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1. E-mail

   I remember an era during the 90’s when signing up for dozens of e-mail accounts was cool. Having so many e-mail accounts did nothing; sending an e-mail was still sending an e-mail. People back then had Hotmail [now called Windows Live Mail], Coldmail, Yahoo Mail, Mail.com, ICQ mail, and AOL mail. Now, people also have Gmail, self-hosted e-mails on personal domains, and more. Having more e-mail accounts was once considered a status. Now, even though many people do not realize that each existing and additional e-mail account can bring in its own unique benefits and downsides, more and more people still keep opening new e-mail accounts daily.

   Opening e-mail accounts is one of the longest lasting online trends ever, and e-mails are still one of the most widely used online tools, if not the most widely used online tool.

2. Guestbooks

   This trend also started more solidly in the 90’s, and continued all the way until the first year or so after 2000 under the original name “guestbook“, after which the name continued and continues to lose its popularity to other terms and concepts which have been derived from it. The term guestbook came from the actual guestbooks and the same term used to describe books at places like museums, where visitors could leave comments and remarks for others to see, whether anonymously or with any detail. Online, in many cases, the guestbook became more popular than e-mail during its strong day, not in number of users but in actual fame, among many people who had guestbooks like Bravenet Guestbooks.

   Guestbooks paved the way for public comments that we see on blogs today. Overall, Guestbooks are still around in their pure form and in some evolved forms like online blog comments. Original, pure guestbooks themselves have lost a lot of their original popularity. In many cases, guestbooks have lost popularity and ground to the very concepts that were derived from them, like comments and forums.

3. Online diaries, blogs and their variants

   Online diaries were the sites that brought blogs into existence. Technically, blogs are nothing more than diaries. Of course, the concept of blogging has been commercialized and now online diaries, the very sites that started it all, are considered immature and not worthy by many of the blogs that aim to make money through non-personal content. I know many people who had and have different online diaries for different reasons. Many people would simply abandon one online diary for the other, as the concept of deleting online accounts was not considered as important by many people in the mid-90’s.

   Among the other things that online diaries have evolved into, blogs are the new normal craze now. Many people get more excited about having a blog instead of getting excited of what they want to achieve and what they can achieve with a blog. Online diaries have evolved into many things including blogs, networking sites, and more. LiveJournal can probably be considered an evolved example of personal diaries.

   Blogs are thriving, and are continuing to get stronger everyday. According to Technorati, more than 70 millions online blogs existed as of April 2007.

4. Chat and instant messaging accounts

   Instant messaging started mainly during the 2nd half of the 90’s, and to this day is very popular. Instant messaging accounts allow people to instantly chat with someone online. In the 90’s, people used to lure their friends into using ICQ to keep in touch. Slowly, Yahoo Messenger, AIM and MSN Messenger [now called Windows Live Messenger] brought more popularity to the entire instant messaging arena.

   Instant messaging itself got popular because of Internet Relay Chat [IRC]. IRC allowed people to chat instantly and live, and thus allowed them to communicate a bit faster than e-mail, if the people involved were online and using an IRC program at the same time. IRC evolved into different kinds of instant messaging, and instant messaging itself evolved and divided into voice chats, webcam conferences, live chat via e-mail accounts such as in Gmail, and more. In some ways, IRC itself can be considered an evolution of e-mail.

   Instant messaging accounts and online chats are also thriving and getting more popular everyday. At this moment, for the first time in internet history, a growing number of online people are using instant messaging more than e-mail.

5. Networking sites, which include social networking sites

   The latest, youngest and biggest craze right now is to open a social networking account. MySpace, twitter, facebook, linkedin, Bebo and many other networking and social networking sites came out with a big bang at different times during the last 5 years. As of last week, MySpace had over 200 million accounts. If it is assumed that each of those 200 millions accounts is owned by a unique individual, 200 millions MySpace members are almost 1/3rd the size of the entire U.S. population. Many people have multiple accounts on different networking sites, and many people simply delete their online networking accounts so that they can start afresh with new accounts.

