With the start of a new decade, lets look back the top innovations in web and technology in the last decade.

Google

Started as a Stanford Project by Larry and Sergey in 1998, Google has displaced the word “Search” from dictionary. Infact, this has been the phenomena of the decade. People like doing googling if they want to find something on net.

YouTube

Its difficult to give life to words. But that’s what was done to the beautiful line by Shakespeare, “ All the world’s a stage”. And yes, you have youtube, giving the opportunity to the entire world to be performers and showcase the talent. Many others followed the trend, but the phenomena to Broadcast Yourself, started nowhere else.

Camera Phones

Cameras and cell phones used to be a prized possession. But with the increasing spending power and reducing prices, the trend of camera phones came into being. It brought with it, the liberty of clicking while talking. No need to carry bulky pros with you when you can have a 8 – 15 MP on your phones.

Blog

You have an opinion, blog it. Blogging is old, but it caught attention this decade. Politicians, actors, reviewers and who not took to blogging to speak out their minds. Even we got the same to do.

P2P File Sharing

Never we thought that sharing files would be that easy. File sharing was given a completely new dimension with the introduction and wide spread use of torrents, pear to pear softwares like limewire and clouds. Though it promoted piracy, but can be a great tool if implemented with proper checks and authority.

BlackBerry

Smartfone term came into being with the advent of Blackberry. Launched in 2002 by Canadian company Research In Motion, the device offered text messaging, emails, and internet faxing. It even gave birth to the Webster’s word of the year in 2006, CrackBerry(crack meaning cocaine, and berry from Blackberry) for the addictiveness it introduced.

Bluetooth

Coming into existence in 2000, the technology allowed interconnecting pcs, mobiles phones and other electronic devices beyond wires. It promoted flirting and hooking up in Islamic countries like Soudi Arabia having strict Islamic laws for women.

Facebook

Yet another innovation coming from a student of Harward, Mark Zuckerberg, the application was meant out to be an online hangout for school and college students. But it saw an extraordinary growth after starting operations in 2004 that today it has more than 350 million active users worldwide, with 65 million accesing the application through their mobile phones. And what more, just when it seemed to be reaching the crest, in comes Jhinga with Farmville, an online game in Facebook getting people take up farming and getting addicted. Its effects will be something to watch for in the next decade.

IPod, IPhone

“I” got a new meaning with Apple launching itself in music and telephony. IPods took the world with a wave and online music sharing and buying was a new trend.

Kindle

And if music was to go online, so were books. With the launch of Amazon’s Kindle, reading books and storing them in your pockets became as easy as anything.

Gmail

When you get 1 GB of space to store your documents, when others offer 20MBs, this has to be a next generation thing. And so it was when Gmail launched in 2004 and straightaway challenged the monopoly of Hotmail, RediffMail and YahooMail. And not until recently, Gmail came out of the Beta version it was launched with, to offer unlimited storage space to its users. In July 2009, 146 million users had their data and mails on Gmail servers.

WikiPedia

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001 pioneered the concept of collaborative websites by the way of wikis. Today it has, 14 million articles, written by volunteer writers throughout the world. How it sustains? Again through donations from online users. Long live Wiki.

RSS

with the increing number of websites available for us to browse through, it became increasingly necessary to get the headlines from each and only go to those which seemed useful. So came RSS bringing all your favorite content and updates on your desktop or mobile.

Chrome and Firefox

Internet Explorer’s undisputed reign at the top was shaken badly with the advent of Firefox in 2004. And the competition became tougher with Google launching Chrome. These browsers addressed the areas IE was working around all these years, SPEED, SECURITY and STABILITY.

Memory Sticks and Blue Ray Disks

Storing 700 MBs on CDs was taken over by DVDs offering 4.7GB of storage. But the requirement of storage space gave birth to memory chips and blue ray disks offering anything between 5GB to 1TB storage. Today we have the entire world in our pockets, thanks to the huge amount of storage devices coming into being.

Videogames

Gaming got a completely different meaning with the advent of Nintendo’s Wii and Xbox 360. And what next, we will start playing games by controlling them through our physical gestures. Way to go gamers.

So here was a brief look into the past decade and what it offered the online world. And promises hold good for the future with the start of cloud computing, Google’s Wave, Chrome OS, Windows Live, and what not. Keep in touch, the web way.

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