25 most influential people on the Internet

BusinessWeek magazine, interviewing its readers and authors, compiled a list of 25 people who, in his opinion, most of all influenced the formation of the modern Internet.

1. "Creator"
Tim Berners-Lee
In 1989, Berners-Lee laid the founding principle of organizing information on the Internet by inventing hypertext, or more simply, a system of links. In the mid-1990s, Berners-Lee began to develop a new concept called the Semantic Web (Semantic Web), which is a method for more convenient tag-based organization of information in the network. He is currently leading the World Wide Web Consortium, which develops standards that may become common on the Internet in the future.
')

2. "Pioneer"
Marc Andriessen
Marc Andreessen made a revolution in the field of Internet navigation, greatly simplifying it by creating the first Internet browser Mosaic. Later, along with Jim Clark, he founded the Netscape Communications network, which then became publicly available and was purchased by AOL. He is currently working on a startup Ning, which helps users create their own social network on the Internet.

3. "The Seer"
Jeff bezos
In 1994, Jeff Bezos came across the statistics that hit him: Internet usage is growing at a rate of 2300% per year. At the time, he had a good job, but he came to his boss and said: “I’m going to take up one crazy idea - to sell books online.” The idea was not bad and allowed to create the largest online store in the Internet Amazon.com.

4. “Seekers”
Sergey Brin, Larry Page
This almost inseparable pair was able to create, without doubt, the most powerful Google Internet site in the world by inventing a method for analyzing links between resources, which ensures an effective search on the web. Bryn and Page became billionaires, but still try to stick to their informal motto “Do no harm”.

5. "Decorator"
Marissa Meyer
Another player on the Google team. In 1999, Meyer became the first female engineer of Google. She is currently the company's vice president of search products and user experience. Her ideas, embodied in the design and principle of devices from various Google services, helped transform Brin's and Page's brilliant technical concept into a finished product, the most popular on the Internet. What Google looks like right now, the result of its work.

6. "Encyclopedist"
Jimmy Wales
Wales, along with Larry Sanger, launched the world's most popular Internet encyclopedia - Wikipedia. This resource has become a social phenomenon, the same as Google. He brings less money to his creator, but Wells is working on it. Now he is trying to apply the principle of “nationality” in another product, creating a new search engine, a significant part of which will be occupied by users.

7. “Kommersant”
Margaret Whitman
Whitman has transformed eBay's unorganized online auction into a powerful international e-commerce tool. Having achieved success in this matter, she took up the acquisition of other related and distant e-commerce projects from 1f70. Its empire now includes such services as PayPal Internet Payment System and Skype Internet Phone. Whitman continues to take over, and it is impossible to blame her for promiscuity.

8. "Blogger"
Evan Williams
This man in 1999 created the Blogger website, a tool that allows everyone to create their own virtual platform, with which you can express everything you want. The company is flourishing, however, now without Williams, who without hesitation sold his brainchild to the insatiable Google. How much he got is unknown, but there is no doubt that a lot. Now he can afford to engage in "little things" - for example, creating a "microblogging" system - Twitter, which allows you to gather in one place pieces of thoughts and sayings of different people who do not want to start their own full-fledged blog, but would like to share their thoughts with others.

9. "Collector"
Kevin Rose
By building a “live news aggregator” Digg, Kevin Rose created a new way to read news on the Internet. Now, to find out how the network lives, at least the American part of it, just look at his website. By voting users, Digg determines which of the latter is really important and what is not worthy of mention. Now Digg efforts of Rose smoothly turns into another social network. Meanwhile, the community of "diggers" has already become an influential force that must be reckoned with not only on the Internet, but also in the real world.

10. "Dreamer"
Philippe Rosedale
Having created the fictional world of Second Life, Rosedale was the first to effectively put into practice long-held dreams and predictions about virtual reality. The Second Life project, which began as an entertainment service, is becoming increasingly serious. Now there are 9 million virtual residents in it, and the turnover of the virtual economy is overwhelming for 12 million quite real US dollars. It may well be that in the future, “Second Life” will be compared in importance with the first. The main thing is that the first one should not turn into the world of the “Matrix”.

11. “Friend”
Tom Andersen
In 2003, Anderson and Chris Devolf founded MySpace.com to help musicians communicate with their fans. By mid-2005, MySpace already had 22 million members in its ranks and was bought by News Corp for $ 580 million. Now the average monthly audience of the most popular social site in the world is more than 115 million unique users. However, Andersen still finds time to add all new MySpace users to the friends list, although he does it without the help of a robot program. Without it, he would not have been able to devote time to strategic plans for expansion into China and defense with another growing social network - Facebook.

12. "Soul of the company"
Mark Zuckerberg
In February 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, together with his dorm roommates at Harvard University, created a website for communication between students. Soon, students from Stanford, Columbia and Yale universities began to use Facebook. Zuckerberg dropped out of school and moved from the university campus to Silicon Valley, where he began developing the site. By spring, the social network had expanded to 800 colleges, and two years later the site opened for public use. At the last count, 41 million active users of the site were recorded.

