"Five Years and Counting!"

Yep, as of today, JonBaas.com is now five years old!

Five years -- May 13, 2002! That's a pretty good life for any continuously-updated website -- especially one with a well-read blog! And, as it just so happens, five days after that, I also received my college diploma. So, not only is this website five years old today, as of this coming Friday, so is my college graduate status! My, how time flies!

So, to celebrate this fun little internet birthday, let's take a look at what a few places on the web looked like back then, shall we? Let's take a trip back to the WayBack Machine!

May 2002: (all website links below reflect archived pages)

JonBaas.com
This is what my website looked like four months after I first launched it.

MySpace.com
Didn't even exist until July 2003. Now it has over 175 million users.

Google.com
Yes, Google was only only a baby in May 2002, not yet five years old. But in the five years that followed it became the GIANT it is today. In February 2003, it acquired Pyra Labs, owner of Blogger.com. Just over a year later they launched GMail, their own free email service. In 2004, Google purchase the company that developed the popular satellite mapping service, (renamed to) Google Earth. And on October 9, 2006, Google purchased the popular video site YouTube.

YouTube.com
Didn't even exist until February 2005.

Yahoo.com
My email service of choice, was only eight years old. The site was considerably less attractive back then, but, nonetheless, a major player on the internet.

Ebay.com
Also a bit less attractive, the world-wide auction website, Ebay, would later purchase PayPal.com a few months after JonBaas.com went live.

Wikipedia.org
The massive free online encyclopedia was only a year old. By the end of 2002, it only featured 50,000 articles. Today it has approximately 7.2 million articles in 251 languages. Boy was it ugly back then!

Flickr.com
Didn't even exist until February 2004.

My how things change in only five years. JonBaas.com is actually over two years OLDER than MySpace -- the largest and most popular website on the internet. How's that for a birthday present!

Have a great Sunday all, and until next time,

Your happily blogging friend,
-Jon
posted by Jon at 11:44 PM  I   I  0 comments