The evolution of the Internet and the websites that live on this sprawling network has been tremendous in recent years. The recent goodbye to support for a technology like Flash may not seem that important smack in the middle of 2017, but we can’t forget that it was one of the basic engines for a ton of websites. It may be easy to forget one’s origins – especially in as dynamic a universe as Internetland. But luckily there are initiatives like Ten Years Ago, a site that shows what some of the most famous sites on the planet looked like in their adolescence.
The historical documentation done by Archive.org is enormous, but it can’t be said that it’s an easily accessible website for your average user given the sheer vastness of content you can find on it. Ten Years Ago is an interesting project from Neal Agarwal that shows you what 15 of the most influential websites used to look like. The project gets updated every day, and shows you what was happening on the Internet exactly 10 years ago.
You get to play a sort of Marty McFly of the Internet, letting you visit any of the pages covered by the project – not just the homepage, but also the various links that appeared on the homepage so you can see what was hot exactly a decade ago. It’s a proper surprise to rediscover the classic look of YouTube, which I didn’t even recall myself, or see how sites like Amazon, Reddit, and IMDb still have a very similar design to this day.
This kind of initiative is always laudable and curious, and can also spur the creation of similar projects. Not just to discover how Internet design has evolved but also to do important conservation work with quality material that in many cases would be lost forever. Plus many of these sites now have Android apps that also shouldn’t be neglected.
Reddit for Android [APK] | Download
Youtube for Android [APK] | Download
IMDb Movies & TV for Android [APK] | Download
Amazon Shopping for Android [APK] | Download
More info | Ten Years Ago
