There's a list of the top 10 internet fads on Kuro5hin at the moment, creating quite a discussion. It made a fun read, and then I thought... this isn't quite right, is it? Sure, it's funny to see some of the old technologies remembered for a laugh, but a few of them weren't a fad at all.
Take the number one fad, PointCast, the ill-fated "push" technology that was all the thing in 1997. This was a system that regularly sent headline and stock info to your desktop, without you actually going on to the web to ask for it. How we all laughed at the foolishness of it at the time. It was just soooo not dot.com. "The internet," we all said haughtily, "is not TV. We want to go look for information, not passively sit there as it comes to us."
Well, I've got one word for you: RSS. In tandem with apps like NetNewsWire, it bears more than a passing resemblance to PointCast. "Push" (whisper it) isn't just still alive, it's thriving, so healthy it's cool.
Another old favourite is in there too: Wap, at number three. which is surprising since I'd say that it's experiencing a quiet and very profitable rehabilitation in Europe these days with services like Vodafone Live! (although nobody, but nobody, calls it Wap anymore).
At least Wap fares one better than "anything sold online", which seems a little glib until you realise they're not really taking a general swipe at the large number of (profitable) online stores around today, just those selling petfood. And even that's flawed: sure, getting tens of millions to launch a business selling petfood online was lunacy, but it doesn't mean that selling petfood online is necessarily a terrible idea. There's probably a pensioner down in Cornwall (it's always Cornwall, don't ask me why) selling her own brand of catfood online, at a healthy profit, right now.
Seems to me this isn't a celebration of faddy ideas which somehow blagged their way to venture capital millions, but a memorial to (mostly) good ideas sunk by the irrational optimism that surrounded them when they first appeared. And irrational dissing of ideas is just as dumb as irrational boosting of them...
