A Year For New Paths To Friends, Music, More

Web Watch
A Year For New Paths To Friends, Music, More

December 28, 2003

By Leslie Walker

Innovation flowered online this year, some three years after dot-coms started dying in the wake of the Internet investment bubble bursting. Here is a short list of what Web Watch considered some of the hottest Internet services in 2003, along with their new or improved features:

iTunes: The iTunes Music Store (www.itunes.com) launched by Apple Computer in April was the big Web hit this year, selling 25 million song downloads at 99 cents apiece in eight months. It triggered a stampede of announcements from rivals planning similar music stores, including Wal-Mart, Dell, Sony, Virgin and Roxio's revamped Napster.

Friendster: The Web got a new twist on friendship when Friendster (www.friendster.com) debuted in March. The service lets people develop and maintain elaborately structured electronic networks for making new friends and staying in touch with old ones. Friendster was one of many such "virtual networking" sites debuting with names like Tribe.net, LinkedIn and Friendzy.

Vonage and Skype: These two pioneering start-ups are pushing the boundaries of Internet telephony and challenging traditional phone companies. Vonage Holdings Corp. (www.vonage.com) of Edison, N.J., sells an Internet calling service for $35 a month that lets people place unlimited local and long-distance calls anywhere in the United States or Canada, using regular phones at both ends of each call. Subscribers plug a regular phone and special modem into their broadband Internet connections to place calls. Rival Skype (www.skype.com) debuted in the summer. The free computer-to-computer calling system uses special software to let users call other people anywhere in the world over the Internet, so long as the people at both ends of the call are using Skype's calling software and have Internet access.

Amazon.com: The Seattle-based retailer (www.amazon.com) added a "search inside the book" feature that lets people search the full text of some 33 million pages inside 120,000 book titles from 190 publishers. The online company also expanded its "Amazon Marketplace" this year to make it easy for any retailers to sell on Amazon.com, and opened new shopping departments, including ones for gourmet food, home items and sporting goods.

Google: The five-year-old search engine (www.google.com) added software for creating Web logs, or "blogs," and introduced all sorts of other features this year, including a math calculator, ad-blocker and e-mail news alerts. This month Google started testing a service similar to Amazon's that lets people search inside books.

Kazaa: This song-swapping service (www.kazaa.com) owned by Sharman Networks came into its own as the new Napster this year. Despite the hundreds of lawsuits the record industry filed against individuals for allegedly sharing copyrighted files online, Kazaa ranked as the Internet's No. 1 search term this year, according to the Lycos search engine. In August, Kazaa debuted a "plus" version of its software that let users pay $30 to purge their file-sharing software of advertising.

There: Yet another fantasy world, called There (www.there.com), was born online this year. Debuting in January, it differed from previous attempts at immersive virtual worlds by offering incredibly realistic graphics and life-mimicking experiences. Unlike most online games, There has no particular point, but as in real life, you can rack up money ("therebucks"), friends (who appear as software avatars) and fun (flying on hoverboards or racing dune buggies). Subscriptions start at $5 a month.

This story also appeared in:

Evansville Courier & Press, 1/4/03