GoogleNet, iTunes 6 rocked my world in 2005

The blogosphere (and World Wide Web in general) is quickly filling up with journalists both professional and citizen perfunctorily posting year-end wrap-up lists documenting the greatest moments of the past twelve months of our collective existence. I'm going to break tradition from publishing such chronology this year and just whittle my personal list down to two, being the number of ideas to have come out that really threw me for a loop.

Call this terse roster my "Great Moments in Thinking, 2005" rundown. Without doubt, the pair of concepts to have arisen in 2005 were GoogleNet and the release of iTunes 6.0. They literally blew me away.

• GoogleNet - Om Malik's off-the-cuff moniker for a theoretical Google-developed nationwide WiFi network, granting free highspeed Internet access supported by a proprietary PPTP login system that tracked users via IP address and therefore able to stream localized ads to their machine, was an amazingly concept whose power was rivaled only by its simplicity. I blogged, podcasted, lectured and talked about this incessantly with co-workers, fellow businesspeople, technologists and anyone who'd hear me out, and everyone agreed it was an amazing idea. The scale and scope of such a bold initiative, driven by the logic and effectiveness of the revenue model really made sense. Most aspiring entrepreneurs ask "now why didn't I come up with that?"- it's so grand a strategy that most of us couldn't think that big. I really hopes this comes to pass.
  
• iTunes 6.0 release - this is the event that set off the industry-wide interest and subset of VOD-derivative services based on the paid downloads of network television programming. The technology is accessible and easy to grasp and the business implications for this model, now and going forward, are huge. The put into motion the growing concern that TV as a medium is fallable in the same way print media's been for years. Apple's planning was sound, its partners powerful, its integration intelligent and its timing right. It also got a little lucky. This is going to be a major landmark towards evolving the Web into a media platform.