Web 0.2

This video from the first Internet Marketing Conference in 1994 is a pretty good time. The highlight is Marc Andreesen's talk about Mosaic and the recently-formed Netscape. Some things I like:

• He talks about applications rather than sites. Mosaic allows users to use applications. The idea that now we're creating web applications rather than sites is meant to be one of the centerpieces of Web 2.0. But it's been in mind since the beginning.


• Mosaic was successful, according to Marc because they skipped all the hard problems of traditional hypertext systems. Most notably this includes search. "How do you search across the information? I dunno."


• Mosaic grew to several hundred thousand users in its first year and 3M users in 18 months.


• The key to Mosaic is communication between people. "The applications that will be succesfull in the next 5, 10 years are the ones that really tie together people."
  

Word.