[romaniv]

I would postulate that if Wikipedia, Youtube and Facebook went permanently offline tomorrow, absolutely nothing of significance would change either online or in the society. People would still find ways to do the same things, maybe even better ways.

The Internet of the 90s wasn't as widespread, but it had a much greater impact on areas of life and people it touched.

If anything, your list shows how centralized the Internet has become. After all, you didn't name technologies, you named brands/services.

[crusso]

The Internet of the 90s wasn't as widespread, but it had a much greater impact on areas of life and people it touched

Having grown up before the age of the Web/Internet, I couldn't disagree more.

I use Youtube on a regular basis to learn about things. Of the top of my head: gardening methods, worm composting, repairing a cracked ipad screen, fixing a macbook with soda spilled on it, learning about new programming environments.

Facebook and other social media have been given much deserved credit for allowing democratic organization of an unprecedented level in the Middle East.

Wikipedia is astoundingly useful for learning things quickly about math, history, science, culture, etc.

Skype keeps my parents in touch with their grandchildren even better than I kept in touch with my own grandparents when I lived an hour away from them growing up.

You could go on all day describing companies and Internet industries that have completely changed the way people live: Ebay, Salesforce.com, CNN.com, Blizzard, etc.

After all, you didn't name technologies, you named brands/services.

The brands are the ones that dominate the services being covered, just like in the old days Xerox was a verb that stood in for the service of making photocopies.

[romaniv]

A lot of people drive GM cars to work, universities and shops. Your argument is similar to saying that without GM every one of them would be jobless, uneducated and could buy nothing. I.e. you conflating the possibility of doing something via a service with the service being the only outlet for doing that.

Internet of the 90s created a lot of possibilities that simply didn't exist before. Services of the 2000s mostly centralized and commercialized already existing trends. Of all the brands in your list, I would say Skype is the only one that profoundly changed something.

Also, I still stand by my statement that if the things I named disappeared tomorrow, the world would move on unscathed.

[crusso]

the world would move on unscathed

That clause is as true and unprovable for most anything you would put in front of it, depending upon your definition of "unscathed".

[eterm]

This was part of the point I wanted to emphasize.

This article talks at how amazing usenet was with it's millions of words a day.

Now any article would take of the valuation of usenet with it's millions of words a day. Someone making a modern usenet wouldn't open their protocol in fear of losing advertising money.

Would twitter, snapchat, etc have their valuations if they released fully open protocols (both client and server)?

[VMG]

> I would postulate that if Wikipedia, Youtube and Facebook went permanently offline tomorrow, absolutely nothing of significance would change either online or in the society.

That is insane. On the other hand, if you shut down 1993 internet, nobody would have noticed.

> If anything, your list shows how centralized the Internet has become. After all, you didn't name technologies, you named brands/services.

That's the natural evolution of every technology - I can imagine you yearning for the day when steam power and electricity wasn't commercialized and was a noble endeavor of hobbyists.

But I'll translate for you: I am talking about wiki software, multimedia streaming technology, social media and search engines, which you conveniently omitted.

Yes, these things are expensive, so they become centralized and commercialized. The world is still better for it.