Slashdot Mirror
Dot-Com Service Memories?
Buster Chan asks: "As the dotcom boom was still going strong in 1998, there was a service called MyTalk, which I used to send/recieve e-mail/voicemail/telephone calls/horoscopes and so forth, for free; it was mostly a unique, ad-driven way to avoid paying a quarter for telephone calls from payphones. Most of the ads were recruitment ads for the U.S. Army. MyTalk was a major tool for my online socialization when I was seventeen. Does anyone else have fond memories of MyTalk, or know of similar services that exist for free nowdays, or does anyone remember using interesting, unique services from the dotcom boom that no longer exist?"
Was that SuperBowl commercial right after the burst where they showed a wrecking ball destroying buildings for .com's that were clearly really stupid ideas.
My favorite: eSocks.com
Vonal Declosion
What, like kozmo.com? Delivering movies and snacks was a good idea, in theory...but apparently not a sustainable business model. I knew bad things were coming when they started delivering Rolexes and other rediculously expensive things...
At one point Urban Fetch dropped off a "free" CD along with a DVD rental that the bicycle delivery people had "written, produced, and directed." It was horrible-- all I can remember was something about "what can we fetch fo' u?" rapped to nasty pseudo-hip-hop music. I scrawled a "please never deliver one of these promos to me again" note on it and returned it alongside my DVD rental.
Ahh, the good old days.
Okay, it actually didn't provide me with anything ... but it paid WAY better. I was the first person that I knew of in my circle of friends at my university who signed up for it, so I got a lot of friends and their friends and their friends ... ad inf. to sign up and as a result I started banking some decent cash. At one point I was making upwards of $150 a month for having a mouse emulator just do random clicks for 8-10 hours a night a few days a month.
I remember back in 1998 when email was still pretty useful and not so spam-filled. And how ICQ wasn't entirely bogged down in crap and was still mostly just a messenger. What happened to those services?
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
Yeah, its called going outside and talking to people.
So going outside and talking to people is a unique service that no longer exists:)?
Alphanos
I remember DesktopDollars, which was a system where you were paid to have advertisements placed at the top of the desktop. It promised $150 an hour. I made $7 in three months.
I also remember Juno and NetZero providing free internet, the later of which now charges $14.95 a month for dialup.
The World is Yours.
I was lucky enough to be working for a cybercafe/reseller/small ISP at the time and had access to some serious bandwith. It was during this period I managed to track down all the rare songs I hadn't heard in years. I must have downloaded dozens of tracks a day.
Good times
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
I used a similar service through broadpoint.com. It worked like a prepaid phone card, only you earned minutes before the call was connected by listening to ads. The big downside to it was that if you listened to enough ads to have a nice conversation and then got a busy signal, your time was wasted because the minutes wouldn't carry over to the next call.
At the end, they limited the number of free minutes per month before shutting down entirely.
Going there now, it seems to be some sort of web directory.
Well, if you can't find a more specific service, you can do everything at Zombo.com. Anything. Welcome. Anything. You can do anything at Zombo.com.
It still exists today but it's not the same. I used to use it to make free calls back home all the time. It worked great for calling relatives, long distance relationships...j
Basically you signed up for free, then dialed the number with your mouse, and used your microphone/headphone to talk in full duplex. Very good sound quality, even with a 56k modem. You'd hear a "thank you for using dialpad.com" and it would call your destination. Completely transparent, no operators involved. The other party had no idea.
It was also great for prank calls. The calls seemed to get routed to a local number, so they couldn't call you back with *69 or caller ID. I'm sure a subpoena could though...
Nothing like stalking an ex-girlfriend anonymously, without having to buy a pre-paid cellular phone.
After a while, DialPad started limiting calls to ten minutes, then they started charging...
I miss /. they was it used to be, when tech articles didn't have to be written to a 3rd grade level to get more than 20 posts.
umnn, getting a decent, steady paycheck?
One public service my NYC dot-com provided was parties. Of course, these shindigs were intended as exclusive events with closely guarded invitation lists...but as you might expect, after about an hour everything would go out the window.
Bar-hoppers would see the line outside our offices and assume they had stumbled upon a new night club or spontaneous rave, and would proceed to talk their way in. We gave everyone nametags as they entered - I rember this one time I saw a guy that had written "SINGLE" on his. Yeah, those were some wacky times.
Of course, the parties themselves sucked compared to what other (bigger) dot-coms were doing - no caviar, no jumbo-tron screen, no smoke machine, no go-go dancers...but they're still in business though, so I guess that was the right thing to do?
