. Then there is Skype, where you can text, video-chat and send files; all at the same time. Formally launched with personal homepage publishing tools in the 80s, social networking sites have changed the meaning of relationships. You got new friends, and instead of kicking any moron's butt, you can simply unfriend him/her on Facebook. The boy/girl who used to be your number-one enemy in high school is the mate, who forward you most of the whackiest emails that flood your Gmail inbox. The funny, interesting facts, which at one time were found at the back of your note-book are all there at the tip of your finger tips now. Do you know 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321? The albums in your Orkut profile allows you to tag your friends in a college get-together snapshot. If you have a fit, you can even slap them at a speed of 300km/h.

Nonetheless, no matter how much you enjoy posting on someone else's wall and reading e-books, spams will also be always to jam your mailbox. It is one of the greatest curses of email service, congesting network and spreading viruses.

You might be sitting in your office cubicle, running an errand and still be in touch with some clients who are sitting on the other side of the world. The off-shoring business has flourished, owing to the services offered by the ICE technology, and specifically the internet. From BPO, business has expanded to all kinds of POs in the Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) sectors: KPO, LPO, RPO, APO and what not. TTFN!


PS: Internet was popularised in the early 90s, but I started using it only around 2000. And the top featured image was updated in June 2021.