By Marc Perton
Jason has started a great new meme with his “
Web 0.0 Test” about O’Reilly’s Global Network Navigator, one of the first web portals (though, of course the site had come and gone before that term was ever applied to a gateway like
GNN). And now that Jason’s gone and started this, I can’t resist adding my own, though I’ll skip the test part. My Web 0.0 pick:
gopher.wired.com, which launched in November, 2003. Yes, I know that the Wired gopher server wasn’t even a web site—but if that’s not Web 0.0, I don’t know what is. My reason for picking it is simple: it’s the site that showed me the potential of the internet for real content. Remember: as the web was in its infancy, the gopher protocol was nearing its zenith, and for a brief period was actually capable of doing more than the nascent web. So, when Wired started what may well have been the first, last and only commercial gopher, it was really a groundbreaking moment—and it convinced me (and probably countless others) that maybe we could use the net for something more dynamic than
FTP servers and newsgroups. Of course, within months, it was clear that the web was going to dominate, and that the gopher would end up back in a little hole. By early 1995, amid plummeting traffic, the Wired gopher
was replaced by the
magazine’s web site. But it was the gopher that lit the fuse, back in the 0.0 era. (Oh, and recalling all this doesn’t make me feel at all 1337—though it does make me feel just a little bit old!)
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, April 18th, 2006 at 8:52 am
