(✿ ♥‿ ♥) 2000's

The 2000s (pronounced "two-thousands" or "twenty-hundreds") was a decade of the Gregorian calendar that began on January 1, 2000 and ended on December 31, 2009.

The growth of the Internet contributed to globalization during the decade, which allowed faster communication among people around the world.

The economic growth of the 2000s had considerable social, environmental and mass extinction consequences, raised demand for diminishing energy resources, and was still vulnerable, as demonstrated by the financial crisis of 2007–08.

In the 2000s, the Internet became a mainstay, strengthening its grip on Western society while becoming increasingly available in the developing world.

Main article: Timeline of computing 2000–2009

Google becomes the Internet's most visited website.
A huge jump in broadband internet usage globally – for example, from 6% of U.S. internet users in June 2000 to what one mid-decade study predicted would be 62% by 2010. By February 2007, over 80% of U.S. Internet users were connected via broadband and broadband internet has been almost a required standard for quality internet browsing.[160]
Wireless internet became prominent by the end of the decade, as well as internet access in devices besides computers, such as mobile phones and gaming consoles.

Email became a standard form of interpersonal written communication, with popular addresses available to the public on Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail.
Normalisation became increasingly important as massive standardized corpora and lexicons of spoken and written language became widely available to laypeople, just as documents from the paperless office were archived and retrieved with increasing efficiency using XML-based markup.
Peer-to-peer technology gained massive popularity with file sharing systems enabling users to share any audio, video and data files or anything in digital format, as well as with applications which share real-time data, such as telephony traffic.
VPNs (virtual private networks) became likewise accessible to the general public, and data encryption remained a major issue for the stability of web commerce.

Various iPod digital audio players
Boom in music downloading and the use of data compression to
quickly transfer music over the Internet, with a corresponding
rise of portable digital audio players. As a result, the entertainment
industry struggled through the decade to find digital delivery
systems for music, movies, and other media that reduce copyright
infringement and preserve profit.

The USB flash drive replaces the Floppy disk as the preferred form
of low-capacity mobile data storage.
In February 2003, Dell announced floppy drives would no longer be
pre-installed on Dell Dimension home computers, although they were
still available as a selectable option and purchasable as an aftermarket
OEM add-on. On 29 January 2007, PC World stated that only 2% of the
computers they sold contained built-in floppy disk drives; once present
stocks were exhausted, no more standard floppies would be sold.

During the decade, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Microsoft Office 2003, Windows Vista[dubious – discuss], and Microsoft Office 2008 (and later Windows 7[dubious – discuss]) become the ubiquitous industry standards[dubious – discuss] in personal computer software until the end of the decade, when Apple began to slowly gain market share.

With the advent of the Web 2.0, dynamic technology became widely accessible, and by the mid-2000s, PHP and MySQL became (with Apache) the backbone of many sites, making programming knowledge unnecessary to publish to the web. Blogs, portals, and wikis become common electronic dissemination methods for professionals, amateurs, and businesses to conduct knowledge management typified by success of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia which launched on January 15, 2001, grew rapidly and became the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet[163][164] as well as the best known wiki in the world and the largest encyclopedia in the world.

Open Source software, such as the Linux operating system and the Mozilla Firefox web browser, gain ground.
Internet commerce became standard for reservations; stock trading; promotion of music, arts, literature, and film; shopping; and other activities.

In the late 2000s Facebook became the most popular social networking site in the world.
During this decade certain websites and search engines became prominent worldwide as transmitters of goods, services and information. Some of the most popular and successful online sites or search engines of the 2000s included Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, eBay, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

More and more businesses began providing paperless services, clients accessing bills and bank statements directly through a web interface.
In 2007 - The fast food chain McDonald's announced the introduction of free high speed wireless internet access at most of its 1,200 restaurants by the end of the year in a move which will make it the UK's biggest provider of such a service.