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When it comes to the internet, our memories can be short. It’s hard to imagine life without reddit or YouTube, which didn’t come around until 2005, or Gmail, which was technically a beta product until 2009. And responsive web design wasn’t really a thing until 2012. The internet of a decade ago looked a lot different than it does now.
New website Ten Years Ago makes it easy to look back into the weird world of mostly forgotten web history, as The Next Web reports. The site peers into the World Wide Web as of July 28, 2007, showing the now-simplistic-looking early designs of sites like YouTube, Amazon, The New York Times, and reddit. And old-school web design isn't the only retro treat. You also get to enjoy the advertising of 2007, back when John Mayer was enticing people to watch Live Earth and fans were eagerly awaiting The Simpsons Movie.
The site is powered by the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine, which captures web pages as they appear now so that they can be used as citations later. Ten Years Ago is a useful tool in that it gathers together sites captured on the same day, so you can recreate what you might see if you were trawling the web on that day in July 2007. Back when even Apple, one of the most design-obsessed companies around, had a website that looked a little clunky.
Chances are, the web will look even more radically different a decade or more in the future. Will we still remember what YouTube looked like now? Probably not. Enjoy thinking of the web design of 2017 as cutting-edge while you can. Someday, it will seem ridiculously outdated.