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rfmcdonaldWhile paging through my blogs through my very handry RSS reader, I came across this post by Nick Moles. Once upon a time he had been a heavy user of AOL Instant Messenger, but now?
I still use AOL Instant Messenger fairly heavily, as do my friends, but, well, AOL as a whole is a technological cul-de-sac as very personally laden though it might be. GeoCities is the same sort of thing, as Don Reisinger noted at CNET.
GeoCities' import to me lies in the fact that so much of the 2300AD/23xx online community's material was based there, like the venerable Pentapod's World, now to be found in its entirety here. And don't get me started about Usenet: my ISP hasn't provided me with direct access to that network, home to soc.history.what-if, for four years, and Google has surprisingly failed to take good care of it.
All this talk of AIM and GeoCities and Usenet is likely meaningless to anyone who's reading this who is now under the age of, say, 25. Web 1.0 isn't relevant to them, not when there's far more capable platforms out there, with more capabilities and higher bandwidth. Even though I continue to use AOL Instant Messenger, I also use any number of more advanced online platforms with more staying power. (I choose to remain agnostic on the subject of LiveJournal.) It isn't as if the social networks I created using these declining vehicles, or the interests I've cultivated, are disappearing. Would it be overdramatic for me to say that I'm feeling a sense of momento mori?
Not a single one of my contacts was logged on. Not a single one of my 54 ‘buddies’ was even accidentally logged in. Not one. You can easily talk about the total failure of AOL’s business model – holding onto dial-up and protected content for far, far too long. But these guys had the original social network 1.0. And now it’s dead.
I still use AOL Instant Messenger fairly heavily, as do my friends, but, well, AOL as a whole is a technological cul-de-sac as very personally laden though it might be. GeoCities is the same sort of thing, as Don Reisinger noted at CNET.
GeoCities might have featured millions of sites that were ugly and poorly designed, but the site let us get on the Web for free. It was simple. And it brought value to millions of folks around the globe.
[. . .]
Back in the late 1990s (the exact year escapes me), I came across GeoCities. It seemed so revolutionary for its time. I didn't have the Web expertise to develop a site of my own, so I relied on GeoCities to do the job for me.
My site was ugly. There's no doubt about it. But for the time, it wasn't too bad.
I used my little corner of the Web to review video games. At that point in my life, video games meant (almost) everything to me. Every spare moment I had was used up by the digital characters I controlled on the screen in front of me.
Perhaps that's why the idea behind my GeoCities site made so much sense to me at the time: to offer reviews like those I had read in the many video game magazines I subscribed to. I had a scoring system, gave my take on everything from controls to gameplay, and ended each review with a "bottom line." It was fun.
But in the end, I slowly drifted away from my Geocities site. Ironically, I never thought a career in writing was for me. I moved on with my life. And, much like GeoCities, my small part of the Web was left to live out its final days alone, without much interaction.
GeoCities' import to me lies in the fact that so much of the 2300AD/23xx online community's material was based there, like the venerable Pentapod's World, now to be found in its entirety here. And don't get me started about Usenet: my ISP hasn't provided me with direct access to that network, home to soc.history.what-if, for four years, and Google has surprisingly failed to take good care of it.
All this talk of AIM and GeoCities and Usenet is likely meaningless to anyone who's reading this who is now under the age of, say, 25. Web 1.0 isn't relevant to them, not when there's far more capable platforms out there, with more capabilities and higher bandwidth. Even though I continue to use AOL Instant Messenger, I also use any number of more advanced online platforms with more staying power. (I choose to remain agnostic on the subject of LiveJournal.) It isn't as if the social networks I created using these declining vehicles, or the interests I've cultivated, are disappearing. Would it be overdramatic for me to say that I'm feeling a sense of momento mori?
