[nostrademons]

Wikis. Who woulda thunk that a website that anybody can edit would actually work, let alone become an important component of the web and most corporate intranets.

HTTP. The protocol is not that complicated, but it's become ubiquitous, and a cornerstone of the web.

Social news. Nowadays everybody takes links you can vote on as a "duh" feature and wonder what the big deal behind Reddit is, but when it came out in 2005, it was very much a "Why has nobody thought of this before? Oh, right, because nobody will ever use it" invention.

[papsosouid]

>Nowadays everybody takes links you can vote on as a "duh" feature and wonder what the big deal behind Reddit is, but when it came out in 2005, it was very much a "Why has nobody thought of this before?

It had been thought of before, and done before. The late 90s had tons of sites like that. When reddit came out in 2005, it was very much a "what is so special about slashdot clone #437?".

[nostrademons]

Didn't slashdot have you vote on the comments and not the stories, and the stories were still picked by editors? I think that was what was new about Reddit and Digg...they were just user-submitted stories and nothing else.

[papsosouid]

Yes, but everyone had told them over and over again to change that, they just wanted to maintain control. It certainly wasn't a new invention of diggs, I just used slashdot as the example of reddit being a clone because slashdot was the most well known. kuro5hin was(is?) exactly digg/reddit for example. Social bookmarking sites were around before slashdot too.