Uses of Internet


1. Electronic Mail. With an Internet email account, users can communicate with anyone else on-line, any place in the world, with no long distance fees. Email can also be used to join mailing lists, bulletin boards, or discussion groups that cover a huge variety of subjects. According to a 1999 study (the 1999 Consumer Technology Survey), email has replaced research as the leading reason given by people in the US for using the Internet. Approximately 48 percent of U.S. consumers said email was the primarily reason to go on-line, followed by research (28 percent).

 2. World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is not a physical place, not a set of files, nor even a network of computers. The heart of the WEB lies in the protocols (common communication rules and languages) that define its use. The WWW uses hypertext transfer protocols (http) to transport files from one place to another.

What makes the www unique is the striking appearance of the information when it gets to your computer. In addition to text, the web presents color, images, sounds and video. This, combined with its ease of use, makes the web the most popular aspect of the Internet for a large majority of users.

One 1995 estimate said that there were 27,000 web sites and that the number were doubling daily. This growth rate would be difficult to maintain, but it is true that the web is the single fastest growing neighborhood on the Internet.

Media scholar Richard Campbell writes: "By the early 1990s, the world wide web had become the most frequently visited region of the Internet. Developed in the 1980s by software engineer Tim Berners-Lee, the Web was initially a text-only data-linking system that allowed computer-accessed information to associate with, or link to, other information no matter where it was on the Internet. Known as hypertext, this data-linking feature of the Web was a breakthrough for those attempting to use the Internet. Hypertext is a non-linear way of organizing information, allowing a user to click on a highlighted word, phrase, picture or icon and skip directly to other files related to that subject in other computer systems.

"By using standardized software, today users can navigate through most features of the Internet, including text data such as email, photo-image files, and video and audio clips. HTML (HyperTextMarkup Language), the written code that creates Web pages and links, is a language that all computers can read, so computers with varying operating systems (such as Windows and Macintosh) can communicate easily. JAVA, a HTML compatible language developed by Sun Microsystems in the mid 1990s, is also universally readable by computers and allows small interactive programs to run on Web pages, creating moving graphic elements such as three-dimensional animations and menus....."

Uses of the World Wide Web include: Research, Personal web sites , On line shopping , Shareware

3. Threaded Conference . Systems (USENET) or network news. Users enter messages and within a day or so, the messages are delivered to nearly every other USENET host for everyone to read. (Not synchronous).

4. On-Line Chat Rooms (Synchronous , Conversations/reaction)

5. Multi-User Dummies (M.U.D.s). Text-based VR ; Role playing games ; Same time

6. Streamed Broadcast (receiving, sending audio and video)

7. Internet telephone and video telephone.




Use by children.