Not long ago I had Mikael over and we were regaling stories of what technology was like back in the day. It was an interesting conversation since things really have changed over time.

In the beginning, there were the ISPs. Everyone got ten megabytes of space to build their own website. Back then that involved coding all the HTML yourself in a text editor and uploading the files with a FTP client.

Next came Geocities. Geocities changed the landscape by providing free web space to host your websites, a web form to upload files, and later, a graphical interface to create them. Suddenly having a presence on the web was within the grasp of far more people.

After this the next major innovation was blogs such as Wordpress and picture sharing websites such as Flickr. The blogging platforms allowed people to create content in an entirely visual and intuitive way. The photo sharing services provided unlimited space for pictures which had traditionally been hogging a large portion of the 10 megabyte limit Geocities gave you. More people were able to come online. At this point Geocities began to die off.

The latest major trend is social networking sites such as Facebook. They combine the blogging capabilities of Wordpress with the photo sharing function of Flickr into one central package. At this point nearly everyone and their dog had some presence online. Blogs began to decline as people learned they could summarize their sentiments into 160 characters and Geocities disappeared.

That brings us to today. It's amazing how far we have come and how things have changed.  Generally this evolution of the Internat has followed two rules; whatever comes next will have to be more user friendly and intuitive than its predecessor, and whatever comes next will have an unprecedented adoption rate.  Does anyone want to venture a guess of what will replace Facebook?