Dot-Com Service Memories? 96
Buster Chan asks: "As the dotcom boom was still going strong in 1998, there was a service called MyTalk, which I used to send/recieve e-mail/voicemail/telephone calls/horoscopes and so forth, for free; it was mostly a unique, ad-driven way to avoid paying a quarter for telephone calls from payphones. Most of the ads were recruitment ads for the U.S. Army. MyTalk was a major tool for my online socialization when I was seventeen. Does anyone else have fond memories of MyTalk, or know of similar services that exist for free nowdays, or does anyone remember using interesting, unique services from the dotcom boom that no longer exist?"
carorder.com - class A idiots (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically, you could go to carorder.com, select
your car, and then they'd sell it to you. You'd
deal with a local car dealer (or they'd truck it to you on a flatbed truck)
I wanted a 1999 civic lx. Cheap, reliable transportation (especially when buying said vehicle at invoice) I had recently been in
an accident and my old car was a total loss. This
was in august/september of '99.
A week or so later, the supply of '99 civics has dried up. They offer to sell me a 2000 civic at '99 invoice price (about $500 below 2000 invoice) if I wait for a month. Since I'm driving a rental courtesty of the idiot who totalled my last car I take the deal.
About a month later (early october I think) I get
a call from the dealer telling me my car is ready. I get there are check it out. We go in to sign the paperwork. I ask about the whole carorder.com deal.
The dealer person says that they don't know the whole story, but a check arrived in the mail. She pulls the check out. It's from caroder.com and it's for about $2300.00. They basically gave
me a free downpayment on my car. I asked if I could make a copy of the check. I framed it and posted it in my office.
The moral of the story?
Losing money on every sale but making it up in volume probably isn't a good idea, especially when you are losing $thousands per sale.
Still, it was a sweet deal for me. The free TiVo I
got at networld+interop in may of 2000 was also a nice runner up. These were the glory days of N+I with a private party every night in vegas.
--chuck