Picture: Dazed and confused
I am sure many are the victims of Cyberspace whirlpools. Days ago, my buddy the Scorpion Queen (Kate) bemoaned the complexities of internet. Like many others the poor girl only wanted to maintain an easy to use webpage, social networking and ocassional blog post. But not that easy huh… I just thought well, sure these are the tough times for those who are not much into HTML, CSS and other technical juggernauts like that. But today, once again I found myself totally at loss and enmeshed when I tried to make simple updates to my blogs. All blog portals with different Blog stats, usernames, comments, font styles, lay out styles, colors etc………………………………………….
More choice certainly does not appear to be a good thing. Turn the clocks back to 1999. Simpler times. That’s when I got regular and personal internet access from my home. It was a lovely period. For email you only used Hotmail or Yahoo or your ISP’s email service like AOL. As for instant messengers ICQ was the in thing… then MSN was very nice too. If you felt like being more adventurous, you could get Yahoo Messenger as well.
Blogging wasn’t born yet. But people got the taste of marking their own internet territory with a Personal webpage provided by a few internet portals including Yahoo (Geocities). Simpler times: like, while watching a beautiful rainbow, splashing the the puddles of sparkling water with your bare feet. And listening to the little birds twitter, chirp and sing and watching them playfully hop across thetree branches.
Then things got worse. Free email services sprang up in a thousand places by a thousand companies, portals etc. Besides, if you’re working for a place or you’re a student in college or University, they give you your own official email address. The only question is, which one to choose and use? I was always very cynical about ‘’signing up” at new places. But discounting the many email accounts I have been deleting forever, today, I have email addresses at Vodaphone, Gmail, Yahoo (2 addresses), Hotmail (2 addresses) and further blogging and social networking Accounts at My Space, Blogger, WordPress, Multiply, Yahoo 360, Technorati, Beebo, Ringo, Flickr, Shelfari, Librarything, Mybloglog, His Stats, Blog Patrol, NetScape, Digg.com, MSN Spaces and certainly there are many more I can’t even remember!
Every now and then I keep getting emails from old friends informing me that they’ve signed up at some site, there are heaps of their pictures, new info and blogs etc. In order to view their page, I go to that particular website and it asks me to Sign UP in order to view content (As if I forgot to mention couple of more Friendster and Orkut and Facebook and Mash)
Can you believe that I ACTUALLY REMEMBER THESE NAMES. I swear I was not looking at some list to write all of this. I am typing straight away as it is. How many of my brain cells are being used merely to remember all this and their usernames and passwords (Ok I tend to keep them same, mostly, but still!!!)
There seems to be no help at all. I just realized it may not be all that simple just to quit Yahoo. They recently bought MyBloglog for about $10 million. And with their deep pockets I’m sure they’re up for something big, adventurious and jazzy when they upgrade our abandoned Yahoo 360 account. And then…? What are we gonna do with this Multiply. Of course we will keep this one too! And the plot thickens forever, ad infinitum.
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