JerseySmarts.com

The Internet As It Exists In 2014… It Kind Of Sucks

Joe — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 11:30:04 +0000

Before I began writing this entry, I wanted to reach out to a few of my long-time online friends just to shoot the breeze. I wanted to ask them how work was going, how their side projects were coming along, if there was a project that we could collaborate on, etc. This is what the internet used to exist of when programs like ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger were running wild on everyone’s desktops. In 2014, we don’t have that any more. Sure, we have Facebook Messenger and Gmail Chat, but they’re both extensions of different social media websites. They’re not designed for one-on-one interaction between individuals in a private, friendly setting.

Frankly, the internet in 2014 kind of sucks.

While I don’t think that we need to go back to the days of the Prodigy internet message boards or the original America Online, I do think that as we’ve moved further down the path of “Social Media Life” we’ve actually removed much of the interaction that we used to have with our online friends. Even as close as 10 years ago I could log-on to the internet and have my Yahoo Messenger load up as well as my AOL Instant Messenger and immediately engage in any number of one-on-one conversations with both my “real life” friends and my internet friends. And the conversations weren’t useless or the type of silly drivel that you read on these humor websites. No, we were making connections and having real conversations. It was fun!

Today, everything seems to need to be filtered through a Facebook or other social media-like portal and I don’t like it. I want to be able to log-on and talk to the folks who originally made the internet fun for me. I also want to be able to pick these people’s brains in a more readily available manner than sending a message into a seemingly black social media hole. There’s no connection in that method of communication.

Unfortunately, though, I don’t think that we’re ever going to get back to that level of meaningful one-on-one interaction on the internet. I think we’re stuck in a mess that doesn’t allow people to grow real friendships through shared online interactions. And given the friends that I’ve made through these online interactions, I think that’s a real shame for future generations of internet users.

Bringing on Some Help For Usable Web Solutions, LLC

Joe — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:29:05 +0000

After some thought, I’ve decided to bring on additional consultant help for my website company, Usable Web Solutions, LLC. So I’m pleased to bring on Santi F. – a fraternity brother from Seton Hall and friend from back when I was in college. When I was running my chapter of the fraternity down at Monmouth University, he was running his chapter up at Seton Hall. We had a lot of good times with the two groups mixing around.

For those wondering, I now have over 30 clients in the website company and more than 10 pending requests (which would put me around 45 clients overall). For a part time gig, the website company really is heating up!

Yahoo is Shutting Down GeoCities?!

Joe — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 15:30:12 +0000

Yahoo! is shutting down its free website service – GeoCities. For those of you that don’t know, GeoCities is/was one of the oldest free website companies on the internet. It was a website system that tried to build “communities” of different web pages which had similar themes. For example, many of you know that I started creating websites with a personal homepage called The Balrog’s Lair. At the time I started it (sophomore year of high school, I think) I was a huge wrestling fan and I intended to write some type of wrestling stuff on that homepage. As such, I was categorized in the “sports and recreation” neighborhood which was titled, “Colosseum.” In fact, the URL of my first web page was www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Track/5869/ Pretty unique, huh?

Literally thousands of young web entrepreneurs started out with free websites built at GeoCities. Most of us, of course, started on the site when it was privately owned. However, after a number of years (and a healthy number of subscribers), the entire system was sold to Yahoo and things went downhill from there. Yahoo cut the amount of bandwidth allowed to users and immediately instituted a pay-for-service option that gave the user essentially what they used to have for free. Lucky for me, it was around this time that I started dabbling in the actual purchase of domain names and hosting packages to manage my web needs.

Yahoo also shortened the URLs (which may have been best for everyone involved), but they shortened them to your user id. I don’t think that I hide my name from anyone on this blog, but I didn’t want my wrestling website to become geocities.com/jpalazzolo. How weird would that be?

Anyway, here is the message I received from Yahoo about the closing of GeoCities:

Very sad. Hopefully, someone will come along and try to buy the GeoCities asset from Yahoo and breathe some new life into this once great service for young web entrepreneurs and people who were just looking for a little place of their own online.