TOP 10 USES OF THE INTERNET

The world wide scope of the Internet makes it, perhaps, the single most valuable tool for use in many significant by both non-profit and commercial organizations. Some important current strategic uses of the Internet are:

 1.        On-line communication. Computer users around the world extensively use the e-mail service on the
Internet to communicate with each other, With this facility, the Internet has proved to be a rapid and
productive communication tool for millions of users.

2.   Software sharing.    The Internet provides access to a large number of shareware software,
development tools, and utilities. A few examples of such • shareware tools are compilers, code
libraries, mail servers, and operating systems. For example, a set of such shareware tools is available
via ftp from the Internet site sunsite.unc.edu. The Free Software Foundation provides a wealth of
GNU software tools on the Internet that can be downloaded free of Charge. For more details on
software tools offered by the Free Software Foundation, you can anonymous ./Sp to the Internet site

3.     Exchange of views on topics of common interest The Internet has a number of news groups. Each
news group enables a group of users to exchange their views on some topic of common interest. For
example, the news group comp.os.os2.advocacy contains views about the OS/2 operating system.

4.     Posting of information of general interest Many users use the Internet as a large electronic bulletin
board on which information of general interest can be posted to bring .it to the attention* of, interested
users around the world; Some such information include career opportunities, conference and event
announcements, and calls for papers for conferences and journals.

5.     Product promotion. Several commercial organizations use the Internet services for promoting their
products effectively. These organizations make use of WWW server sites that are focused on
disseminating timely information about corporate happenings, product announcements, recent
strategic alliances, press releases, and other information of potential interest to existing "and
prospective, customers, for example, computer. system .announce news group contains information about
Sun Microsystems latest product announcements.

6.     Feedback about products.   Commercial organizations also use the Internet to gather information
about user satisfaction of existing products, market opportunities of new products, and ideas for
potential new products. This is usually accomplished by putting up an interactive survey application
by the organization on a WWW site on the Internet

7.     Customer support service.  Many organizations also use the Internet to provide timely customer
support. The combined e-mail, ftp, and other services on the Internet provide necessary enabling tools
for such first-rate customer support. For example, bugs in fielded software products can be reported to-,
an organization via e-mail, and bug fixes, minor releases, workarounds, known problems and
limitations, and general advice about a product can be made available by an organization to its
customers via an ftp server.

8.           On-line journals and magazines.    The Internet now has^ literally thousands of electronic
subscriptions found both for free and low cost. There are many WWW sites on the Internet dealing
with electronic versions of many journals and magazines. For example, the Internet edition of the
Times of India newspaper is available at the internet http://www.timesofindia.com. Researchers
have extended this idea to support full-fledged electronic libraries on the internet

9. On-line shopping.   The internet has also facilitated the introduction of a new market
consisting of virtual shops. These shops remain open 24 hours all the year round, and are J
purchasers all around the world. They provide information about products or services for sale 1
WWW servers. Using the Internet services, customers submit specific product queries a»irf
specific sales quotes. Through a well-defined authorization and authentication scheme, the
services are then used to accept orders placed by customers, to handle order payments*and to*1
orders to fulfillment.. For example, the Internet site amcaon.com is a WWW-based bookshop
Internet, where information on all types of International books can be found and books can be
on-line.

10. Worldwide video conferencing.   Worldwide video conferencing is an emerging service on
.   Internet allowing a group of users located around the globe to talk and interact with each other

they were sitting and discussing in a single room. The parties interacting can see each other tall their computer screens and can hear each other's voice through a special audio-device fixed in computers. The CU-Selene system developed at Cornell University is an example of an Ir based video conferencing system.