What the Internet Was Like in 2003
Cybercultural: Internet History 2025-12-24
Flash at full volume: Jamiroquai’s website in 2003.
By 2003, the internet had weathered the worst of the dot-com crash and developers and entrepreneurs were beginning to come out of hibernation. While it would take another year for Silicon Valley to start inflating another bubble — this one would be named "Web 2.0" — there was a renewed sense of optimism.
Blogging and RSS moved into the mainstream in 2003, helped by the emergence of consumer-friendly RSS Readers like NetNewsWire and Bloglines. There was even now an economic model for blogging, with the launch of Google's AdSense in March. Also, online music went legit with Apple's iTunes store, and social networking began to take recognizable form with Friendster and MySpace.
"Social software" was a geeky term being used in the blogosphere during this time. So there was an understanding that social aspects would underpin the next web era, even if the tech industry hadn't yet put all the pieces together.
Clay Shirky explaining "social software" in Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 newsletter; May 2003.
Blogging Goes Mainstream
If there was one company that was putting together the jigsaw puzzle that would later be named Web 2.0, it was Google. In February, Google acquired the leading blogging service of the day: Blogger.
“Google, which runs the Web's premier search site, has purchased Pyra Labs, a San Francisco company that created some of the earliest technology for writing weblogs, the increasingly popular personal and opinion journals,” wrote Silicon Valley reporter Dan Gillmor on February 15, 2003.
Blogger homepage, July 2003.
Needless to say, Google's purchase brought blogging even more into the mainstream. Other blogging tools, such as Movable Type, Radio Userland and LiveJournal, gained popularity over 2003 too.
Meanwhile, there was also a revolution happening in reading software. RSS Readers (sometimes called "news aggregators") were increasingly being used. Two examples were FeedDemon and NetNewsWire — these were desktop readers, for Windows and Mac respectively. Then in mid-2003, a browser-based RSS Reader called Bloglines launched; by August I was a Bloglines user and have used browser-based readers ever since.
Bloglines homepage, July 2003.
People used these new reader apps to subscribe to blogs, via a fast-growing open standard called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). RSS became a crucial part of the blogging movement over 2003, because it enabled bloggers to be discovered and their content to be distributed across the internet.
AdSense and Pro Blogs
In addition to buying Blogger, Google was starting to figure out its business model. The company had only recently begun to turn a profit, thanks to its AdWords online advertising platform — introduced in 2000. But when the company launched a contextual advertising system in March, we began to see why blogging was of such interest to Google.
Initially given the descriptive, if clunky, name "Content-Targeted Advertising," Google's new ad product was promoted as "a new, automated system that matches advertising precisely to the information on content and community pages."
Google's Content-Targeted Advertising system, 2003.
By June, the system had been renamed AdSense and was expanded to all websites via a self-serve model. Google now pitched AdSense as "a program that enables website publishers to serve ads precisely targeted to the specific content of their individual web pages."
AdSense opened the door to professional blogging. Nick Denton, previously cofounder of the news syndication company Moreover, was one of the first to take advantage. He'd launched Gawker in January 2003 and by November was telling the New York Times that AdSense was effectively guiding his topic selection:
"The way Mr. Denton determines the theme of his blogs has less to do with his own personal interests than with the demands of the market, as determined by Google. He relies on Google's AdSense program, which pays Web sites to publish text ads matched to the pages' content, for the bulk of his revenue. As a result, he picks blog subjects based on the rate Google pays for clicks on ads in specific topic areas. Among the topics of blogs he plans to start this year are computer gaming, travel and politics."
Gawker, a pioneering pro blog, in July 2003.
Friendster and MySpace
Friendster launched publicly in March 2003. It wasn’t the first social networking site on the internet: Classmates.com had started in 1995, Six-Degrees.com the following year, and LiveJournal began in 1999 as a kind of blogging spin on the idea. But Friendster was the first of this kind of site to gain major traction in Silicon Valley. It was initially pitched as “a new way to meet people” for dating purposes, “or making new friends.”
