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Arjuna·

Was Viaweb First?

http://www.paulgraham.com/first.html

http://ycombinator.com/viaweb

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It was first according to PG's knowledge, which is incomplete. Amazon.com was incorporated in 1994, and sold its first book online in July 1995 [1], a month before Viaweb. EBay launched in Sept 1995 [2], a month after Viaweb, and so was probably independently under development. Geocities was active and allowing user-contributed content by July 1995 [3], a month before. WebCrawler was the first general-purpose Internet search engine, and launched in April 1994 [4].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay#History

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities#History

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebCrawler

Viaweb was the internet's first web application. Its customers used Viaweb to create and manage their own e-commerce sites. Like Shopify (or rather, Shopify is like Viaweb).

Viaweb was not an e-commerce site like Amazon or Ebay. Its customers were merchants rather than consumers.

I'd define "web application" as "something that lets you perform a task via the web". All of the companies I linked count under that definition; Amazon let you buy books; EBay let you buy & sell odds & ends; GeoCities let you build a website; WebCrawler let you search for things.

If you define it more narrowly as "something that lets you create a site", Geocities still counts.

I think you'd have to narrow the category to "first online store builder" to make it accurate, which is still quite an accomplishment, but certainly isn't the "first web app".

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