Merge

It's that time of year when you're done assessing what's happened and you look forward to what needs to be done.

In the past eight years, Merge has seen a lot of change in the web industry. We've seen Front Page come and go (thank goodness), Inktomi was the hot search engine back in and around 2000, Yahoo! was serving up results by Google! (their original logo had an exclamation point), companies like Pet.com and WebVan.com promised the world and then left us empty-handed. The web eight years ago was a trial and error era--we were figuring it out as we went along.

With the crash of the dotcom days and the reality of unrealistic expectations, the over-exuberance of the web was self-corrected and for an 18 month period, the web was relatively quite and the world was resigned to having some convenient electronic brochure sites living on the internet. Then Web 2.0 came along. Big fonts and snazzy interactions. A new philosophy was attached and buzz words flew: "User-Generated Content" and "Social Networks" soon became the rage. Companies that couldn't spell their own name started popping up, like Flickr and Del.icio.us arrived on the scene. Myspace.com, known only to bands and teens at the time was building momentum, and a little company called Facebook.com, then restricted only to colleges was making its own headway. Blogging became mainstream, and in the election of 2004 "bloggers" began to get some traction and notoriety.

It seemed the web wasn't dead after all.

Soon, Murdock buys Myspace.com for $500 Million, Zuckerburg was reportedly offered $2 Billion for Facebook by Yahoo! and soon thereafter Newsweek plastered a picture of a web entrepreneur with a preposterous valuation. Were we back to craziness? Maybe.

Web 2.0, User Generated Content and Social Networks converged into what we call Social Media today. In 2008, Social Media started raising eye-brows. By the end of 2008,

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