|
Going
through my old bookmarks of favourite websites I used to visit,
I was surprised and saddened to note that so many of them
had disappeared. No doubt some fortunate ones had been gobbled
up by bigger fish, but most others likely had their innards
ripped out and strewn across the city streets, for gluttonous
bloodsuckers to prey on flagrantly.
I know. I worked with a dotcom for a while. The Indian dotcom
bust was perhaps
even more gut-wrenching than elsewhere. A mad frenzy when
everyone wanted in, and an equally mad frenzy
to exit and stop the bleeding, all in the space of just over
a year-and-a-half. Makes you wonder about the wisdom of all
those top-notch businessmen and their highfalutin consultants,
with their specious
financial wizardry and ostensible forecasting mastery. That
apart, the bigger tragedy was that at many of the dotcoms
there was a considerable amount of great work-in-progress.
Hundreds of man-months of superlative effort, most of which
never saw the light of day the pendulum swung from one extreme
to the other quicker than salvage could even be contemplated,
let alone implemented.
If you’re an ex-dotcommer who wants to indulge in a bit
of nostalgia, or just a casual surfer who gets a kick out
of time warps, some salvage may just be possible. Check out
the Wayback
Engine at www.archive.org. Search for the dead-and-buried
website of your choice and right before your eyes you’ll
see history unfold, in the form of the site’s home pages
archived over the years. Eerie, but useful too since some
archives are more than a level deep, I was even able to retrieve
a couple of long-lost online articles of mine.
If you’ve been following the Internet world closely,
you’d remember that we’re almost upon the second
anniversary of NASDAQ’s bottoming out in the first week
of April 2000. Last year, to commemorate that Black Monday,
the guys at Iconocast, a popular online marketing
newsletter, had designated April 3rd as “Back the Net
Day”, set aside for people to express their “Internet
Appreciation” and combat the “viral lack of confidence”
in the Internet that seemed to be prevailing at the time.
Iconocast’s founder Michael Tchong urged netizens to
buy something online, to send online greeting cards through
Excite@Home (which has itself tanked, since), and do other
Net stuff on that day. No one’s talking of a Back the
Net Day this year, but that’s perhaps because a semblance
of sanity has returned the gold rush is history,
but everyone is also clear that the Net economy is far from
kaput and definitely
here to stay.
But revenues are still hard to come by. It’s really sad
to see a useful website struggle to survive, and then finally
choke, sputter and die. I’m sure many loyal users would
not mind parting with a few rupees from time to time to keep
their favourite sites above water. There just needs to be
a convenient way to do it. That’s what initiatives like
the Amazon Honor System, PayPal and Yahoo PayDirect were designed
for, to enable participating websites to solicit voluntary
contributions as low as $1 from appreciative surfers, mainly
in the US. I would welcome something like this in India too,
and would definitely support it, although as a concept this
has not caught on to the extent it should have, perhaps because
many websites take umbrage at the connotations of “charity”
involved, and are too proud to sign up with Amazon, or Yahoo
or others, which incidentally also extract their pound of
flesh from each transaction.
Another concept that has returned to prominence is that of
micropayments—tiny payments of a few pennies that users
could make every time they access a service or download something
from a specified website. Micropayments fell out of favour
when developers realised that the infrastructure creation
would cost more than the revenue generated, and that standards
formulation was a near-insurmountable problem. But now that
so many other business models
have failed, the realisation has dawned that tiny payments
may just be better than no payment at all—so we’re
seeing a resurgence
of micropayment initiatives, notably by IBM Research offshoot
Cartio, and ClickShare. We’re definitely going to see
much more activity on this front in coming months. Once the
obstacles are overcome, micropayments would mean that websites
could earn a little from a lot of people (which translates
into a lot of earnings) and, at the same time, users wouldn’t
have to pay huge subscriptions
upfront.
But all that is some way off. Meanwhile, until micropayments
become feasible,
or the honour system comes to India, I’m going to show
my appreciation for the Net by making a few purchases online
this April 3rd. Maybe it won’t bring all those dead websites
back to life; but just maybe, if enough people do likewise,
it would help some of the current lot thrive.
-
Val Souza, Editor
valsouza@expresscomputeronline.com
|
