What was going on with the Internet in 2003
In 2003 LinkedIn, Myspace, WordPress and Skype launched.
LinkedIn was developed in 2002 and officially launched in 2003.
The Social networking service Myspace also launched in 2003. In July 2005 News Corporation acquired Myspace for $580 million. In June 2006 it surpassed Yahoo! and Google becoming the most visited website in the United States. At its peak in 2008, Myspace had 75.9 million monthly active users in the United States. According to Wikipedia, when News Corporation attempted to merge it with Yahoo! in 2007, Myspace was valued at $12 billion and had more than 300 million registered users. In May 2009, Facebook surpassed Myspace in its number of unique U.S. visitors. The number of Myspace users steadily declined despite several redesigns. By 2019, the site's monthly visitors had dropped to seven million.
Wordpress also launched in 2003. Originally created as a tool to publish blogs, the platform evolved to where 43% of all websites are using WordPress as their content management system. Currently, there are over 850 million websites built using WordPress.
Skype was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennström, from Sweden, and Janus Friis, from Denmark. Skype was used to make free computer-to-computer calls, or reduced-rate calls from a computer to telephones. In September 2005 eBay acquired it for $2.6 billion
Also in 2003, Harvard college sophomore Mark Zuckerberg launched Facemash (the precursor to The Facebook), an online service for students to judge the attractiveness of their fellow students.
In 2003, there were 40,912,332 websites* with their own designated URL.
* www.internetlivestats.com