Technology. Brilliant isn’t it. Can you believe it only started about 25 years ago?

Perhaps it’s an exaggeration, technology isn’t just defined as the internet, although sometimes it certainly seems that way.
The internet, 25 years old today, has fundamentally changed the way that marketers do their jobs for ever. It’s brought advertising to the mass market and put digital in everyone’s pocket.

The first ever internet address ending in .com was registered 25 years ago by a Massachusetts-based company called Symbolics. By the end of 1985, there were a total of six .com web addresses.

However, the ‘world wide web’ as we know it didn’t exist for several years afterwards, when Sir Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) began working on the project, creating the world’s first website in 1991.

These days, around tens of thousands of .com addresses are registered every day and more than 300 million of the .com sites created since March 1985 are no longer active.

The .com domain is the responsibility of Verisign, as is the .net domain, which was created at the same time as .com in January 1985.

However, it seems that surfers in the UK aren’t as attached to the .com domain as they are the .uk domain. According to a recent report from Nominet, the domain name registrar for the UK, 77 per cent of UK consumers would choose a .uk website over a .com site.

Nominet also said that there are now more than eight million .uk websites registered.

Today, there are 668,000 dot-coms registered every month, according to the BBC. Current top internet properties include names like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and eBay – none of which were registered until the late 1990s.

And apart from those sites that many people frequent, pretty much anyone who anyone has a website.

Microsoft’s Bing team puts the amount of web pages at “over one trillion”.

And Google has already indexed more than one trillion discrete web addresses.

There are more addresses than there are people on Earth. The current global population stands at more than 6.7 billion.

That means there are about 150 web addresses per person in the world.

Translated: If you spent just one minute reading every website in existence, you’d be kept busy for 31,000 years. Without any sleep!

Mark Higginson, director of analytics for Nielsen Online, said the global online population had jumped 16 per cent since last year.

“Approximately 1.46 billion people worldwide now use the internet which represents a solid 16 per cent increase from the previous year’s estimate (1.26 billion in 2007),” he told news.com.au.

The largest internet population belongs to China, which claims to have more users online – 338 million – than there were people in the US.

IWS combines data from the UN’s International Telecommunications Union, Nielsen Online, GfK and US Census Bureau.

Its latest global figures puts the number of internet users in the world at 1,596,270,108.

That’s just 23.8 per cent of the estimated 6,0706,993,152 people in the world.

And it will continue only continue to get bigger.

“In terms of the future, we anticipate mobile to contribute significantly to internet usage,” Mr Higginson said.