13. "Newspaper"
Rupert Murdoch
The 76-year-old Australian media tycoon, before many of his colleagues, realized the importance of the Internet and the threat he poses to traditional media, in which Murdoch made his fortune. Therefore, it is no coincidence that Murdoch’s empire News Corp has laid out several hundred million dollars for the purchase of the social network MySpace.

14. "Designer"
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs, who in 1996 returned to Apple as CEO, is obsessed with trifles and, at first glance, meaningless details - it is this feature that allowed him to create a number of products that many consider ideal. Thanks to his efforts, everyone knows that it is best to listen to music on iPods, and you need to download it from iTunes. Fortunately, monopoly is impossible, and Jobs has to constantly invent new moves to keep the Apple cult up to par.

15. "Shepherd"
Mitchell Baker
Working for Netscape, Baker got the nickname “the shepherd of parasites” by chance — in her current role as head of Mozilla, which deals with one of the largest open-source projects, the Firefox browser, she has, on the one hand, to maintain the spirit of freedom and enthusiasm that has created a free browser, superior in quality to Internet Explorer from Microsoft, and on the other, to conduct business so that a company that does not make money on sales can make a profit. While her work is progressing well, Firefox was able to win 15% of the market from Internet Explorer.

16. “Savior”
Jerry yang
Jerry Yang founded the Yahoo! portal with his friend David Filo. in 1995. Since then, the page on which the links were simply collected by category has become a billion-dollar empire. However, until recently, Young had only the honorary title of "Chief Yahoo" in the company. Now that Yahoo’s business is not doing its best - the portal is losing in the Google race, Yang was promoted to executive director. Yang must not only raise the moral level of workers, but also create a miracle - again to bring it to the market leaders.

17. "Investor"
Peter Teale
One of the founders of the online payment system PayPal, Til also created the global hedge fund Clarium Capital Management, which manages over $ 2 billion in investments. In addition, Til is the managing partner of the venture fund Founders Fund, which invests in technology companies. Among the companies to which Til has entrusted the money of his clients are startups such as Facebook, Slide and Ooma. In general, if you have a brilliant high-tech idea, but there is no money for its implementation, try to convince Tyla of her genius. If he says yes, it means that you are halfway to success.

18. "Angel"
Reed hoffman
Another person with whom the author of any promising startup in the USA meets is Reed Hoffman. Among the inhabitants of Silicon Valley, he probably has the best connections. And not only because he is the founder and head of LinkedIn professional social network, but also because he is an investor in more than 60 companies, 2082 including Facebook, Digg and Last.fm, and also serves on the board of directors of companies such as SixApart, Kiva.org and Mozilla.

19. "The King of Ventures"
Michael moritz
Moritz is the third investor in the list of the most influential on the Internet, but you need to go to him if you have already achieved some success. Before becoming managing partner of the Sequoia Capital investment fund, he was a correspondent for Time magazine and wrote popular books about Apple and Chrysler. However, he then changed the pen to a calculator and achieved success. Recently, Forbes magazine named him the most successful entrepreneur.

20. “Critic”
Michael Errington
If Hoffman or Till have already invested several million in your company, now is the time to try to have a good relationship with Michael Errington, who is the head and founder of the TechCrunch blog. In just over two years, Errington has managed to turn his resource into a small but influential media empire. If your company was mentioned by Errington, it means that you have gone a quarter of the way to success, and maybe it is time to ask for money for further development from Moritz.

21. "Teacher"
Tim O'Reilly
O'Reilly began publishing books on computers back in the 1980s, and 20 years later, reference books and manuals issued by his company fill in the computer departments of all the bookstores in the world.

22. "Decorator"
Max Levchin
In 1998, Levchin had to borrow $ 2,000 to buy his stake in PayPal, of which he was one of the founders. By 2002, this native of Ukraine was bothering, no matter how cheap it was, selling Margaret Whitman from eBay to PayPal for $ 1.5 billion (the cost of Levchin’s share was about $ 34 million). Now Levchin hopes to earn even more thanks to his new company, Slide, which produces so-called “widgets” - small online applications (for example, slide shows) that are embedded in popular Internet services to perform a specific set of functions.

23. “Seller”
Mark Benioff
Modern trading companies are actively switching to the use of a new generation of software, which is a service that is distributed online. The pioneer of such a service was Salesforce.com, the founder of which was Mark Benioff. A former Oracle sales rep, he is still developing tools that other companies can use to create their own programs.

24. "Provocateur"
Dave Winer
Wiener is best known for creating the RSS format, which allows users not only to view the content of several resources at once in one place, but also to immediately find out about updating third-party sites. Wiener has made quite a few enemies with his sharp remarks, but he doesn’t have much popularity either.

25. "Strategist"
Ray ozzie
After Bill Gates began to move more and more away from the direct management of Microsoft, Ozzy assumed the role of strategist. It is he who should help the company, which is a monopolist in software for users, to take a decent place in the Internet. We can say that in the coming years, Ozzy will have no time to relax - while his company is far from winning as never before.