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Published March 12 by CBC online:

The World Wide Web is celebrating a birthday today. On March 12, 1989, the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee launched the web.

Twenty-five years ago, the web was about connecting documents. Today, it's about connecting people.

At HÂþ»­ University's Social Media Lab, Anatoliy Gruzd and his colleagues track the world — live.

Streams of social media flood in, creating beautiful fireworks and laser shows of information.

"Here you can see from a particular announcement of the Russian Federation allowing to use the military force in Ukraine and then, even though the conflict is still going on, people on the web are shifting their interest," he said, showing a graph that tracks tweets by the hour.

The touchscreen at the centre of the lab looks like a Jackson Pollock painting, but it shows the connections among tweets about the unrest in Crimea.

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The high-tech lab is long way from the web's early days.

Michael Shepherd, the dean of HÂþ»­'s computer science department, helped create a proto-electronic newspaper for the 1995 G7 summit in Halifax.

"Prior to the web, you weren't connected around the world. You were building your data bases, doing your work — it'd all be on one server," he explains.

Now, Marshall McLuhan's "global village" is a reality. Shepherd said communities gather online in a post-physical world based on common interests, not common geography.

Shepherd sees the web getting to know us in the future. It will learn our interests and channel information our way.

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