Web Masters

If you experienced the “Dot-Com Bubble” you surely remember all the hype and excitement surrounding the Web as well as all the money that flowed into tech startups in the late 90s. You also remember when things came tumbling down in May and April of 2000, wiping out countless companies and turning Silicon Valley into a corporate wasteland.

While plenty of factors contributed to the Dot-Com boom, one of the biggest contributors was investor hype. And, interestingly, the places where lots of that investor hype happened was on the Internet itself. In particular, community websites like RagingBull.com played a huge part in allowing retail investors to continuously promote the wild market.

But RagingBull wasn't some corporate tool built in the heart of Wall Street. Instead, it was launched by a college kid named Bill Martin who was simply interested in talking with other people online about stocks.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Opera was one of the earliest commercial Web browsers, having been launched in 1995. That’s the same year Microsoft launched Internet Explorer, and less than 12 months after Netscape launched Navigator, which is widely regarded as the browser that popularized the Web.

From the very beginning, Opera was a different type of Web browser. Specifically, even though it helped users access the same World Wide Web as every other browser, the Opera browser was built entirely on its own codebase. That might not sound like a big deal if you don't know much about browser architecture, but, for Jon von Tetzchner and the Opera team, it was a huge competitive advantage that allowed Opera to exist on devices that couldn't support any other browsers. This made Opera, for a time, the most popular web browser in the world.

Unfortunately for Jon, some bad investors pushed the company in the wrong direction, and he was powerless to stop it. The only thing he could do was build another browser. So, 20 years after launching Opera, he launched Vivaldi to compete with his old company and win back the trust of the loyal users Opera had lost.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Google Analytics has been such an important and well-integrated part of the Google suite of services for so long that most people assume it was developed inside Google. But that’s not the case.

Google Analytics actually began as part of a San Diego web consulting firm from the mid-90s called Quantified Systems Inc. Quantified Systems was really just a group of guys building one-off websites for clients around Southern California and hosting those sites on their internal servers.

At the time, bandwidth was incredibly expensive, and some of their more prominent customers were running up bills worth thousands of dollars a month. To help manage these costs and charge their customers appropriately, the Quantified Systems team built a custom web stats platform to show how much traffic a site was getting and where it was coming from based on server logs.

They soon realized that their Web stats program had the potential to be a more interesting business than their Web consultancy. So they gave away their clients and changed their name to Urchin Software Corporation. Their website stats tracking tool was so successful that Google bought them and used them as the foundation to launch Google Analytics.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Advertising is a fixture of the current Web. After all, two of the most prominent online companies -- Google and Facebook -- are really just advertising platforms disguised as a search engine and social network, respectively.

Despite the ubiquity of advertising on the Web today, it might surprise you to discover that sophisticated advertising technologies were developed relatively late. In fact, many of the biggest websites in the world -- with millions of active users -- were struggling to monetize on their traffic because they didn't have good ad serving platforms.

That began to change in 1996 thanks, in part, to a company named Accipiter and its founder, Chris Evans. Chris was one of the first people to identify the lacking ad software ecosystem for websites and launched Accipiter, which, for better or for worse, made online advertising easier, faster, cheaper, and more profitable.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Even though Tripod eventually became one of the most popular online webpage builders in the world, that’s not how it started. Instead, Tripod began as a digital magazine. At the time, Bo was a college student, and he'd been dreaming of an online publication targeting young, college-aged audiences. It was going to be the MTV of the Web.

However, for fun, one of Bo’s developers experimented with a new concept to allow people to publish their own content online for free. They called it the "homepage builder," and it went viral literally overnight.

Within its first month, Tripod had thousands of users for its free homepage builder. Soon, it had hundreds of thousands. And, then it hit its first million shortly before being acquired. Along the way, Bo became known in the popular press as an entrepreneurial wunderkind. But was it skill and smarts that helped Bo reach the pinnacle of startup success? Or was it just dumb luck? Find out on this episode of Web Masters!

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

There’s a good chance you haven’t heard of Craig Kanarick and Razorfish. But that’s only because you’re not reading this article in 1999.

Back in the late 90s, Kanarick and Razorfish were household names in the entrepreneurial world. Launched in 1994, Razorfish was one of the first digital media design agencies. Their early customers included mega-companies like Time Warner, KPMG, and Charles Schwab.

Razorfish was founded by Kanarick and his childhood friend, Jeff Dachis. In just five years, the two friends in their mid-20s grew Razorfish to 1,200+ employees, nearly a dozen offices around the world, almost $100m in annual revenue, and a successful IPO.

But, as Craig explains, that success had a price. He and his co-founder became the poster boys of late 90s, Internet tech excess and, ultimately, the failed dot-com boom and bust.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

If you were born by 1990, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Second Life. In 2006, over 600 articles per day were being written about it. That was around the time the Internet was becoming fully “mainstream,” and people were fascinated by the possibility of what it might lead to. The concept of Second Life, in particular, excited the general public, perhaps because it seemed so futuristic. People began to imagine living inside of computers.

Even though most people weren't thinking about what it might be like to live inside computers around the turn of the century, the founder of Second Life, Philip Rosedale, had been thinking about it since he was a kid growing up in the 70s. The only problems: computers weren't powerful enough and the Internet wasn't fast enough.

That all changed in 1999, and it's what allowed him to launch Second Life. Today, Second Life is home to 1 million people, and, as Philip explains in this episode of Web Masters, he thinks it's about to get a lot bigger.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

In the early 2000s, online file sharing was a huge part of Internet culture. It was also a huge problem for media companies who viewed piracy as an existential threat to their revenues. As a result, they aggressively prosecuted file sharing services, forcing them to shutdown almost as quickly as they launched.

Unfortunately for the media companies, one file sharing service refused to shut down. That service was called The Pirate Bay. On this episode of Web Masters, we speak with one of its original founders, Peter Sunde.

Peter helped grow The Pirate Bay into the world's largest torrent search engine and one of the world's most visited websites. In the process, he was sued by nearly every major music, TV, movie, and software studio. He ultimately got sent to jail, and he owes the Swedish government more money than he'll ever make.

While you'd think that kind of outcome would be bad, Peter's actually not too upset about it. In fact, when you hear his story, you might even come away feeling a little jealous.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

In the late 90s, a weblog called Memepool was gaining popularity for more than just its posts. Half of its million-plus users per month were enjoying a unique feature built by the site's operator, Joshua Schachter. The feature allowed Joshua to bookmark interesting links from around the Web and share them with the site's followers. This was the start of social bookmarking.

To that point, it was only Joshua sharing his links. Thinking other people might enjoy being able to do the same thing, Joshua built a tool anyone could use to bookmark and share interesting links. He called that tool del.icio.us.

del.icio.us grew in popularity so quickly that it had thousands of user in its first month, investment from a top NYC venture capital firm shortly after, and, within eight months, an acquisition offer from Yahoo!

On this episode of Web Masters, Joshua shares the story of how it all happened and his thoughts on why the site became so popular so quickly.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

The dirty little secret of most new media technologies is that the stories of how they became mainstream are rarely as wholesome and altruistic as people tend to think. That's true of the World Wide Web, too. In fact, things like email marketing, which, today, seems dull and boring, were originally taboo and avoided by most companies.

In this episode of Web Masters, we learn about how email marketing became mainstream by talking with Scott Maslowe, an email marketing pioneer who was originally using email to drive traffic to adult websites. He eventually took those same tactics to lots of other companies and showed them just how powerful -- and valuable -- email marketing could be.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

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