Things You didn’t Know About The Digital World

Undeniably the world of digital media is expanding with each second passing by. Between the trends of new hashtags or challenges one can only realise how far the technology has come. 

INTERNET running for Nobel Prize

You read that right! The internet ran for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. BBC reported that it was among the 237 individuals and organizations nominated for this category of the prize. The prize eventually went to Liu Xiaobo for “his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.”

We can’t help but ponder who would have come up to receive the prize had Internet won it??

Google was originally called Backrub

Yup! Back in 1996 the world’s largest search engine did not start under the name Google but the name Backrub. 

The name is based on the system finding and ranking pages based on backlinks. It was later that year that they changed it to Google inspired from the word ‘googol’ which is 1 followed by a hundred zeroes.

Chris Messina: The person who gave us #hashtag

Chris Messina is the hero we all should be cheering for as he introduced the famous hashtag # to the digital world. What’s even more interesting is that the he could have patented the idea but chose not to so that the it catches up quickly.

“All Hail!! Chris the #Great”

Oxford Word of the Year 2015 was an Emoji

In 2015 for the first time in history. Oxford Word of the Year was a pictograph 😂 officially called the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji. This move was Oxford’s way of acknowledging the surge in the use of emojis.

Years later our reaction to this news is still “😂”

The First photo on Instagram was posted before its Release.

Instagram, globally one of the most downloaded apps with over a billion users was launched on October 6th, 2010. Interestingly the first post was made on July 16th, 2010.

Kevin Systrom’s (Co-founder of Instagram) photograph of a stray dog sitting near a taco stand in Mexico is the first image ever shared on Instagram with the caption “test”.