2004 was the first year of the future
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge
In early 2004, the world was shaking it like a Polaroid picture, flocking to theaters to see what was going to happen with all those hobbits, and wondering if that Tom Brady guy was something special. Meanwhile, a few folks around the world were inventing the web as we know it now: A world-shaking social network was brewing in a Harvard dorm room. A Google employee was dreaming up the future of email in their spare time. The coolest cellphone of all time was just about to drop. The internet was still a niche activity, but that was about to change — and fast.
In so many ways, the digital world in which we now all live was created 20 years ago. Google went public and began to ascend to rule the web. Facebook, Gmail, Firefox, Flickr, and…