Page 10 - index

RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS

When the Internet got a memory…

Before Lou Montulli developed the cookie in July 1994, browser in turn sends to the server each time it gets
the Internet had no memory. Incredible to imagine it contacted in the future. The name cookie was the first
today - especially in marketing – that whenever a per- name that crossed Lou Montulli’s mind for the small
son clicked on a webpage, he became an arbitrary user text files that brought the solution, and this name re-
again and again. There was no way to bring him in con- mained until today.
nection with the action he has just executed moments
before. Of course, it wasn’t long before the cookie conquered
the World Wide Web. First, the cookies were distributed
In the summer of 94, various programmers had recog- over the Netscape browser, then more and more other
nized the need that something had to be done against browsers supported the small text files, and websites
the forgetfulness of the Internet. Montulli worked for the started to use cookies in many different ways. In so
newly founded software company Netscape at that many ways which Montulli would have never ever been
time, which was then sold just four years later to AOL, able to predict.
and had been, by the way, the birthplace of Mozilla, too.
The biggest issues that emerged were the so-called
Montulli got in contact with the problem when col- “Third Party Cookies” - when web cookies are com-
leagues tried to develop a shopping cart for an online bined with embedded references that are linked to oth-
store. With the existing technology at that time no solu- er websites – that represented a new way, how users
tion could be found and Montulli started to think about it. can be tracked over many pages.

A week later, the concept that revolutionized the inter- It means, for example, that when you are on website A,
net - and still defines 95% of what cookies represent and there is any content with a link from a party B on
today - was ready: A web server can pass back infor- that site, B may set a cookie and can track you as a

mation to the browser with the help of cookies that the user.
10 Asian eMarketing January 2015 - Digital Marketing Trends & Predictions