Early 2000 isn’t early web. By that point it had already been around for a decade, had been heavily commercialised and a lot of the fun independent portals were already starting to disappear. By early 2000 Yahoo! was already losing favour to Google and the MS buyout of Hotmail was already a distant memory. VRML2 had been and gone, XHTML was deprecated and FutureWave / Macromedia Flash was just about to move to it’s 3rd company, Adobe. By early 2000s the browsers wars had already been lost too Microsoft and the era of Internet Explorer.

There’s so much history that had already been and gone by 2000 that it’s a real stretch to argue the middle third of the web as it’s early period.

Yeah, early 2000s is Web 2.0. Upthread is talking more like mid-1990s when you could plausibly have a hand-curated directory of the interesting sites (which Yahoo did at scale of course but for a time I even maintained an internal home page that was links to the sites I was interested in).

maybe I got the date wrong but web 2.0 is ajax/myspace/fb

I was talking about the phpbb era

Myspace in 2003, O'Reilly coined read/write web at about the same time. The original iteration of Facebook was 2004. The Ajax book I have on my shelf is 2006. All this stuff started coming in as the industry was starting to pick itself up from the dot-com bubble bursting. phpBB was a little bit earlier with the first release at the end of 2000.

Ahhh the era of blahblah");drop table users; -- , and unencrypted unhashed password databases :+ I'm still amazed the internet didn't just blow up in those days. Strange enough that was sufficient security back then.

Because those were the days that you didn't trust a website enough to enter a credit card number. If you needed to give a credit card number you called a land line phone number listed on the page that took you to their sales department (or the one guy answering the phones who also worked as sales, tech support, and customer service).

That was true in the 90s but by the early 00s there were already a few online payment processors around. I remember using WorldPay a lot in around 2000 to 2004. PayPal came onto my radar shortly after, though even then I was aware it had been around for a while beforehand.

I vaguely recall there was another service like WorldPay, and possibly named similarly too, around that time.

I’ve been running websites since 1994 as well as a keen record collector in the early 00s so used to do a lot of transactions online. I can’t really remember how I payed for stuff online in the 90s, which leaves me wondering if it was all via phone. But I definitely remember using WorldPay sometime around 2000 as I recall being frustrated by the lengthy process (lots of questions, which in hindsight I should have been pleased they did thorough checks).

That's the issue today. Everything is serious. Old web wasn't about security and payment :)

Absolutely.

Keywords I remember (?) from a developer perspective:

- basecamp (product from 37 signals, now Basecamp)

- prototype and scriptaculous

- tags, "folksonomy"

- later: gmail

And with gmail, don't be evil. Lol were we fooled.

Explains a whole lot of the the anti-Google sentiment here.

I think a lot of us thought for once we had a smart, nice, funny tech giant and they just had to prove us wrong.

We now

- don't have any really good search engine anymore, no Reader, no Desktop Search, no Google+. It seems Google after 2009 is incapable of maintaining what they once built.

- Google long ago abandoned the idea of not being evil

- and even Microsoft is wittier and more playful in their messaging at the moment

So why am I writing this? Because I hope they will change their ways or that someone else will pick up the really nice niche they left behind:

- to find results for the things I actually ask for. (A bonus would be if they or whatever replaces them also implements the ~ operator for "something like".)