Growth of Internet Based Services with special reference to Sri Lanka

Internet, which has its origins thirty years back, was designed to serve the networking and communication needs of the academic and research community in the United States. Today it has opened up many new vistas in the commercial and business sectors. Internet has been responsible for the introduction of many and varied on-line services. New application ideas emerge at an almost inconceivable rate. Even at this moment of writing new applications are being added to a list which is already long and impressive. Some of them have already appeared in Sri Lanka and the others have yet to find their way into our Internet culture. The rate of growth of the Internet and its associated services are so phenomenal that only a snapshot can be provided at any given time. This paper provides such a snapshot, and serves to record some of the major applications and services which have made the Internet to be the most pervasive technology of this century.