   Networking sites are very strong right now, attracting more and more members everyday. At the same time, networking sites are also in their infancy sage. Social networking sites are the least experienced players in the entire online arena compared to the other 4 types [e-mail, guest books, online diaries and instant messaging accounts]. In many ways, networking sites can be considered children of concepts like Yahoo Groups and the original Usenet groups, now part of Google groups.

   The trend of opening networking sites in huge numbers started recently, and is in full force right now, gaining more momentum. It is happening and evolving live as you read this.

There you have it. Listed above are 5 trends of opening up 5 different kinds of accounts. These 5 services have had a historical trend of attracting a crowd that focused hysterically on opening new accounts. E-mail is the oldest and longest running of such trends, and networking sites are the youngest of the bunch.

Can you think of any trend from the above or any other trend you yourself may have been, or are, involved in? Do you have any questions or comments? Please let me know.

Thanks for reading.

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1. Directions

   Driving around with furniture and going to at least 4 cities everyday, in the middle of a move, can prove to cause headaches sometimes. That is why using the cell phone, I saved a lot of time finding out directions or shortcuts to different places. The cell phone allows me to either access Google Maps, or call a 1-800 number to find out directions. For reasons I will explain in the near future, I was forced to put some of the furniture on top of my car at the last minute in order to move it to the new house. While driving, the furniture fell down once. I decided to find some local roads instead of taking the freeway. Google Maps showed me a local route to my destination. It took longer, but the furniture did not fall again from the top of my car.

2. Finding out specific answers to specific questions

   Using the cell phone, I could call someone and find out some information, or I could even text some people. I had a very important presentation a few days ago, and I had forgotten some key information. I was driving, so checking the internet via my cell phone was not possible as I did not have enough time. What was the solution? I decided to either quickly e-mail someone or text someone. Some people I knew in other countries were sleeping like babies, so I decided to ask Valerie if she could help me . She helped me, by texting me back with all the information I needed. In this case, the cell phone is sometimes only good when you know someone reliable who can help you find some very important information. Thanks Valerie!

3. Contacting people

   This can be considered the most basic purpose of a cell phone. While doing a lot of important things, none of which can easily be given priority over something else, contacting people for various things by placing a simple phone call can help tremendously. I called a few people to confirm appointments, and I called a few people to let them know I would be a few minutes late. I also talked to different people about different important things, in other countries also, about topics ranging from business tasks to personal things.

4. Checking e-mail

   E-mail is unfortunately a big part of my life. The reason I say “unfortunately” is because I do not like relying on any piece of technology, unless it helps and cannot backfire. I get many e-mails everyday, and thus checking those e-mails via my cell phone while on the go is very important to me. I was selling some furniture, and I got an e-mail from a buyer willing to pay the price I wanted. I contacted them through my cell phone e-mail, and I sold the furniture.

5. View missed calls

   If your cell phone allows you to view missed calls, this can be one of the most important features available. I get a lot of phone calls regularly, from friends, strangers, business contacts who are either friends or just business contacts, and even new random people who call for life-threatening help for various reasons [one of my supposed-specialties]. While driving around and moving stuff, I missed a lot of calls, and I was able to call back some people. Of course, I was not able to call back any blocked calls or calls from restricted numbers.

The 5 examples above illustrate how my cell phone helped me tremendously during the last few days. By helping me find directions to finding information to interacting with others to checking e-mails to finding out who tried to contact me, my cell phone helped me save a lot of time and helped me do a lot of things faster.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments about this. Thank you.

Below is the original post I had written, on July 31st, 12:02 am PST.

