This Day in Internet History

A 3D rendered animation of a baby doing a cha-cha dance spread across the early internet via email chains. Many consider it the very first viral internet meme, predating the word 'meme' being used in this context.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin officially incorporated Google Inc. in a garage in Menlo Park, California. The search engine had already been processing around 10,000 search queries per day.

Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker launched Napster, the peer-to-peer file sharing service that let millions of people share MP3 files for free. The music industry would never be the same.

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone could edit. Academics were skeptical. It became the largest reference work in human history.

MySpace launched and quickly became the most visited website in the United States, overtaking Google in 2006. It introduced millions of people to the concept of a personal profile, friend lists, and the all-important Top 8.

Three former PayPal employees — Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim — founded YouTube. The first video uploaded was 'Me at the zoo' by co-founder Jawed Karim, just 18 seconds long.

Facebook dropped its university-only requirement and opened registration to anyone over 13 with a valid email address. Within a year it surpassed MySpace as the most popular social network in the world.