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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 5 things that I think MyBlogLog, or Yahoo, need to improve or work on in the long run. Just because a business model exists does not mean it will work. It has to be fixed and improved constantly. It is more important to fix current bugs that affect users or the overall service instead of introducing new fancy features.

5 things MyBlogLog needs to improve

1. MyBlogLog only tracks other MyBlogLog users

   MyBlogLog lets you discover people who visit your site only if they are also MyBlogLog users. Otherwise, you get even fewer stats than your regular stats program.

   “MyBlogLog was designed to track only registered MyBlogLog users“, you say? Then why is everyone running around, including MyBlogLog admins, claiming that anyone who visits your site can be tracked? The original promise of the program was to discover who visited your site, and not which MyBlogLog members visit your site.

   This bad point about MyBlogLog is also its strongest selling point: if a user is registered, it allows a site owner to find out exactly who was visiting a site including their name and site url.

2. I visit your site only if I see you on my MyBlogLog widget

   Many bloggers have stopped visiting other sites unless they see someone in their MyBlogLog widget. That means these bloggers are only visiting the sites of those MyBlogLog members who visit them. That also means these bloggers do not visit, or rarely visit, the sites of their commentors or people who are not MyBlogLog users.

   MyBlogLog is supposed to let you find out who visits you. It is not supposed to let you prefer MyBlogLog users over non-MyBlogLog users. MyBlogLog needs to promote a mentality through the MyBlogLog blog that will allow people to realize that they should not avoid visiting sites that do not appear in their MyBlogLog stats.

3. Using MyBlogLog makes you depend on MyBlogLog servers for your site to load

   The MyBlogLog code loads a lot of things from the MyBlogLog servers. That means if the MyBlogLog servers go down, your site will load slow or keep loading. That has happened to me a lot, where my site has taken up to a minute to load simply because some image from the MyBlogLog server was not loading.

4. MyBlogLog widget is not customizable

   When you show the MyBlogLog code or the widget on your site, one of the only things you can customize is the colors. Otherwise, you are stuck with showing the standard format of the MyBlogLog widget, including the advertisement link that points back to their site.

   Some people may say that a free service comes with a link pointing back to the service. My point here is not to argue whether or not the link back to MyBlogLog should be necessary; what I am showing you is one of the things that show how and why the MyBlogLog widget is not customizable.

5. MyBlogLog communities are spammable blogrolls in disguise

   These can be two points, though I will combine them as one. The MyBlogLog communities are supposedly places where people can interact and find out more about each other. In reality, the MyBlogLog communities are nothing more than blogrolls. MyBlogLog communities currently display only the names and links to people and sites you are associated with.

   MyBlogLog does allow you to e-mail other people, though that has resulted in spam messages, including people sending “Thank you for visiting me” emails to you everytime you visit their site or MyBlogLog profile, probably resulting in spam advertisement to be disguised in unwanted “thank you” e-mails. Such a trend is increasing, turning MyBlogLog into more of a MySpace community where many spammers spam every profile they come across just to get someone to visit a specific profile in return.

So, what is the verdict?

The verdict is that you have to figure out your own verdict. If the above things are insignificant to you and you still consider MyBlogLog to have an actual purpose, go ahead and keep hugging MyBlogLog. Personally, I am still using the MyBlogLog service as of this post, as it does one thing for me that has made me keep it on my site: it shows me new MyBlogLog members who visit my site. It does introduce new people to me, and it is easy to find out who has visited my site.

How Yahoo’s control of MyBlogLog is shaping things

One of the things, in addition to the above list, that I would love MyBlogLog to have is to allow anonymous users to register their site addresses, using relevant e-mail addresses from the same site domain, so that people are not required to register new accounts, but are allowed to enter in a url that is kept in a cookie or associated with their IP. That way, we can have more non-MyBlogLog members tracked also.

However, considering the fact that Yahoo bought MyBlogLog, we may probably see more strict registration requirements where people who do not register will continue to be left out of the MyBlogLog service. Recently Yahoo announced about improving MyBlogLog, though the above issues are not being addressed yet, according to the announcement. At least it is a good thing that Yahoo is working on improving some things about the service it acquired not too long ago.

What do you think?

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A dialer software dials into another computer to give you internet connectivity. Many ISPs these days release dialer software that comes bundled with unnecessary extra features. This results in the bandwidth being wasted and the computer slowing down. PeoplePC dialer, for example, always keeps a window open that shows ads and links in the form of their website. If you close this window, you get disconnected automatically.

You can easily bypass the dialer software and go online by creating a dialup connection yourself. I will use Microsoft Windows as an example OS for this: go to your “Control panel” and double click on the “Network Connections” icon. Then, click on “Create a new connection” to open the “New Connection Wizard.” You will be asked about the type of connection you want and the way you want to connect. Choose the “Connect to the Internet” and “Set up my connection manually” options respectively. You will then be asked about the nature of your connection hardware. Choose “Connect using a dial-up modem” option for this.

