|
[Previous entry: "The thinking behind movie ratings"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Lentil soup for good luck in the New Year"]
"Back to the basics"
12/30/2002 Entry
Remember Yahoo! in 1997? (Click here if you don't.) It organized information, provided a search engine and gave you a free email account. It also didn't have much clutter, mostly just text with very few graphic ads to slow down data transfer. Things changed as it became a commercial enterprise and struggled to make a profit. The number of services grew but the quality soon declined. Many similar sites that offered free services started moving toward a fee-based model. There is even a blog that chronicles The End of Free.
Here we are five years later with much less for free online especially if you are looking for quality services. This is not surprising. Paul Starr summed up the unrealistic expectations and approaches pretty well in the following: "When it first broke into public view, the Internet seemed like an economic as well as a technological miracle. As consumers, Americans came to expect that the information and services they found online would be free, while as investors they believed that the Net would generate billions of dollars in profits. A miracle is exactly what it would have taken to realize both those expectations." (quoted from the American Prospect article The Great Telecom Implosion)
In light of all that, it's a pleasant surprise to come upon an online service that does seem to offer something of quality for free. Enter My Way. It looks a lot like Yahoo! but without the graphic clutter. You can personalize it and it also offers a 6MB email account. [January 2nd addition: I just realized that it may not be possible to read email in text-only format in MyWay. That would be a huge bummer and limitation. I've contacted them to find out if I'm just missing something and to suggest it's something they may want to consider.] Moreover, because it is fairly new, you are likely to find a username that does not require throwing away all the vowels in your name or appending fifty numerals to it. I'm not fully clear on their business model but I'm happy to give it a try. I could always use a new email account that is spam-free (at least for now) and a place to organize some bookmarks for times when I'm not at my computer is also helpful to have. Moreover, My Way is partnering with Google for searches which is another plus.
Thanks to Law.com's Best of the Web in 2002 for pointing me to the site.
| |
