A brief timeline of some important events in the history of peer production on the web (sort of, really the larger 21st century web), just so I can keep the chronology straight for myself. I’ve assembled this as part of prep for an article on the history of Wikipedia, so events I think of as connected to Wikipedia’s emergence are privileged.
This is a note-to-self sort of thing. I constructed it idiosyncratically, remembering things that seemed important at the time and snowballing from there. It’s not meant to be exhaustive or representative.
- Spring 1985: The WELL founded
- October 1985: Free Software Foundation Formed
- August 1998: IRC Created
- February 1989: GNU GPL Version 1 released
- April 1989: MP3 Patented
- July 1990: Electronic Frontier Foundation formed
- January 1991: First Web Servers Available
- September 1991: First Linux Kernel Available
- September 1993: Release of NCSA Mosaic Browser / AOL adds USENET (“Endless September”)
- January 1994: Yahoo! Founded
- July 1994: Amazon Founded / WIPO Green Paper on IP (DMCA groundwork)
- September 1994: W3C Formed
- November 1994: Beta releases of Netscape Available / Geocities Founded as “Beverly Hills Internet”
- March 1995: Ward Cunningham releases first wiki software
- April 1995: First Apache Webserver Release (0.6.2)
- July 1995: Geocities Expands “Cities” Available for Users
- August 1995: Netscape IPO / Internet Explorer 1.0 released
- December 1995: Altavista search engine launches
- February 1996: Communications decency act passes / “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” published
- December 1996: Flash 1.0 released
- May 1997: Amazon IPO
- September 1997: Slashdot begins
- October 1997: Explorer 4.0 (version that will take majority market share from Netscape) released
- December 1997: RSS Created / Term “Weblog” Coined
- April 1998: BoingBoing.net at current web address (sources say it began 1995)
- May 1998: Microsoft anti-trust case (Browser bundling) begins
- August 1998: Pets.com Founded/Geocities IPO/Blogger launched
- September 1998: Google Founded
- November 1998: Netscape releases source code for communicator
- January 1999: Yahoo! buys Geocities
- June 1999: Napster service begins
- November 1999: Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace published
- December 1999: Lawsuit against Napster begins
- January 2000: 16 Dot-com companies run superbowl commercials / AOL-Time Warner Merger Announced
- March 2000: Nupedia goes online
- March 2000: NASDAQ Peaks and begins to decline / Gnutella released
- November 2000: Pets.com defunct
- January 2001: Wikipedia goes online / Creative Commons Launched
- February 2001: Peak Napster Users
- July 2001: Napster Shut Down
- September 2001: Moveable Type Blog Software announced
- August 2002: “Coase’s Penguin” published
- March 2003: Friendster goes online
- May 2003: WordPress released
- June 2003: First “Flash Mob”
- August 2003: Myspace Launched
- February 2004: Flickr launched / Facebook Launched
- May 2004: Anarchist in the library published
- October 2004: First Web 2.0 Summit
- November 2004: Digg Launched
- February 2005: YouTube Launched
- June 2005: Reddit Launched
- March 2006: English wikipedia has 1 million articles
- April 2006: Wealth of Networks published
- May 2006: “Digital Maoism” published
- June 2006: Term “crowdsourcing” coined / Myspace Overtakes Google as most visited site
- January 2007: Wikipedia’s editor population peaks and begins to decline (largely unacknowleged until 2009 or so)
- September 2007: English Wikipedia has 2 million articles
- February 2008: Here Comes Everybody Published
- April 2008: Facebook overtakes Myspace as most visited social networking site
- October 2010: Limewire shuts down
- August 2015: Facebook reports one billion uses in a single day
