Internet Time
16 July 2025
Howdy everyone! I'll have you know that I am doing good. Just came off of a rough patch for the past couple days, but I'm back to my normal me.
You may have noticed something new to the blog, up in the header. With the restoration of the old little moon gif comes new functionality to my site! My new Internet Time clock, and I'd like to tell you about it.
What is "Internet Time"?
Internet Time is a mostly-defunct attempt at a new international time standard created by the Swiss watchmaking company the Swatch Group. The official Internet Time webpage has some basic information about the time standard, stating that "Internet Time exists so that we do not have to think about timezones."
In the Internet Time standard, one solar day is broken up into 1000 equally-sized lengths of time called a ".beat", with each .beat measuring about 80 metric seconds. There is a very easy comparison to draw here between Internet time and Revolutionary French Decimal Time used in France in the 1790s. The Internet Time standard is based on what the Swatch Group calls "Biel Mean Time," named after the location of the Swatch headquarters in Biel, Switzerland. Metric midnight in Biel would be exactly equal to @000.beats Internet Time. The standard was announced on the 23rd of October, 1998.
Who used Internet Time?
During the late-1990's and early-2000's, the Swatch Group produced several models of digital watch that would display the current Internet Time in addition to metric time. A few major websites, such as the CNN website, also displayed Internet Time for a while. Defunct IM platform ICQ used the standard as well to keep time. I was unable to confirm whether or not the functionality still remained on ICQ, because sadly the service has shut down as of 2024.
Perhaps the most notable use of Internet Time has to be its inclusion within the menus of a small handful of 2000's, online-oriented SEGA games. Phantasy Star Online notably had an Internet Time clock located in the bottom right of the game's menu during gameplay. In an environment like Phantasy Star Online, an archaic MMO with non-region-locked servers, Internet Time serves as a timezone-agnostic way of organizing times to play together for groups. Not to mention, a weird time system does help a player feel more immersed in the strange sci-fi setting of PSO.
Why didn't Internet Time catch on?
This isn't a very hard question to answer, Internet Time never did anything new. If we want some sort of coordinated, universal measure of time, we would use UTC, the current standard timezone that all other digital clocks are synchronized with. Internet Time's 'agnostic' identity is merely shifting the place we already arbitrarily defined standard time to start from. Decimal time systems have been attempted before, but our global society's entire infrastructure is already built around metric time. While, logically, it may be easier to do math with a decimal system, hundreds of years of history has already shown us that people will not make the jump when what we have already "works enough" to not be super annoying. Even using Internet Time to coordinate silly little things like meeting up in an MMO really isn't needed. Most games, even of the era, would allow you to view the time according to the current server's location, providing a consistent time that people could use as an anchor point.
Why am I using Internet Time?
I just think it's neat. It's as simple as that, really. It's an odd piece of history, a relic of the early internet, and it's just... super charming. I would also be lying if I said that I didn't find a .beat a useful measurement of time. An hour is a substantial amount of time, when an hour has passed, you know time has definitely moved. A minute, though? A minute feels too short to do anything meaningful with, just barely. When I sit for a minute, it doesn't really feel like time has passed, it just feels like a later part of the same moment. A .beat though? About a minute-and-a-half? That feels like around the smallest unit of time that I can visualize, the smallest unit of time that actually means something. It works for me, and that's all that matters.
Thanks for reading my little ramble about stuff that doesn't matter at all in the slightest. Next time the site gets updated, I think I'll have something way cooler to show.