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
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.
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
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.
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?
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
Friends told me about dialpad, but MyTalk was more useful because of its portability. You needed a computer in order to place calls over dialpads telephone/computer network, but you could access MyTalk's long-distance network of connected telephones/computers from any phone in continental North America. In the early days of MyTalk, I was exploiting the system by being a "telephone tourist" -- I'd call as far North in Canada as I could, and as far south in Mexico as I could, and I'd call places like Carnegie Hall and Hollywood and Niagra Falls... and I still look back at those memories with joy. Now I've got a crappy job in a callcenter, and I must annoy those exact places with market research surveys; it's ironic, in a way, that the very places I called for fun are now being called by me at work as part of a torturous job that not only tortures me, but also tortures the people I'm calling at all hours of the day, to ask them questions regarding things about which they have no reason to give a damn.
"I am a fictional character."
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?!?!?!?"