Immediate access to information voted top of the web

As the web turns 20, vnunet.com readers share their views on the best features

The web is 20 years old this month

As the World Wide Web celebrates its 20th birthday, vnunet.com readers have been busy telling us which feature of the web has had the biggest impact on their lives.

Twenty years ago this month at Cern, Tim Berners-Lee wrote Information Management: A Proposal, the original outline for what was to become the World Wide Web.

According to the results of a vnunet.com poll to mark this 20-year milestone, the ability to get immediate access to information has been far and away the biggest benefit of the web. Of the 550 readers who voted in the poll, a massive 72 per cent cited information access as the feature of the web that has most improved their lives.

Following this were 11 per cent of respondents who voted for communication tools such as instant messaging, webmail and web-conferencing. Online shopping was chosen by six per cent of readers, no doubt as a mean of avoiding supermarket queues and being dragged around shopping centres at weekends.

Social networking did not rate very highly in the poll. Only three per cent of readers felt that social tools such as Facebook and Twitter had been the best web development.

Very few vnunet.com readers would be interested in going back to a world without the web, the poll revealed, and for a tech-savvy bunch this is unsurprising. Only 13 readers out of 550 opted to bring back the good old pre-web days - although they were still happy to take advantage of the web to vote in our poll.