What the Internet Was Like in 2002
With Flash websites and CSS designs, the broadband-fueled 2002 internet is full of creativity. Meanwhile, online music is the wild west and the blogosphere points the way to a more social web.
In June 2002, Pew Research Center released a report on broadband uptake. It stated that 21% of all Internet users in America — 24 million adults — now had broadband in the home, up from just 6% two years ago. Of course, broadband penetration would continue to trend upward over the coming years. But even in 2002, Pew claimed that the internet had morphed from a "sometimes" tool for communication and finding information to an "always-on information appliance."
This change in the character of the internet around 2002 led to the other trends we'll look at in this post: more interactive websites, more online music choices, more socializing on the web.
Web Design: Flash to CSS
One website that illustrates well the shift to a broadband sensibility in 2002 was MTV.com. Unlike some multimedia-heavy websites from that year, it didn't rely too heavily on Flash technology. If anything, it was a traditional HTML portal that made extensive use of tables and image buttons for layout.
The site was rich in streaming media, though — including on-demand music videos, radio streams, and broadband-only content. This was typically delivered via RealPlayer and Windows Media plugins, rather than Flash.
However, Flash and Shockwave — two popular multimedia technologies from Macromedia — were used heavily for MTV's tv show microsites and its interactive promos. One example was an interactive microsite for The Osbournes, built using Shockwave:
MTV also had community member profiles, which in hindsight looks like a prototype for MySpace (which would launch the following year). Only instead of blogs, it was message boards; and the emphasis was on collecting lists of bands and MTV shows, rather than collecting friends. But if you squint, you can see social networks taking shape.
It wasn't all about multimedia on the web in 2002. Web standards were also becoming increasingly popular with web designers; and in particular the "tableless CSS" design. Wired launched a big CSS-based redesign in October 2002. Blogger Adrian Holovaty wrote:
"In a tremendous win for Web standards and modern Web technologies such as XHTML, the site now uses an all-CSS layout. The site's announcement says it "may be the first major, heavily trafficked, constantly updated site to adopt [Web standards]." [...] the site's reliance on style sheets opens the door to many innovations -- such as dynamic text resizing, which the site has already implemented."
Lead designer Douglas Bowman noted that all pages now "rely entirely on CSS for every design, format, and presentation detail."
Blogosphere Rises
Speaking of beautiful web designs, over 2002 blogging became a thriving ecosystem of colourful personal sites that interconnected to each other via RSS, trackback and blogrolls.
Blogging software by this time was both sophisticated and relatively easy to use. In its version 2.51, Movable Type had multiple template options, entry categorization, built-in comments, a new feature called "trackback," and more. The original mainstream blog platform, Blogger, was also still going strong. Other blog software options included Radio Userland, LiveJournal and Xanga.
In an influential article on Microcontent News, John Hiler popularized the notion of a "blogosphere," which he defined as an "emerging media ecosystem."
Hiler gave the credit for coining the word to William Quick, who first used it at the end of 2001. In fact it was Brad Graham who coined blogosphere, albeit jokingly, in September 1999. In any case, Hiler was the one who positioned blogs in the larger media ecosystem:
"The word was meant as a clever pun combining "Blog" with "logos", a Greek word meaning logic and reason. And while bloggers do often use logic in dissecting arguments, I love the word Blogosphere because it happens to capture another truth: the Blogosphere is a biosphere of its own, a Media Ecosystem that lives and breathes just like any other biological system."
Post-Napster P2P Chaos
Napster was effectively cancelled in 2001 due to lawsuits from the record industry. But by 2002, even more decentralised peer-to-peer (P2P) services had arisen to take its place: KaZaA, Gnutella (which powered clients like LimeWire and Morpheus), eDonkey2000 (with its eMule client), BitTorrent, and others. It was these services that people flocked to for MP3s, not the sanctioned apps of record companies.
The P2P ecosystem was a chaotic one in 2002. Let's quickly look at KaZaA, a desktop client built on top of FastTrack — a P2P protocol developed by a group of Estonian programmers led by Jaan Tallinn. This protocol later became the foundation of Skype, one of the standout applications of Web 2.0. But back in 2002, during the wild west of P2P music sharing, KaZaA had its hands full fending off record company lawsuits and competitors like Morpheus.
Morpheus had originally used FastTrack, but was kicked off the network in February and subsequently moved to the open source Gnutella protocol. A March 2002 article from The Register captures the utter chaos of this time:
"Music City [owner of Morpheus] pointed the finger of blame towards KaZaA.com (recently acquired by Sharman Network Services), which like MusicCity's Morpheus and Grokster has licensed the FastTrack P2P stack. MusicCity described FastTrack-KaZaA software as a security risk (or a vector for spyware). Not so, says FastTrack-KaZaA. KaZaA founder Niklas Zennstrom told CNet that StreamCast Networks, the firm behind Music City Morpheus, had failed to pay its bills, so the license for its P2P stack was terminated."
The Register added later in the article that "both Morpheus and KaZaA are embroiled in copyright violation lawsuits brought against them by the music industry."
Meanwhile, on the back of releasing the second generation iPod in August, Apple set out to create a legal alternative to the illicit music file sharing scene. But to do that, Steve Jobs would have to convince the five major record labels — Universal, Warner, EMI, BMG, and Sony — to take part in its upcoming iTunes Store. This took him over a year to accomplish.
Also in 2002, we saw the launches of last.fm and Audioscrobbler, two services that would eventually merge and give the online music ecosystem a social component.
A Phoenix Arises in an IE6 Web
By 2002, Microsoft was in total control of the web browser market. Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) had been released in August 2001 and was at or near its peak by 2002, with an estimated market share of nearly 90% — other versions of IE added 5% to that figure. With such dominance, there was little reason for Microsoft to continue pushing forward on browser technology (there would be no IE7 until 2006).
The only hope for further innovation was in Mozilla, the non-profit organization spun off by Netscape in 1998. But its progress towards a new browser was slow. Mozilla 1.0 was eventually released on June 5, 2002. Part of the delay was that Mozilla 1.0 wasn't just a web browser, it was a full application suite:
"Built on the Gecko layout engine, Mozilla 1.0 is cross-platform and integrates a core set of applications that allow users to access the capabilities of the Web, including a web browser, an email reader and a chat client. Gecko is the core browser component in Mozilla 1.0 and was developed as part of the mozilla.org open source project; it is freely available for inclusion in third party products."
Some Mozilla developers disliked the bloat of Mozilla 1.0, so they began development on a single browser app — which also used the Gecko layout engine. This was the beginnings of Firefox; and on 23 September 2002, an early version called Phoenix 0.1 was released. Finally, it looked like the slumbering browser market would wake up.
More year-by-year overviews of internet history:
- Dot-com: 1994 · 1995 · 1996 · 1997 · 1998 · 1999 · 2000 · 2001 · 2002 · 2003
- Web 2.0: 2004 · 2005 · 2006 · 2007 · 2008 · 2009 · 2010 · 2011 · 2012
Buy the Book
My Web 2.0 memoir, Bubble Blog: From Outsider to Insider in Silicon Valley's Web 2.0 Revolution, is now available to purchase:
- Paperback, US$19.99: Amazon; Bookshop.org
- eBook, US$9.99: Amazon Kindle Store; Apple Books; Google Play
Or search for "Bubble Blog MacManus" on your local online bookstore.