An entry in the wiki site Take Back the Web points to 15 people who changed the Internet. These are personalities that pioneered some of the most popular and widely used properties on the web.
The list mostly cited people who owns the top internet companies today which includes:
1. Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google Inc.)
2. Sir Tim Berners-Lee (Created World Wide Web)
3. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
4. Shawn Fanning (Napster, Rupture)
5. Kevin Rose (Digg, Revision3, Pownce)
6. Matt Mullenweg (WordPress, Automattic)
7. Bram Cohen (BitTorrent)
8. Pierre Omidyar (eBay, Omidyar Networks)
9. Mike Morhaime (Blizzard Entertainment – World of Warcraft)
10. Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia)
11. Craig Newmark (Craigslist)
12. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen (YouTube)
13. David Filo and Jerry Yang (Yahoo! Inc)
14. Jack Ma (Alibaba)
15. Jeff Preston Bezos (Amazon)
While I do not completely agree with the top 15 in the list, I think several other people deserve a spot in there:
- Bill Gates (Microsoft) – mainly because of Internet Explorer. Let’s admit it, if it were not for the IE browser, we would still be paying for Netscape Navigator until today.
- Steve Jobs (Apple) – though Apple is mostly a software/hardware company, iTunes proved that selling digital music online can be bigger than CD singles.
- Jarkko Oikarinen (IRC) – he invented the Internet Relay Chat Protocol, a service that’s basically a Web 1.0 epitome of MySpace/Friendster/Facebook + Napster in the 90s.
Who else do you think deserves to be in the list?
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I agree with abe
Where’s Friendster and Macromind Flash?
a la TIME mag, we, the users, changed the internet.
1. Robert Morris Jr.-Morris Worm
2. Marc Andreesen -Mosaic Browser then Netscape
3. Linus Torvalds -guess what?
Macromedia peeps (for creating Flash). The Friendster owner, too, since Friendster is the first social-networking site in the web.
Michel V of cafelog.com who was the one of the first to use mysql (perhaps the first) database for blogs. Wordpress was based on the b2 script.
@ noemi – For a moment I thought that was Michael V…
wala si Marc Andreesen and Bill Gates sa list? oh come on…!
what about Java?
I think each one of them deserves to be on top 15. Unfortunately, they are more than 15. To agree on the ratings (that is not likely still) we must set the criteria.
What is our criteria?
Jef
How in God’s name is Digg more influential than eBay, Amazon, Wikipedia, etc?
Firefox changed the Internet
AhmedF,
True. There is a randomness reminiscent of Al Gore’s claim to some of the people in the list.
I think the owner of firefox should be included.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak
Abraham Olandres – Yugatech
Mine should be the ff to be included:
Linus Torvalds, Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu), Bill Gates (nah I don’t think so), Steve Jobs.
Linus Torvalds, hands down.
Jonathan Abrams (Friendster)–who pioneered social network service/social networking sites–should have been there instead of Mark Zuckerberg (FaceBook).
Whoever pioneered or popularized online forums/discussion groups should also be in the list.
we should also be grateful to these forsaken people Paul Baran, Donald Davies & Leonard Kleinrock (they are the architect of the internet)
I think whoever pioneered porn on the internet should be on the list… can’t deny the impact of porn on the internet :\