What the Internet Was Like in 1999
In 1999, Microsoft vanquishes Netscape in the browser war, Google starts to show up competing search engines, Blogger launches, and Napster loudly arrives to shake up our culture.
When AOL completed its acquisition of Netscape in March 1999, a part of the old web died forever. By the end of the year (and the century), Netscape's share of the browser market had shrunk to about 20% and Microsoft's Internet Explorer had become dominant.
Meanwhile, the dot-com bubble continued to expand, with IPOs from Nvidia (now the world's most valuable company), Netscape co-founder Jim Clark's Healtheon, priceline.com, Ask Jeeves, Red Hat, TiVo, Akamai and others. Also, Google received its first VC funding round in June and declared its bold goal “to organize the world’s information, making it universally accessible and useful.”
But 1999 might best be remembered as the year of three revolutionary new internet technologies: Napster's disruption of the music industry, the launch of Blogger ushering in the age of weblogs, and RSS as a new way to syndicate web content.
Microsoft ↑ Netscape ↓
At the beginning of 1999, one company had all the momentum on the Web: Microsoft. In March, the company released version 5 of its browser, Internet Explorer. Bill Gates claimed IE5 "sets a new standard in Web browsing performance" and early reviewers didn't disagree. Paul Thurrott called IE5 a "stunning achievment" and was impressed by the whole suite:
"Think of IE 5.0 as IE 4.0 done right: All of the rough areas have been smoothed out and in the place of the IE 4.0 pig is a small, elegant, and yes, quick, Web browser that comes optionally bundled with a full suite of Internet applications that many people are going to find irresistible."
That same month, March 1999, Wired wondered out loud: Where's Netscape's new browser? The open source Mozilla project was meant to supply a new browser engine called Gecko for Netscape Communicator 5 — the suite codenamed “Seamonkey” internally — but no 5.0 release shipped in 1999. Instead, Netscape kept the legacy 4.x line going, culminating in Communicator 4.7 in late September.
By then, even Slashdot readers were tired of Netscape. "I just switched to IE this week after getting sick and tired of the literally dozens of illegal operations and hangs Netscape was giving me," wrote one after Netscape 4.7 was released in September.
By this point, Netscape's founders had jumped ship too. Jim Clark had never even joined AOL; and while Marc Andreessen was made AOL CTO in February, by September he had resigned from that role and started a new company called Loudcloud (later renamed Opsware).
Google Rising
During 1999, search engines tended to be judged more on the size of their index than the quality of their results. And by size, Google was roughly middle of the pack. A study conducted in February 1999 and published in Nature magazine in July found that Google had indexed 7.8% of the known web. AltaVista, perhaps the most well-known search engine of the time, had indexed 15.5% — putting it second on Nature’s list.
This was one reason why Google didn't get much mainstream attention in 1999. One or two savvy tech journalists had picked up on its appeal, though. In February 1999, Newsweek reporter Steven Levy name-checked the fledgling search engine: “Google, the Net's hottest new search engine, draws on feedback from the Web itself to deliver more relevant answers to customer queries.”
But Levy had only mentioned Google as an aside. His article was actually a profile of American entrepreneur Bill Gross, who (among other things) ran a search engine company called GoTo. As Levy explained, GoTo was basically a ‘pay-to-play’ search engine:
“If a GoTo user looks for ‘New York Yankees,’ the first 10 choices are paid advertisers (‘Buy Yankees gear at Fogdog Sports’). On the 11th try you finally get Yankees.com, the official site of the world champs. (On Google, this comes up first.)”
So those in the know had an inkling that Google was building something formidible, but that wouldn't become widely known until the following year.
Napster
Napster was the first major MP3 file sharing platform of the internet age and it launched in June 1999. It very quickly gained users — and the attention of the music industry.
Napster was a software program you downloaded onto your computer, which allowed you to search for MP3 files on the computers of other users. If you found the latest Nine Inch Nails or Limp Bizkit album — and you easily could — you could download that to your computer via peer-to-peer (P2P) technology.
The creator of Napster was Shawn Fanning, who was only 18 years old when the software launched. At the time, he described his creation as “a real-time search engine.” And just as social media products in the future would insist they weren’t responsible for what users did on their platforms, Fanning tried to downplay the responsibility of Napster in policing music copyright.
