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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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Following are 3 good and 3 bad points, chosen randomly, of having the same contacted listed in more than one of the instant messaging or e-mail accounts you have have.

Pros of having the same contact on more than one e-mail and instant messaging account:

1. Talk via a different account if the primary account is not working
2. Talk advantage of different accounts for different things - one for texting, one for webcam, etc
3. Separate business and personal communication with the same person

Cons of having the same contact on more than one e-mail and instant messaging account:

1. Make communication more confusing with a person by having too many unnecessary channels of communication
2. Have too many duplicate contacts across your instant messaging and e-mail accounts
3. Harder to keep track of all the communication through different accounts between you and the other person

So, do you have any contact who is listed on more than one of your instant messaging or e-mail accounts? Is there a reason for that? Do you think it is a good or a bad thing?

Thank you for reading. Please let me know what you think.

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As I sometimes say, the question of whether or not one should use instant messaging over e-mail or vice versa can be answered by finding out which medium the message in question can benefit from, and what the participants of that medium can be most comfortable with also. Following are 5 random benefits and drawbacks of using e-mail over instant messages, to help you get a sense of why you may prefer one over the other, or even why you may treat both the same.

5 random benefits of using e-mail over instant messages

1. Allows more time for planning
2. Allows more serious actions to be taken
3. Allows more thought out responses
4. Allows a more thorough, permanent form of communication with more explained logic
5. Can avoid more conflicts by allowing people to focus more on issues instead of emotions

5 random drawbacks of using e-mail instead of instant messaging

1. Not as fast as instant messages
2. May consume more time, depending on the people involved, when it comes to taking actions
3. People not good at communication may feel threatened based on other people’s online communication skills
4. May make formal and informal people feel uncomfortable around each other, depending on each one’s flexibility skills
5. Can result in some inexperienced people to focus more on presentation than the actual message, specially in businesses - in my view, 99% of all the famous bloggers you see out there fall a victim to this as they tend to follow the rules they learned while in school than learning the effective and business form of communication

Do you prefer e-mails over instant messengers?

So, do you prefer e-mailing people instead of instant messaging them?

Please let me know what you think. Thank you for reading.

[update - August 23rd, 2007 - 10:02 am PST] In the original article, I had accidentally written “4″ instead of “5″ points for the above random benefits and drawback lists. I have corrected that, thanks to Jess. [end of update]

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