Hasta La Ideas

When the prospects of digitization seem endless, design studio Jess3 recently stepped in to lend some clarity to the subject with an amusing infographic video illustrating the meteoric rise of the Internet. With 1.73 billion users, 243 million websites, 200 billion spam emails, and at least one new social networking platform cropping up every year, the interpersonal interactivity is at times difficult to fully comprehend. Their three-minute video puts it all into perspective, animating pie charts, thumb tacks, speech bubbles and more to help get a handle on the staggering size of the web.

Now a nearly globally shared vocabulary, social networking sites actually began 15 years ago with Classmates.com. Jess3’s informative timeline on the rise of social networking websites charts the exponential expansion in the early 2000s with Flickr, Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, Youtube and more, concluding with the recently unveiled Google Buzz.

Acknowledging how the Internet is at times a strange beast, Jess3 really captures the paradoxical nature of this century’s most game-changing invention—isolating yet intimate, unimaginably wide yet easily traversed.