My technology PR career was in its formative years in 2001 and I often wonder about technologies I wrote about, pitched to journalists or just struggled to understand back in those early days. Reading a piece in today’s Guardian by Charles Arthur made me think about how much technology has moved on over the last seven years.

Google, as part of its tenth anniversary celebrations, is generously giving us all the opportunity to take a retrospective look at the top sites in 2001 - so I wondered what would happen if I put some of the most popular searches into the Google engine… Here is what I discovered.

Twitter didn’t exist , but Roget’s Thesaurus defined the word twitter as “to move to and fro in short, jerky movements”.  I’ve not fully embraced this social networking phenomenon for the enigmatic… but having seen friends of mine that do, it’s a fairly accurate description of what they end up doing if they’re away from their PCs for too long!

The other social networking leviathan - Facebook - does, surprisingly come up but it’s still wearing short trousers.  The foundation of the site we know today is described as a “searchable database of all students and faculty at Harvard”.

The only iPod, which I suspect struggled to sell in multiple millions, was the Aperta IPOD (Image Proof of Deposit Document Processing System) promises to bring the advantages of imaging technology to organisations.  You can’t load your entire music back catalogue on to it though.

The much vaunted Next Generation wireless Networking technology, WiMAX, was cardio-kickboxing and more in 2001.  It doesn’t say what the “more” is, but I’m guessing it wasn’t mobile broadband.

The only RAZR available in 2001 was a company called American Safety Razor (with the stock symbol RAZR), and Ericsson announced it would no longer make mobile handsets (probably best if you look at some of the phones it was making back then).

Search for Microsoft Vista back in 2001 and top of the list was a small Russian software house developing applications for MS Word.  It’s still going today, but if the website is anything to go by, probably hasn’t had the same success as the company founded by Mr Gates et al.

And, finally, what of that must have gadget of 2008 - the Apple iPhone?  Surprisingly, for any non-geeks at least, there was an iPhone online back in 2001 - only it was made by Cisco in the olden days and you couldn’t use it as a Sat Nav.

I’m often asked what relevance online and Web 2.0 has in public relations. Try searching some of the same terms in the 2008 Google engine… it should become clear.

Lyndon Johnson