Era 03 · 2001–2008
Community & Search Era
Users start producing content; search and e-commerce find ways to make money
- Start
- Reinvention after the 2001 bust; Wikipedia launches and the Agile Manifesto is published
- End
- 2008: the App Store launches and the first Android phone ships; China's internet users rise to the world's largest
Background and drivers
- Hardware: PCs get cheaper and spread into homes; servers shift from expensive minicomputers to cheap x86 machines.
- Network: ADSL broadband replaces dial-up with flat monthly pricing, so users can stay online for long stretches and upload content.
- Capital: after the bust, capital turns cautious and values real revenue. Chinese companies list in the US one after another (Tencent in Hong Kong in 2004, Baidu on Nasdaq in 2005).
- Users: the number of internet users surges, shifting from "reading" to "writing": blogs, forums, comments, online shopping.
- Policy: the 2004 Electronic Signature Law gave online transactions a legal basis; the 2007 Administrative Measures for Information Security Multi-Level Protection made MLPS a hard requirement for building enterprise systems.
Pain points
- How do you turn free content and traffic into revenue?
- Online transactions lack trust: buyers fear paying and getting no goods, sellers fear shipping and getting no payment.
- Users and data volumes explode; a single server or single database can't cope, and big sales or hot events bring it down.
- Every action on a web page reloads the whole page, an experience far worse than desktop software.
- Browser compatibility is a serious problem (IE6 dominates and ignores standards), and writing a single drop-down menu means handling a lot of compatibility code.
- Internet products keep getting more complex, and waterfall development takes a year or two to ship one version, failing to keep up with changing user needs.
- Website vulnerabilities and worms run rampant (SQL injection, XSS, Code Red, Blaster, Worm.WhBoy / "Panda Burning Incense"), and a black-market industry chain begins to form.
- Mobile internet is only WAP: crude pages, expensive data, slow speeds.
New technology and practices
- Search pay-per-click ads (keyword ads), online games, SMS value-added services -> pain point 1: the internet has a scalable revenue source for the first time.
- Alipay escrowed transactions (launched with Taobao in 2003, spun off in 2004) and a credit-rating system -> pain point 2: the platform holds the buyer's payment first and releases it to the seller only after the goods are confirmed received.
- LAMP horizontal scaling, read/write splitting, caching (Memcached), CDNs -> pain point 3: replace one expensive machine with many cheap ones.
- Google's GFS (2003) and MapReduce (2004) papers, and the open-source implementation Hadoop in 2006 -> pain point 3: storing and computing on massive data, the starting point of what later became "big data."
- AWS S3 and EC2 (2006) -> pain point 3: rent servers on demand instead of buying machines and building your own data center, the starting point of cloud computing.
- Ajax (named in 2005) -> pain point 4: partial page refreshes let web pages work like desktop software, such as Gmail and Google Maps.
- The web standards movement, CSS layouts replacing tables, and JS libraries like jQuery (2006) -> pain point 5: one set of code smooths over browser differences, and "frontend" starts to become an independent technical track.
- Agile development, rapid iteration, and user-experience (UED) teams -> pain point 6: small, fast steps and continuous revisions based on user feedback, which is how the product manager role took shape.
- Web application firewalls, secure coding standards, MLPS assessments, and vulnerability response -> pain point 7.
- iPhone (2007), App Store (2008), Android (2008) -> pain point 8: a genuinely usable mobile browser and app-distribution channel. They lead into the next era.
Roles of this era
- FrontendFrontend Engineer
Split off from "web production." The daily work is writing standards-compliant HTML/CSS, building interactions with Ajax and jQuery, and handling IE6 compatibility. During this period, major domestic companies set up dedicated frontend or UED teams.
- BackendBackend Engineer
Shifts toward high concurrency and distributed systems. The daily work is sharding databases and tables, adding caching, optimizing slow queries, and writing business logic in Java/PHP.
- ProductProduct Manager
The product manager system spreads across internet companies. The daily work is writing requirement documents, drawing prototypes, following up on iterations, and reviewing user feedback.
- DesignInteraction Designer
Splits into interaction design and visual design, doing user research and usability testing, and establishing the UED way of working.
System administrators (SA) and database administrators (DBA), responsible for managing hundreds or thousands of servers, monitoring, and releases.
- SecuritySecurity Engineer
Web security engineers and penetration testers, doing vulnerability scanning, MLPS assessments, and incident response.
- OperationsOperations Specialist
Content, community, and e-commerce operations took shape in this period, corresponding to the operations role page `/roles/operations/`.
Security & law thread
- China2001-12-20: State Council Order No. 339 promulgated the Regulations on the Protection of Computer Software, effective 2002-01-01 (2001 original version (in Chinese)(opens in a new window)). First revised on 2011-01-08 and revised a second time on 2013-01-30 (State Council Order No. 632, effective 2013-03-01); the current version is the 2013 revision (current version (in Chinese)(opens in a new window)).
- China2004-08-28: the Electronic Signature Law of the People's Republic of China was passed (effective 2005-04-01) (2004 original version (in Chinese)(opens in a new window)). First amended on 2015-04-24 and amended a second time on 2019-04-23; the current version is the 2019 amendment (current version (in Chinese)(opens in a new window)).
- China2007-06-22: the Ministry of Public Security, the National Administration of State Secrets Protection, the State Cryptography Administration, and the State Council Informatization Office jointly issued the Administrative Measures for Information Security Multi-Level Protection (Gongtongzi [2007] No. 43), moving MLPS into the phase of mandatory enforcement (MIIT website text (in Chinese)(opens in a new window), not the originating authority's official document).
- GlobalThe Code Red worm in July 2001, SQL Slammer in January 2003, and Blaster in August 2003 drove the adoption of automatic operating-system updates and patch management.
- GlobalFrom late 2006 to early 2007, Worm.WhBoy ("Panda Burning Incense") caused widespread infections across China; the author was arrested in February 2007, giving the public its first awareness that a black-market industry chain lay behind such viruses.
Key events
Wikipedia launches
The Manifesto for Agile Software Development is published
The Code Red worm breaks out
Taobao is founded
Google publishes the GFS paper
The first Web 2.0 Conference; the term "Web 2.0" catches on
Alipay begins operating independently; the same month Google publishes the MapReduce paper
Sources: zh.wikipedia.org(opens in a new window) · research.google(opens in a new window)
Jesse James Garrett publishes an article coining the term Ajax
Baidu lists on Nasdaq
jQuery is released
AWS launches S3 and EC2 (beta)
Hadoop becomes an independent open-source project
Apple unveils the iPhone
The author of the "Panda Burning Incense" virus is arrested
The Administrative Measures for Information Security Multi-Level Protection are issued
Sources: miit.gov.cn(opens in a new window)
China reaches 253 million internet users, rising to the world's largest for the first time (CNNIC's 22nd report)
Apple's App Store launches
Google Chrome is released; the V8 engine greatly improves JS performance
The first Android phone, the HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1), is released
On to the next era
The business models and distributed architecture of the PC internet have both matured, but users can only get online sitting at a computer, and mobile internet is still hard to use. Smartphones and app stores have appeared; all that's missing is a cheap, fast-enough mobile network, and the 3G licenses of 2009 filled in that piece.