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Everybody's life has been impacted by the internet, some by certain sites and services and some by others.
Some of the ones that have had the greatest impact on my life personally:
Web-based forums: Of the thousands upon thousands of hours that I wasted my life away on the internet, these probably account for the most. I have both argued and befriended many people on internet forums, and they have accounted for the bulk of my social life for long periods of time.
Facebook: Before Facebook, there were limited sources of information about most people. To find something out, you had to ask them, unless they were a celebrity or major web presence. Then there came Facebook, and that changed everything. Unless they have their profile on total lockdown, you can find a lot out about people by simply looking at the pictures they have up and reading their "Likes".
Wikipedia: The web was a more chaotic place before the introduction of Wikipedia. Doing a Google search for something like the "Cuisine of Egypt" would bring up Egyptian restaurants, recipe sites, pages from people wanting to sell you an Egyptian vacation, etc. Wikipedia made getting an introduction to something much more manageable by summarizing the information on a convenient, user-editable page.
First is email. I've conducted most of my business via email, and kept correspondence with relatives and friends who have passed, which keeps their presence around.
Second come forums and usenet, which have hopefully honed my writing skills and were instrumental in my learning enough to get out of Florida just before the big housing bust.
Weather radar and webcam sites - which keep me informed on tornadoes and other events.
Online banking and credit card sites.
Online shopping -it is best to keep me away from bookstores. I tend to buy them out.
After those, it is a toss-up. Multitudes of online news sources, google maps and the various satellite views, online lectures, google+ video chat is becoming more of a "feature."
Built and grew a successful e-commerce business allowing me to retire before 40.
I also love how easy it is to find out things. Google can answer ANYTHING!
I try to explain to my kids if you needed to answer a question you had to look it up or find someone that knew the answer that you trusted!
As an amateur genealogist, sites like Ancestry.com and others have saved me a lot of time and money that I would have spent traveling to libraries, courthouses, etc. I can search these sites 24/7, saving me $$ on gas, eating out and parking fees. Also due to the internet I have "met" many cousins which I probably would have never known otherwise.
Also, like Harry chickpea, online banking and online shopping are great. Living out in the boonies, it's wonderful to able to check your bank balance, make transfers, pay bills, etc without leaving your home. There have been some times where we've done all our holiday shopping online. The UPS guy is familiar with us!
One of my hobbies is radio scanning, listening to police, fire, air, etc. Back in the 80's and 90's I went to RadioShack and bought a book every year that had frequencies in it. I had to go through and find all the agencies I wanted, write them in a log to keep track of them, and manually enter them into the scanner. Today you plug your radio into a computer, fire up some software which can download frequency databases from the web, then have it dump them into the scanner, went from hours of work to minutes, kind of took some of the fun out of it though.
I try to explain to my kids if you needed to answer a question you had to look it up or find someone that knew the answer that you trusted!
Or walk to the library through three foot of snow uphill both ways!
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