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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?

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Avatar for 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.

21 Responses

  1. Avatar for donbalanhi donbalanhi says:

    Ikaw ang susunod sa listahan Sir Abe. Ahihihi…

  2. Avatar for DG DG says:

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

  3. Avatar for joe joe says:

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

  4. Avatar for Warrior In Scrubs Warrior In Scrubs says:

    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.

  5. Avatar for Julius Julius says:

    Mine should be the ff to be included:

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

  6. Avatar for beeps beeps says:

    Abraham Olandres – Yugatech

  7. Avatar for Adrian Adrian says:

    Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak

  8. Avatar for Jan Alvin Jan Alvin says:

    I think the owner of firefox should be included.

  9. Avatar for BrianB BrianB says:

    AhmedF,

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

  10. Avatar for ewancoo ewancoo says:

    Firefox changed the Internet :)

  11. Avatar for AhmedF AhmedF says:

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

  12. Avatar for Jef Jef says:

    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

  13. Avatar for BrianB BrianB says:

    what about Java?

  14. Avatar for andre andre says:

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

  15. Avatar for pinoyapostolic pinoyapostolic says:

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

  16. Avatar for noemi noemi says:

    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.

  17. Avatar for Xeltran Xeltran says:

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

  18. Avatar for Rogerd Rogerd says:

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

  19. Avatar for blozoom! blozoom! says:

    a la TIME mag, we, the users, changed the internet.

  20. Avatar for katexter katexter says:

    Where’s Friendster and Macromind Flash?

  21. Avatar for Lhurey Lhurey says:

    I agree with abe

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