“We were providing a search engine which allowed you to find files, which were indexed on individuals computers, but we were not actually providing the files themselves,” he later said. “We were facilitating the transfer between those two parties.”
Fanning's business partner, Sean Parker (just a year older), said the same thing. “Look, we never touched the content ourselves,” he said in a 2013 interview with Billboard. “We were just an index. We operated no differently than Google or AltaVista.”
The problem was, although Google or AltaVista occasionally pointed to pirated content in 1999, the vast majority of their indexes pointed to perfectly legal web pages. Whereas with Napster, it was almost always pointing to copyrighted files. Those files would become pirated content as soon as they were transferred from one person to another, which Napster enabled.
On December 6, 1999, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Napster for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. It was a flashpoint between the cultural industries and the internet startups that dared to challenge decades-old companies like Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Warner Music Group.
The fact that the lawsuit arrived right at the end of the twentieth century was apt — the online future was an existential threat to those analog-based record companies. The “majors” would eventually adapt, but they needed more time to do it.
Blogging and Early RSS
In early 1999, there were just a smattering of weblogs on the internet. But if you knew HTML and also how to operate a web server, then you might have noticed a new trend in the DIY web builder community: writing short, thoughtful commentaries about the various links you came across that day, and doing it in reverse-chronological order. The term for this was a "weblog." By late April or early May 1999, Peter Merholz had shortened it to "blog."
This trend gathered momentum on May 28, 1999, when Salon's Scott Rosenberg wrote that “a phenomenon known as the weblog is one of the fastest-growing and most fertile creative areas on the Web today.” He offered a detailed definition:
“Weblogs, typically, are personal Web sites operated by individuals who compile chronological lists of links to stuff that interests them, interspersed with information, editorializing and personal asides. A good weblog is updated often, in a kind of real-time improvisation, with pointers to interesting events, pages, stories and happenings elsewhere on the Web. New stuff piles on top of the page; older stuff sinks to the bottom.”
Blogging became much easier on August 23, 1999, when a startup called Pyra Labs launched Blogger.
The key to Blogger's eventual success was that users needed no technical knowledge — all you had to do was fill in a form on the Blogger website ("No muss. No fuss."). Specifically, you didn't have to mess around with web servers. Behind the scenes, Blogger used FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to publish the contents of the form to the user's weblog.
Meanwhile, Netscape had launched the first RSS specification on March 15, 1999: RSS 0.90, which stood for "RDF Site Summary." It was a way for publishers to add their website as a "channel" to My.Netscape.com, a new customizable version of Netcenter (Netscape's portal).
The most notable thing about RSS 0.90 is that it was designed to list out linked item titles only — since that was how portals worked at the time. But Dave Winer, an early blogger and weblog software developer, had his own XML format that expanded the amount of content in a feed. It would prove influential in the years to come.
Online Identity
In a January 1999 interview with The Guardian, legendary rock star David Bowie explained his approach to the internet as an artist:
“Interaction on the Web is a little like a mirror, like communicating with a manifestation of yourself. Because it is so chaotic, so decentralised, I find that using the Web becomes like communicating with a hardware version of me. It’s not exactly a doppelgänger, but an alternative version of myself.”
It wasn’t just Bowie who was exploring alternative identities on the web — it was becoming a widespread trend. In a 1999 paper entitled “Cyberspace and Identity,” the American sociologist and author Sherry Turkle explored the phenomenon. Her opening words echo what Bowie had said: “We come to see ourselves differently as we catch sight of our images in the mirror of the machine.”
She added that the Internet “links millions of people together in new spaces that are changing the way we think, the nature of our sexuality, the form of our communities, our very identities.”
Remember, this was 1999. In retrospect, the changes the internet was bringing to your sense of identity — not to mention the Net's impact on the wider culture — was only just beginning.
More year-by-year overviews of internet history:
- Dot-com: 1994 · 1995 · 1996 · 1997 · 1998 · 1999 · 2000 · 2001 · 2002 · 2003
- Web 2.0: 2004 · 2005 · 2006 · 2007 · 2008 · 2009 · 2010 · 2011 · 2012
Buy the Book
My Web 2.0 memoir, Bubble Blog: From Outsider to Insider in Silicon Valley's Web 2.0 Revolution, is now available to purchase:
- Paperback, US$19.99: Amazon; Bookshop.org
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Or search for "Bubble Blog MacManus" on your local online bookstore.