2007, one of those dates

Some years just stick out in the cultural memory. 1812. 1914. 1945.

How about 2007?

The idea that ‘the future is here, it is just unevenly distributed’? Thomas L Friedman in his book Thank you for being late seems also to suggest that 2007 was the year the future started to get distributed.

This is also so scarily not-that-long-ago, as history goes, that I remember lots of it.

Late 2006: Google bought YouTube

  • Late 2006: the Internet had more than 1 bn users for the first time
  • Sept 2006: Facebook, previously just for students, was opened to the world
  • Jan 9 2007 at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world: I remember watching the preasentation on my mac.
  • 2007 Twitter spun off from an earlier startup and started to scale globally. I remember joining Twitter shortly afterwards courtesy of the Guardian’s Tech Weekly podcast — and finding nothing going on, came off again.
  • 2007 AT&T found a way to use software to expand its capacity. Its throughput of data increased 100,000% (in Friedman’s words) between Jan 2007 and December 2014
  • 2007 Amazon released the Kindle.
  • 2007: Google launched Android.
  • Spotify (though Friedman doesn’t mention it here) started in late 2008.

Of course other dates in 2007 may also make a mark on history:

  • Bulgaria and Romania join the EU, marking (in the light of future events) its maximum extent?
  • BNP Paribas blocked withdrawals by three hedge funds that were drowning in sub-prime mortgages, triggering the financial crisis.
  • (And there was a school shooting in the US, only a couple of dozen dead, not news at all.)

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