50 Surprising Facts About The Internet

Guess how many people are still paying for AOL?

1. The term "surfing" the internet was coined in 1992 by an upstate New York librarian Jean Armour Polly, aka "Net Mom."

2. The most played song on Spotify is "Wake Me Up" by Avicii.

3. The first tweet was sent on March 21, 2006 by Jack Dorsey:

4. Mark Zuckerberg's original Facebook profile number ID is 4.

5. The first YouTube video was uploaded April 23, 2005. It's called "Me at the zoo," and features Jawed Karim, one of the founders, at the San Diego Zoo.

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

6. A single Google query uses 1,000 computers in 0.2 seconds to retrieve an answer.

7. The original Space Jam website is still live.

8. So is the You've Got Mail site.

9. 16% to 20% of the searches Geoogle gets each day have never been Googled before.

10. Chinese social network Sina Weibo has 280.8 million users.

11. Twitter has 250 million users.

12. 500 milion tweets are sent ever day.

13. Tila Tequila had 1.5 million friends on Myspace.

14. The inventor of the modern world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth.

15. Mr. Berners-Lee uploaded the first image to the internet. It is of a joke band of women from the nuclear research lab CERN.

16. The first website is still online.

17. The most commonly searched question beginning with "What is" in 2013 was "What is twerking?"

18. The most expensive keyword for Google AdWords is "insurance."

19. The GIF format was invented by Steve Wilke, an engineer at Compuserve in 1987.

20. Mr. Wilhite maintains the correct pronunciation of the term is "jiff."

21. He is clearly wrong.

22. There are 191.3 million Tumblr blogs.

23.There are 83.1 billion Tumblr posts.

24.The most popular Tumblr is the official updates page for Minecraft.

25. Today, the Internet is 8,354 days old. Check HowOldIsTheInter.net to keep up to date.

26. "Gangnam Style" by Psy is still the most viewed YouTube video of all time. It's been viewed over two billion times.

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

27. The first email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson to himself. He doesn't remember what it said.

28. The first spam email was sent in 1978 over ARPNET by a guy named Gary Thuerk. He was selling computers.

29. The first registered domain was symbolics.com.

30. The world record for the fastest time to log into a Gmail account is 1.16 seconds.

31. The world record for fastest texter is held by a Brazilian teenager.

32. This is what Google looked like in 2004:

33. 2.58 million people still pay for AOL.

34. It cost AOL over $300 million to mail all those CD-Roms back in the day.

35. At one point, AOL accounted for about 50% of all CD-Rom discs being made.

36. It took only 5 years for the internet to reach a market audience of 50 million users.

37. This is what Facebook looked like in 2004:

38. There were over 7 million Geocities sites before it was shut down in 2009.

39. Angelfire is still up.

40. Mark Zuckerberg had a pretty sweet Angelfire page.

41. One million babies have been born from people who met on Match.com.

42. Online daters spend an average of $243 per year on online dating.

44. 33% of female online daters have had sex on the first online date.

45. 10% of sex offenders use online dating.

46. The Amazon logo is indicating you can get everything from A to Z (look at the arrow):

47. Before the world wide web (the modern internet invented in 1989, people traded ASCII porn on the internet during the '70s and '80s.

48. We now spend more time browsing the web on mobile devices than desktop computers.

49. There is a subreddit devoted to chicken nuggets that look like other things.

50. This is the NeXT computer that Tim Berners-Lee used to create the World Wide Web:

A previous version stated there was a subreddit devoted to things that looked like chickens, rather than chicken nuggets that look like things. Although there's probably a subreddit for that, too.

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