How has technology changed your life in the noughties?
BBC Radio Leeds Breakfast Show presenters Andrew and Georgey (@andrew_georgey on Twitter) will be discussing how technology has changed our lives during the first decade of the twenty-first century (although some people say the decade doesn’t end until 31 Dec 2010…). I’ll be with them for a few minutes sometime after 07:30; here are some of the things I’ll be talking about.
Google
You probably weren’t using Google in 1999. You might not even have heard of it. But in the past ten years it has won us over in many more aspects of our online lives than just search:
- Google Analytics (2005). Making what were previously enterprise-level website statistics available to all – for free, of course
- Google Maps (2005). Remember how clunky online maps were before?
- Google Docs (2006). Taking the idea of cloud-based applications mainstream (although most people still cling to the security blanket of Microsoft Office.
- YouTube (acquired 2006). The Queen launched the official Royal Channel in 2007.
- Picasa (2006). Not as popular as Flickr, but free-er.
- Gmail (2007 opens for all). Invites were like gold-dust until 2007 and the service only came out of beta in 2008.
- Android (2007). An open source operating system for mobile phones.
- Streetview (US launch 2007; UK 2008). Despite complaints from some about privacy, Google continues to photograph the whole world. They recently added Pompei
- Chrome (2008 for PC, 2009 for Mac). Claims to be the fastest, most stable web browser around. Certainly beats Internet Explorer (but what doesn’t).
- Google Navigation (launched in selected US cities 2009; roll-out 2010). Garmin and TomTom’s share price tumbled when Google announced release of their free turn-by-turn navigation application and they’ve been slashing prices ever since.
They’re doing quite well financially, too. In the last full financial year (to 31 December 2008) they made over $4.2 billion profit. Not bad for a company that hadn’t worked out a monetization model until 2001, when they launched AdWords. Although they didn’t invent the ‘pay-per-click’ platform and they weren’t the first to place adverts on search engine results pages, they were the first to figure out how to really make it pay – for themselves, but also for advertisers and users.
Connecting to the Internet
Almost all of us were still on dial-up connections to the Internet in 1999. Ten years later we’re almost all on broadband. Here’s a rather dull chart from the Office for National Statistics that shows the rate of changeover.
Changing gadgets
In 1999 most of us used:
- film cameras (and photo albums)
- floppy disks
- road atlases
- basic mobile phones
- VCRs
- CDs
Over the decade these have been replaced by:
- digital cameras (and online photo sharing)
- USB memory sticks
- sat nav and online maps
- smartphones (Blackberries, iPhones, etc)
- DVDs and BluRay
- MP3 and downloads
And what will be obsolete or in terminal decline by 2019? How about:
- USB memory sticks (and other storage devices) replaced by online storage (such as DropBox).
- personal sat nav devices replaced by turn-by-turn navigation on mobiles.
- chequebooks (and maybe even cash) replaced by micropayment methods.
- DVD and BluRay replaced by on-demand services. The BBC iPlayer is just two years old and now serves over 80 million programmes a month.
- Software on PCs replaced by software-as-a-service: applications hosted online and accessed via your web browser.
Social media
The second half of the noughties, and the past couple of years in particular, has seen an explosion in the use and participation in social media. Facebook now boasts over 350,000,000 users – half of whom log in to their account at least once a day. Often quoted, but impressive nevertheless, is the statistic that if Facebook were a country it would be third only to China and India in the size of its population.
Hair straighteners
In compiling my content for the radio slot I asked my Twitter followers for their ideas (thanks @jonmoss, @squiggle, @sc_r, @mattseward, @strawbleu, @johnpopham and @azp74).
You can see from my profile pic that I have no use for them, but thanks go to @leedsgrub for tipping me off to the miracle that is GHD hair straighteners. According to Katie
Before ceramic straighteners, you either had to use straighteners that didnt really work or spend ages blow drying. Having GHDS has revolutionised hair fashion, as super straight styles were never achievable before that.
I’ll just have to take her word on that…
What about you?
What technological change in this decade has had the biggest impact of your life and what are you looking forward to in the next decade? Leave your comments below.