Key Internet developments

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. Dorsey posted his first tweet on 21 March 2006, and Twitter was publicly launched on 15 July.

PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim created a video-sharing website where users could upload, share and view content. YouTube was activated on 14 February 2005.

Facebook is born. The era of social networking begins. The Facebook website was launched on 4 February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.

Wikipedia was initially conceived as a feeder project for Nupedia, an earlier free Web-based encyclopedia. There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia’s editors and reviewers to associate Nupedia with a wiki-style website. They decided to give the new project its own name, and thus on Monday 15th January 2001, Wikipedia launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google on 4 September 1998.

In 1994, Jeff Bezos incorporated Cadabra Inc. which he later renamed Amazon. Amazon.com went online in 1995. It started as an online bookstore and later diversified to become the electronic commerce and cloud computing company it is today.