Title: No post today, tuesday - Moving houses - July 31st, 2007

Hello. It is that time of the year again, where I have to do it again. No, I don’t mean getting stabbed again. I am moving houses and changing cities. I will most probably not be able to access a computer with an internet connection today [Tuesday], so I apologize in advance. I will update this very post on Wednesday, hopefully, with some more useful information, like a good article. Once the new article goes live, this very message will either be buried or will get deleted.

I will reply to all comments and e-mails by this Thursday evening. If you wish to get a hold of me, simply contact me by e-mailing or im’ing me on my cell phone through e-mail or AOL AIM instant messaging.

Thank you for supporting me so far. I really appreciate it.

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If a site tries hard to appear in the top search results, it better provide better content too

Let us take a hypothetical situation. If I see ProBlogger appearing first in search results when searching for the words “Make money online”, and I notice the quality of content on Problogger is inferior compared to the content on JohnChow.com, I will think that Darren Rowse, owner of ProBlogger, simply focused on getting higher listing on search engines instead of coming up with better content than other sites like JohnChow.com.

Why? Because I would notice that his content, in this hypothetical example, is of lesser importance, value and quality compared to other sites which do not rank high on search engines. I would also think the same thing for JohnChow.com, if his site appeared higher in search results compared to other sites but provided content of lesser value, or content that has already been discussed elsewhere compared to other sites which have unique and more useful content.

Of course, as you get more popular, people tend to agree more with you. Reading a post about having good anchor text on hundreds of new blogs on the internet for the last 5 years does not spark much interest in some people, while those very people jump to commenting with great excitement because of someone like John Chow bringing up the same point. I wonder if some people are simply looking to praise anything written on prominent blogs instead of focusing on what is being said and why it is being said.

What do I think of JohnChow.com?

As for me, I initially started reading John Chow’s site because of his humor and the way he discussed random things that he wrote about so well. As time passes, his blog is focusing more and more on being commercial, full of reviews and stuff related to making money. I guess directions change from time to time. Even my site has gone from being completely personal and talking about everything to being a blend of personal thoughts and public trends, among several other things.

As long as John Chow’s site has something that does not focus solely on making money or commercial marketing, I will continue to be a reader. He writes well and in my view, with honesty, and when he jokes, it is good. As for ProBlogger, in my view, I like Darren Rowse being honest and transparent in his posts, and for addressing the issues of making money and commercial marketing well through direct and indirect ideas and thoughts. I will continue to be his reader also.

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People from almost everywhere have been able to open Orkut accounts on their own for a while now. Therefore, chances are you can now open a Gmail and Orkut account directly by opening a Google Account, without the need of any invitation.

You can read my previous Gmail and Orkut invitation posts to get an idea of what the invitation trend has been about. Thank you for allowing me to invite you to both services all these years. I have handed out around a 100 Orkut invites and over 300 Gmail invites so far, including one for CJ’s Gmail invite request yesterday. I still have the ability to send Gmail and Orkut invites to people who cannot open those accounts, though now for many people such invitations may probably work more as recommendations than actual invitations.

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John Chow’s site is fairly new to the internet; John Chow, however, is not. He has been working on the famous hardware site The Tech Zone since 1999, TTZ Media Network, and his new blog since December of 2005. Since then, he has been offering a lot of information on things that have made his site better and tips that have helped him optimize different aspects of his site in order to earn more. He offers tips ranging in many topics; from the banner ad types suitable for different advertising networks work to how doing different things with your content gives different results. John does all of this not by theorizing stuff but by giving examples of his own experience with his blog.

John has also started helping his readers in other ways. He offers prizes through contests and recently offered to linkback to anyone who writes a review of his site, both good and bad. That is what I am doing in this post. So far, I have had a good time reading his posts and so my overall experience has been a positive one. I have been confused though by the “Google’s #1 Dot Com Mogul” word being used around the site, but the more I read the site, the more I realize what it really means. The site does not give you the answers that you can copy verbatim to your site, but tells what the results were for different things happening around his site.

I hope this review helps you know a bit about John Chow’s blog if you did not already know about it.

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