You Should Be Dancing
02/04/2006
I don’t know how or when it happened
But the internet has never been so fun. And addictive. And in an instant gratification world, it really doesn’t take too long for the next best thing to come along.
I remember all those years ago I thought Rocketmail was the epitome of smarts. No more crap ntu.edu.sg email, no more ISP email addys. Something I could check from anywhere (not that I used that feature too much).
Then Yahoo! sunk their fingers into it, and I moved from My Excite to My Yahoo! because the latter just had more content.
And along came Yahoo! Messenger, and Yahoo! Photos – complete time suckers, like everything else on dial-up.
Though none of these could compare with the time-sucking dedication I devoted to Napster. I loved Napster. It even sounded cute. Even my dad used it.
Fast forward five years (and truly like dog years, it really did feel like 35 years) and we’ve the Web 2.0 versions of everything (well almost except for Messenger).
Rocketmail morphed into a spanking version of Yahoo! Mail, which hung in there for two more years until the now-termed “classic” version made its debut, bumped its storage to 250mb and then 1gb (thank you Gmail!). To up the ante, two years back Yahoo! bought a pretty cool mail product called Oddpost, which is now their Beta Mail product. It’s an outlook like interface, with the freedom of being a web product. Now how cool is that?
My Yahoo! hasn’t really moved along too much, compared to stuff like Netvibes and Protopage. Protopage is cute, it lets you move the modules around the page almost like a widget – even has the transparent background going.
Yahoo! Photos has pretty much stayed the way it is, but last year Yahoo! bought Flickr which has blown anything photo-related out of the water. Storage + community, how cool is that? Flickr isn’t something you can really describe, Flickr is best experienced. It’s a complete time sucker, and you really can’t help yourself.
And the best thing since Napster – not free, but legal – is iTunes. I love that I don’t have to buy the whole damn album. I love that I get videos along with my downloads sometimes, and I love that I can search for the song without going around HMV in circles. So totally love. The only thing that iTunes could do better is to do a lyric search to present results, cos how many times have you heard parts of a song on the way to work or on tv and not been able to find it?
So there we are. Five years on, and things are still exciting. It’s still a great place to be.