This will create a dialup connection for you in the network connections area of the control panel. Simply double click this connection and enter the following three pieces of information whenever you want to start connecting to your ISP:

Information you need to connect to your ISP

1. Your ISP username that you chose while signing up
2. Your ISP password that you chose while signing up
3. A local access number to dial into

A local access number is a number you dial into to get an internet connection. I have listed below the local access numbers for some major ISPs within the United States to help you:

List of local access numbers for a few major ISPs

• AOL dialup access numbers
• AT&T and SBC Yahoo dialup access numbers
• Earthlink dialup access numbers
• Fry’s dialup access numbers
• NetZero dialup access numbers

Sometimes it is not easy to find local access numbers for an ISP through their website. For example, I could not find a list of access numbers on the PeoplePC website. If you run into a similar situation, follow these four steps to find a list of local access numbers:

4 steps to find out local access numbers for your ISP

1. Install the ISP dialer program.”What!? I was just told that it’s the most evil thing in the world!“, you are thinking. Do not worry. We will remove the dialer program in the fourth step.
2. Use the dialer software to find a list of local access numbers. The dialer software will show you a list of local access numbers before it connects you to the internet.
3. Write down all the local access numbers for later reference.
4. Uninstall the dialer software.

You now have a list of local access numbers you can use to connect to the internet. Whenever you feel like surfing the web, simply go into your network connections area and open the connection you created. The benefits of taking this route are simple: you save time by connecting in fewer steps, you do not install any additional programs that you do not need, and you end up saving a little bit bandwidth.

I hope this helps you in some way. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know either via email or by posting a comment here. Thank you for reading this.

Updates
I am getting several e-mails from many people asking questions about the direct dialing route I post above. I will slowly add updates to this page to include any questions that may help you successfully dial into your ISP without using your ISP’s dialer software.

February 15th, 2007 - 9:05 am PST

The following question was sent to me by a wonderful reader who said that basically they could not connect directly to PeoplePC using my method above when they used their usernames which otherwise worked well when used in the PeoplePC dialer software. If you enter your username and it gets denied, try entering your full PeoplePC or your ISP e-mail address in the login box [like username@peoplepc.com ] . That should solve the issue. If you are using your e-mail to login, try entering only your username [username instead of username@peoplepc.com ]. Basically you are switching the two to see if you can login, and in most cases, you will be able to login without further issues. Thank you.

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1. Your webcam turns on automatically whenever your computer turns on. You have setup your computer and your instant messaging programs to automatically turn on the webcam in any chat or voice conversation, whether you’re sleeping, around the computer or away from home.
2. You try to turn off the lights in the shower, to make sure no one watches you. Yes, you can dry yourself with ease knowing that you aren’t being watched by someone on Skype, and when you realize you don’t have a webcam in the bathroom, you don’t laugh at the whole situation; you get mad. “Why don’t I have a webcam in the shower?“, you ask yourself.
3. Your webcam is powerful enough to move along with your body. If you walk in your room, your webcam follows you. If you bend down to scratch your body, your webcam captures all the action.
4. You don’t like to approve online friends who don’t have a webcam. If an online buddy does not have a webcam, you block them from your Yahoo buddy list. If a new person who wants to add you as their friend doesn’t have a webcam, you block them.
5. You dress up everyday to look good on the webcam. You take your clothes to the laundry so that you can look good on the webcam. When you go out to a shopping center or a mall, you dress in clothes that usually result in people staying at least 5 feet away from you, in a circle. That makes you feel powerful, and you don’t know why.
6. If you need some time alone from everyone, you turn the webcam away towards the wall. Sometimes you sit in a corner where the webcam’s view is blocked by some object. You never unplug the webcam during this process, by the way.
7. Your webcam has a name. You call your webcam “HAL” or “SAL“, and the next generation of webcams, in your view, should be able to talk.
8. The first thing you like to see in the morning is your webcam. People dream of waking up next to a beautiful person in the morning. You dream of waking up to a better webcam that is watching you in the morning.
9. Your webcam is your counselor. When you’re depressed or upset, you talk to the webcam as if you were talking to a qualified psychiatrist. Sometimes when you’re really upset, you also say to your webcam “Oh come on, don’t say that!“, knowing that the webcam is actually responding to you.
10. Your webcam is a baby of yours. If someone tries to fight with you or insult you in your computer room, you tell that person “Not here“, pointing to the webcam with your eyes. You don’t want your webcam to be exposed to indecent words.
11. Your webcam is your baby. If you ever sleep with someone in the computer room, you don’t remember that night as sleeping with Betsy, but as sleeping with Betsy and your webcam.
12. You don’t like anyone to talk about your webcam in a bad way. If anyone ever tells you that “your webcam sucks” or that your webcam is old, you get offended and block that person on your MSN Messenger account.
13. If anyone ever comes to your computer room and touches your webcam, you get surprised and ask that person “WHAT ARE YOU DOING??!!“ There is no word for a pedophile drooling after webcams, so you call that person a “webdophile” before kicking them out of the house. Since there is no law yet to protect webcams against a webdophile, you tell your webcam that same night “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.” You then curse all the webdophiles and cry yourself to sleep.
14. Breaking up with a webcam is always hard for you. If you find a better webcam than the one you already have, you sit down and look at the old webcam with teary eyes before unplugging it from your computer.

Those are the top signs that will show you the strength of your love for your webcam. What about you? How much do you like your webcam? Do you even have a webcam? Do you consider it a piece of technology or a piece of your heart?

As for me, I’ll get back to my webcam conference with someone Skype right now. Thank you for reading.

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