Friendster, April 2003.
Despite its popularity — it had around three million registered users by the fall of 2003 — Friendster was slow and plagued by technical issues. That left the door open for other social networks to enter the market and offer a better product.
MySpace did exactly that, when it launched in August 2003 as “an online community that lets you meet your friends' friends.”
MySpace in September 2003, the month after its launch.
MySpace grew quickly. By October, it had over one hundred thousand users. It was still small fry compared to Friendster, but MySpace users seemed to be having more fun than Friendster users. Partly this was because MySpace allowed people to edit the HTML in their profiles — which meant they could add colourful backgrounds and fonts, and use images and GIFs like on Geocities. This helped MySpace attract a youthful user base, which in turn helped it become the trendy new social network.
2003 was really Friendster's year, but the immediate future would belong to MySpace...although it, too, would leave the door open for competitors. In late-2003, a little website called "Facemash" came online — it was created by a Harvard University student named Mark Zuckerberg.
iTunes Music Store Launches
In April 2003, Steve Jobs launched the iTunes Music Store at a special Apple music event. It offered over 200,000 songs, which you could buy for 99 cents each. Notably, the file format wasn't MP3, but a new format called AAC (Advanced Audio Encoding) encoded at 128 kilobits per second. The file quality was generally viewed favorably, although Sound on Sound commented in a November review:
"While AAC definitely offers better-quality encoding than MP3 at the same bit rate, Jobs' claim that AAC "rivals CD quality" was maybe a little bit of a liberty."
The iTunes store was initially available to Mac computers only; and also restricted to the US for licencing reasons. In October, the store was expanded to Microsoft Windows when iTunes for Windows was launched. But international expansion didn't begin happening until mid-2004 (my country, New Zealand, had to wait until 2005).
iTunes Music Store webpage, 29 April 2003.
The idea with the iTunes Store was that you downloaded the music and owned the file (albeit with DRM — Digital Rights Management). In time, online music would gravitate to the streaming model, which in 2003 was the domain of Rhapsody. But Apple's big advantage was the success of the iPod, which meant it had a complete hardware-software ecosystem. Also, you could listen to your music offline — a key feature in 2003, when internet connectivity was still largely restricted to PCs and laptops.
In mid-December 2003, Apple announced that more than 25 million songs had been sold from the iTunes store since its April launch. It had also doubled the song catalog to more than 400,000 songs.
iTunes user interface; via Sound on Sound, November 2003.
Peak Flash Web Design
By 2003, Flash websites were ubiquitous on the web — almost the default for anyone wanting to be creative online.
As game designer and net artist Nathalie Lawhead wrote in a later retrospective, Flash “started as a tool for bringing animations to the web,” but it “eventually grew to being used for building rich, immersive, and very animated websites.” 2003 was smack in the prime years of what Lawhead termed the “Flash website movement (when websites were ‘the new emerging artform’).”
BowieNet version 3 was made entirely of Flash; screenshot circa September 2003.
A showcase for Flash websites during this time was the Favourite Web Awards (FWA), run by Rob Ford. In his review of 2003, Ford highlighted tokyoplastic v1, an experimental Flash site designed by Sam Lanyon Jones and Drew Cope from the UK. "One of those rare sites that gave you an adrenaline rush (or was that a fright?) when you clicked on the loaded graphic and the site swallowed you up," Ford wrote.
Jones and Cope later said that the site "served no purpose just kooky animation, sound design and a bit of interaction." While that's underselling their clever use of vector graphics and 3D animation in tokyoplastic v1, it does sum up what Flash brought to the web: a sense of creativity and fun, albeit sometimes it "served no purpose."
So by the end of 2003, the web felt primed for a new era: social software was going mainstream, web standards were stable while Flash brought the pizzazz, and business models were emerging. Could this be the second generation of the internet coming online?
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