The Amazing Decade of Communications Technology From 1999-2009

It’s hard to believe it has only been ten years when you look back at it. With only a few days to go before the decade ends, I’m sitting here in my apartment trying to digest it all. Outside, the snow is melting away as the storm hugging my balcony makes my Weber barbeque rattle ominously. The whole scene has something dramatic about it.

Ten years ago, I was still a tech student at the Linköping Institute of Technology. By this time I was probably engaged in stuff like Java programming, state-space descriptions and sweat inducing acoustics calculations. ICQ and student email (are people still using student email adresses these days?) were the main channels of communication and I was still on a stationary Dell. I guess one could have guessed where the web would go if one had only thought hard enough about the laws of human and technological evolution. Things have moved radically, but perhaps not in so surprising directions?

Since the weather is to crappy to go out and do anything, I started putting together a list of events from the most impressive decade in the history of communications just to get a feel for the timeline. I probably left out a bunch of stuff, so feel free to add things in the comments and I’ll update the post as we go.

1999

• Napster
• Original MySpace
• Boo.com
• The word “blog” is born from it’s original form “weblog”
• Blogger
• The state of the art $5600 Nikon DSLR D1 reaches 2.66 megapixel resolution
• Apple Airport

2000

• dotcom bubble peaks
• Playstation 2

2001

• iPod
• Wikipedia
• Apple Powerbook G4 Titanium
• Mac OS X
• Podcasting
• XBOX
• Drupal

2002

• 3G is launched in Sweden
• Second Life first Demo
• Friendster

2003

• Skype
• WordPress
• Safari
• iTunes Store
• Flashmobs
• MySpace
• Technorati
• LinkedIN
• The Pirate Bay

2004

• Facebook
• Firefox
• Flickr
• Web 2.0
• Gmail (Beta)

2005

• YouTube
• Google Maps
• Google Earth
• Ning

2006

• Twitter
• Nintendo Wii
• TED-talks made available online
• Google Docs / Apps
• Spotify

2007

• iPhone
• Kindle
• One laptop per child project

2008

• Google Android
• Google Chrome

2009

• 4G
• Google Wave
• Bing!
• Google personalized search and real time search
• Voddler

I bow deeply to humanity. This is an impressive decade!