Things I miss are the sites where you could get free webspace to do whatever with, and not have to fart around with banner ads, popups, etc. Granted that's moot since I have a friend who hosts one of my sites.
This sig no verb.
I know a lot of people didn't like it, but I loved it. You picked out your groceries online but not the brand, and placed a bid. If your bid was accepted, you got the grocery at that discount rate. Then, you went to the store, picked out items from your list, and paid with your priceline card. The only thing I didn't like was that you had to keep your items seperate from normal stuff in checkout, and pay twice.
It also didn't hurt that their web code had a bug where you could always get the super-low-price tokens.
As I recall, this service started up in 1997 or so. Some guy in a suit knocked on my door and said, "I hear that you know about this 'internet' thing -- I'll leave a big sack of money outside the door of your apartment every two weeks if you'll show up at my office for a couple of hours each day and sit there playing video games."
After that, about every three months or so a different guy in a suit (at least I think it was a different guy) would knock on my door and say, "I hear that you know about this 'internet' thing, and I also hear that there's still room for more sacks of money in your apartment; if you'll show up at my office for a couple of hours each day, and tell me that 'the rules have changed,' and that I 'don't get it,' I'll leave a bigger sack of money outside your door every two weeks.
I guess their their funding dried up or something.
* * *
It is a dada story -- it has no moral.
Reasonable chances of getting an job in IT .... that didn't require mocing to India.
I think this internet thing sounds like a good idea
Had a 128kb/s Ricochet Wireless modem, man that thing was sweet. Anywhere in LA, I could get on the 'net as fast as my home connection (128k partial T1) ... at the time, that was pretty trick.
Had some great times in Griffith Park with that modem... so suck that they went under and couldn't manage their network, because it was huuuge to have wireless connectivity like that.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
When sites were ad driven (as the parent suggests) things were very cheap if you knew how to exploit them right.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
The best was the infamous Hitachi 19" monitor debacle in 98 or 99. I got like 12 $1000 monitors for like $200 with free shipping! My average selling price was like $700... I was in school at the time and that really saved my ass.
I had actually ordered 50, but they refused to ship the entire order... someone started a class action suit and I ended up getting a $60 check last year.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
You can still use them to get a couple of different services, but cellphone apps today have the same capability.
Now their focus is VoiceXML applications.
Holland
Boy the way Steve Ballmer said,
Unix now is finally dead,
Windows was king they all said
those were the days.
Didn't need no business plan
so said the investor man
And now the stocks are in the can
Those were the days.
We all ran Windows 98
Blue screens that we had to hate
Gee our Packard Bell ran great
Those were the days
Mr. we can use a man like Linus Torvalds again
Those were the days!
Unknown host pong.
that Katz guy? /vomits/
Some change *is* good.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
Groceries! Delivered! To your door! Did everything except put them up for you... *sigh*
Some people are like Slinkies - Not good for anything, but you can't help smiling when you push 'em down the stairs.
GNAA in the hizouse.
I did their opening promotion - you had to "play" a slot-machine game that came with 25 spins. Instead of cherries and bars, they were banners. Of course, you kept "winning more spins," so it took forever to finish an entire run. I had 25 friends sign up so that I could get a free Palm V (like $300 at the time) - I even signed up 30 just to be sure they wouldn't accuse me of cheating. Sure enough, they did. They would only send automated replies for like 2 weeks - even though I would email them all documented proof of my ~30 signups, until they just stopped replying at all. I sent one last email saying:
"You win. This is my last email I will send you. I have written a report of my experience with you, where you scam college students with the lure of a free Palm pda and then get your exposure, then don't give them their prize. I am planning on sending this to CNN.com, ABCNEWS.com, Yahoo, MSNBC, etc"
Wouldn't you know it, not 5 minutes later, the VP of the site emailed me. I had my Palm the next week.
there was some dotcom for wakeup calls for free. My friend and I used to order them for people we hated in our house in college all the time! It was great! We'd hear a 5AM "Who the f--k keeps calling me?!?!?!?"
14$ is STILL a pretty good price for 50cdrs, and this is three years later.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
This has got to be one of the dumbest moves of all time - selling cars at invoice through dealers who charged a lot more.
Basically, you could go to carorder.com, select
your car, and then they'd sell it to you. You'd
deal with a local car dealer (or they'd truck it to you on a flatbed truck)
I wanted a 1999 civic lx. Cheap, reliable transportation (especially when buying said vehicle at invoice) I had recently been in
an accident and my old car was a total loss. This
was in august/september of '99.
