Top 15 People Who Changed the Internet

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?

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

21 Comments

donbalanhi says:

13 years ago

Ikaw ang susunod sa listahan Sir Abe. Ahihihi…
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DG says:

16 years ago

I think whoever pioneered porn on the internet should be on the list… can’t deny the impact of porn on the internet :\
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joe says:

16 years ago

we should also be grateful to these forsaken people Paul Baran, Donald Davies & Leonard Kleinrock (they are the architect of the internet)
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Warrior In Scrubs says:

16 years ago

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.
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Julius says:

16 years ago

Mine should be the ff to be included:

Linus Torvalds, Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu), Bill Gates (nah I don’t think so), Steve Jobs.
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beeps says:

16 years ago

Abraham Olandres – Yugatech
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Adrian says:

16 years ago

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak
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Jan Alvin says:

16 years ago

I think the owner of firefox should be included.
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BrianB says:

16 years ago

AhmedF,

True. There is a randomness reminiscent of Al Gore’s claim to some of the people in the list.
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ewancoo says:

16 years ago

Firefox changed the Internet :)
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AhmedF says:

16 years ago

How in God’s name is Digg more influential than eBay, Amazon, Wikipedia, etc?
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Jef says:

16 years ago

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
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BrianB says:

16 years ago

what about Java?
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andre says:

16 years ago

wala si Marc Andreesen and Bill Gates sa list? oh come on…!
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pinoyapostolic says:

16 years ago

@ noemi – For a moment I thought that was Michael V… :D
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noemi says:

16 years ago

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.
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Xeltran says:

16 years ago

Macromedia peeps (for creating Flash). The Friendster owner, too, since Friendster is the first social-networking site in the web.
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Rogerd says:

16 years ago

1. Robert Morris Jr.-Morris Worm
2. Marc Andreesen -Mosaic Browser then Netscape
3. Linus Torvalds -guess what?
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blozoom! says:

16 years ago

a la TIME mag, we, the users, changed the internet.
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katexter says:

16 years ago

Where’s Friendster and Macromind Flash?
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Lhurey says:

16 years ago

I agree with abe
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