There have already been at least two revolutions online in the past 10 years. The first was the introduction of subscription free, pay as you go internet access. The first company to do this successfully in the UK was Canadian company, X Stream. Once the early adopters had helped sort out the teething problems, the idea was pinched by Freeserve and, almost a year later, the model took off! That was in 1998.

The Second revolution was after the introduction of ADSL broadband. Broadband as we now know it is a very fast signal, running on the telephone line. However, in the mid 90′s it was not thought that it would be possible to get any real speed along a copper cable, and we would all need to get fibre to give us the broadband speed we all wanted. They were wrong, and by today, it is quite common for people to have 3 Mb+ speeds in their homes.

However, broadband itself wasn’t the revolution. The revolution was what happened once we all got broadband. Initially, the whole issue of getting people on line was that it took 2 minutes to switch the PC on, 30 seconds to get online, and then wwwait for the web to get the page we wanted. Broadband made the connection almost instant, and also made the searches faster. Finally, with the introduction of XP and its built in firewall, people felt comfortable with leaving a PC on while not being used.

This meant that we now used broadband differently. We didn’t worry about the cost of being online, we did more dedicated searches and started experimenting with adding content to the web. The concept of blogs appeared, and, along with MySpace, YouTube and Facebook, the internet is now a place where information is flowing in two directions rather than just in one 10 years earlier.

So, what will the third revolution bring?

Will you be there to take advantage of it?

Hindsight is one of the big problems with articles like this because the next revolution is already here – we just don’t realise it because we are not looking for it. Maybe the answer is with Google Android?

Originally posted 2008-02-05 13:03:37.