A week or so later, the supply of '99 civics has dried up. They offer to sell me a 2000 civic at '99 invoice price (about $500 below 2000 invoice) if I wait for a month. Since I'm driving a rental courtesty of the idiot who totalled my last car I take the deal.
About a month later (early october I think) I get
a call from the dealer telling me my car is ready. I get there are check it out. We go in to sign the paperwork. I ask about the whole carorder.com deal.
The dealer person says that they don't know the whole story, but a check arrived in the mail. She pulls the check out. It's from caroder.com and it's for about $2300.00. They basically gave
me a free downpayment on my car. I asked if I could make a copy of the check. I framed it and posted it in my office.
The moral of the story?
Losing money on every sale but making it up in volume probably isn't a good idea, especially when you are losing $thousands per sale.
Still, it was a sweet deal for me. The free TiVo I
got at networld+interop in may of 2000 was also a nice runner up. These were the glory days of N+I with a private party every night in vegas.
--chuck
Paypal was another - when they were trying to woo customers - other payment services had to keep up - they all offered some cash referal bonus - I must've earned close to $400 in such bonuses for getting people to sign up for paypal, homepay, ecount, etc etc.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Years ago, there was this company called Pointcast (who knows, maybe they still exist). They were all about the push technology. They had a program that let you select all sorts of news items (among other stuff) and it would periodically be updated, so you could open the program and find the latest headlines. It's similar to something like My Yahoo! but I liked the interface much better than today's web-based stuff. Sadly, they decided to change things frequently and ditched the program, and thus I stopped caring about them.
I'd just gotten started surfing the net from work when Sunny Delight ran an online promotion. They gave cryptic hints about where to find a hidden bottle of SunnyD on some web site. You'd get a score based on how long it took for you to find the bottle, and the best score got the cool prizes. I won a $20 CDNow gift cert and a T-Shirt.
But better than that was the online community that sprung up. When we discovered that SunnyD was using banner ads from a single source, I compiled a JavaScript application to automatically generate BurstNet banner ads with every possible serial number. We pushed the limits of 1996 search engine technology doing reverse lookups on the bottle image filename. Other coders found creative ways around HTTP-REFERER when SunnyD caught on to our "creative" techniques. I learned the joys and pitfalls of message board moderation -- skills I still use today.
I guess the thing I miss from those days that's not available now is the sense of discovery. The 'net (or at least the www part) was new, and we (the searchers as well as the SunnyD admins) were exploring its limits.
For the curious, check out the Sunny D entry in this online Trophy Case. It's about 3/4 of the way down the page.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I remember reading suck on the old 486's in the back of the IT dept at my univ. while waiting for tech support calls. We were offering free ethernet access in the dorm rooms, and only had a few takers. Those were the days....
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
You sir, are WORSE THAN HITLER, and if I ever see you again, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS!!!!!
Wierdly, some of them are still trading. Ziplink (ZIPL) is quoted at $0.0001 on NASDAQ. Their web site is still up, although most of the pages are bad links. Their last news item is "ZipLink, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZIPL), a wholesale Internet connectivity provider, today announced that the company plans to suspend its operations effective today, November 17, 2000."
Despite this, the stock is still tradable, and a few people trade it each day.
I know I am posting this so late, that no one may ever see it - but I just have to say, after reading through the replies - We were basically asked - what was cool, what do you miss about the dot.com era, and most of the replies are about how easy it was to screw over a vendor!!!! So many ppl found a way to profit over a vendor's attempt to offer a deal to the customer - buying online then selling it for more on eBay, while having the vendor ship for you?? Getting extra checks and just keeping them? Signing up to browse the web then having a mouse emulator do it for you?? The list goes on. Just one more element to add to the long list of failed business practices that led up to a very fateful economical crash. And some of those very same ppl who did the screwing, are now themselves screwed as they are unemployed, etc. Sheesh!!!
If the business model does not take into account the basic greed, selfishness and cunning of the environment, then it is doomed to failure.
That is not to say that I agree with the actions of the above posters, but it is naive to believe that the companies did not bring it upon themselves.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Being able to pick off Rocket Soldiers, Heavy Weapon's Guys, and Demoman with my sniper-rifle and a 384 ping in TeamFortress. I still cherish and would gradly accept the memories of getting grounded for playing TeamFortress all night on School nights... Nigh, those were the days. I miss my 28.8 with the upgrade chip to 33.6. I always wanted to learn how to whistle an ATA Handshake.... Dotcom? DotBust damn time of my life. -slicenglide
John Walsh once found me while looking for some other kid. He was not amused.