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0 pointsjason_wang12y ago0 comments

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.

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nostrademons12y ago

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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