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An article written by Luciano Schlaen (Paginar.net's Managing Director for Europe) for the news site Cinco Días.
A recent report from the Hitwise consultancy noted that Facebook, for the first time in history, has exceeded Google in United States traffic. This milestone led me to think that we are experiencing a new internet revolution. In the beginning there were the old portals, with their aspirations to organize everything. When examining and classifying all of the content proved to be impossible, the search engines arrived. And from there on to the 2.0 universe and social networks, where we as users generate or recommend the content.
Let's go back to 1994. Yahoo was born that year, offering a new entry point to the web. Soon afterward it became the defining leader of a new age in the history of the internet: the era of portals. Constantly examining the content published on the internet and classifying it in a directory so that users could find it. This was the basic function of Yahoo! and other portals, such as Lycos or Terra in Spain.
Five years later, the volume of online content required a new way to access the internet. Google provided the solution with its search engine. Its mission: to organize information worldwide so that it would be universally accessible and useful. With this search engine, we could see the infinite information horizon and we were free. We no longer depended on the editorial criteria of a portal or its ability to include new websites in its directory. Google rapidly positioned itself as the port of entry to the most widely-used network in the world, replacing the traditional portals. The era of search engines had arrived, which would basically change the world forever.
Let's move forward another five years. With the tidal wave of 2.0 internet tools, it became interactive. The user had assumed the lead role and everything changed yet again. Facebook was born in 2005 and today it is threatening the giant Google. There is good reason for this: 400 million users, 130 million unique visitors per month at Facebook.com alone, 7 hours per month spent on the site (compared to 2 on Google), and a growth of 145% in the last year in the United States. And now, it has exceeded Google's traffic for the first time. And it seems we are already living in the third era of the internet: the era of social networks. This implies a new revolution that is completely transforming our habits.
We do not know what the near future of the web will be like. But what is clear is that the internet is still in diapers and, since we have already lived through the era of the portals and that of search engines, and now, the era of social networks, we are merely witnesses to its childhood.
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