Growing old on the Internet

I was browsing the MegaTokyo forums this morning and I came across a very interesting post which made me think back of how long I've been on the internet.
I got my first dial-up internet plan from my ISP back in 2001. The area I lived in was still unsupported and the internet would often have trouble connecting. When I did finally manage to make it work, I entered a whole new world.
I remember looking at the Netscape Navigator icon...it was strange double clicking that icon used to be an unfamiliar activity. Today, the first thing that I start-up is Google Chrome.
The first community I was ever a part of was Epilogue.net. I couldn't draw but I really appreciated the art work. I only ever browsed and left the odd comment and never really met anyone. Later on in the year, my friend introduced me to the MegaTokyo manga. I remember how all I could think of at school was getting home and carry on reading. By this point, I had around 800 strips to get through so I had plenty of reading material.
Shortly after, the MSN Messenger bug had hit everyone. Standard school day routine: come home, throw bag onto floor, boot up PC, log onto MSN, chat to girls. Most of us wouldn't even get changed or have something to eat, almost as if it was a competition as to who could log on first.
This was the first time I started mixing the internet and my real social life. In 2006, ADSL had finally arrived. The internet was now a normal everyday thing even for my Grandparents. They would use it to read the news, send e-mails and order for their business. It almost seems a century away...
Once I had a good and stable internet connection, I started getting into programming. I was always fascinated by being able to make a piece of software do exactly as I wanted it to.
I joined community after community. My favorite communities at that time was Astalavista and Elite-Hacker forums. They seemed to be the only ones that had reasonable and mature people on it. Usually you would find 13 year old 3L1T3 H4CK3R5 who would find you and kill you whenever they lost an argument.
By this point, no-body could track the communities and forums they had signed up for. The internet started become a mess of accounts that we were unable to keep track of. I remember having a pad with all the usernames and passwords I used.

This is when web 2.0 was born. I wasn't the only one having this problem, and it seemed that people had so many identities that nobody knew who they were talking to. Then came Facebook alongside OpenID. One account for them all. Everybody should easily be able to keep their accounts tracked and be able to publish contents onto the internet without needing the technical know-how. The result? Well what you see today.

Blogs, forums and a single sign-on service thanks to Google, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.