5 technologies that will shape the web

Abstract

It was 1997-eons ago, in internet years'and the Web was only beginning to take off. People used dial-up modems to get online, and Netscape Navigator was the browser of choice. Google was still a research project of two Stanford students, and Facebook'well, Mark Zuckerberg was a 13-year-old having his Star Wars'themed bar mitzvah. Flash forward to 2011. The Web has since reinvented itself time and again: when businesses embraced it in the late 1990s, when Google dominated search in the early 2000s, when user-generated content became prominent in the mid-2000s. Today the Web is going through another reinvention, morphing into a place where our social interactions are ever more important. And the main force behind this phenomenon is, of course, Facebook, led by Zuckerberg, now a 27-year-old billionaire. © 2006 IEEE.