Dot-Com Service Memories?

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?"

kozmo.com

[Doobian Coedifier]

What, like kozmo.com [disobey.com]? Delivering movies and snacks was a good idea, in theory...but apparently not a sustainable business model. I knew bad things were coming when they started delivering Rolexes and other rediculously expensive things...

AllAdvantage

[Strike]

Okay, it actually didn't provide me with anything ... but it paid WAY better. I was the first person that I knew of in my circle of friends at my university who signed up for it, so I got a lot of friends and their friends and their friends ... ad inf. to sign up and as a result I started banking some decent cash. At one point I was making upwards of $150 a month for having a mouse emulator just do random clicks for 8-10 hours a night a few days a month.

The good old days...

[BigZaphod]

I remember back in 1998 when email was still pretty useful and not so spam-filled. And how ICQ wasn't entirely bogged down in crap and was still mostly just a messenger. What happened to those services?

Napster

[Captain Splendid]

Can't have this thread without mentioning Napster at its peak.

I was lucky enough to be working for a cybercafe/reseller/small ISP at the time and had access to some serious bandwith. It was during this period I managed to track down all the rare songs I hadn't heard in years. I must have downloaded dozens of tracks a day.

Good times

broadpoint.com

[crow]

I used a similar service through broadpoint.com. It worked like a prepaid phone card, only you earned minutes before the call was connected by listening to ads. The big downside to it was that if you listened to enough ads to have a nice conversation and then got a busy signal, your time was wasted because the minutes wouldn't carry over to the next call.

At the end, they limited the number of free minutes per month before shutting down entirely.

Going there now, it seems to be some sort of web directory.

DialPad.com

[vasqzr]

It still exists today but it's not the same. I used to use it to make free calls back home all the time. It worked great for calling relatives, long distance relationships...j

Basically you signed up for free, then dialed the number with your mouse, and used your microphone/headphone to talk in full duplex. Very good sound quality, even with a 56k modem. You'd hear a "thank you for using dialpad.com" and it would call your destination. Completely transparent, no operators involved. The other party had no idea.

It was also great for prank calls. The calls seemed to get routed to a local number, so they couldn't call you back with *69 or caller ID. I'm sure a subpoena could though...

Nothing like stalking an ex-girlfriend anonymously, without having to buy a pre-paid cellular phone.

After a while, DialPad started limiting calls to ten minutes, then they started charging...

Oh beans, mytalk...

[dacarr]

I got one email from them. A friend sent me one, it was a 2 MB .wav file over a dialup. Lovely. And they wouldn't accept a response by MP3.

Things I miss are the sites where you could get free webspace to do whatever with, and not have to fart around with banner ads, popups, etc. Granted that's moot since I have a friend who hosts one of my sites.

Priceline... groceries

[Anonymous Coward]

I know a lot of people didn't like it, but I loved it. You picked out your groceries online but not the brand, and placed a bid. If your bid was accepted, you got the grocery at that discount rate. Then, you went to the store, picked out items from your list, and paid with your priceline card. The only thing I didn't like was that you had to keep your items seperate from normal stuff in checkout, and pay twice.

It also didn't hurt that their web code had a bug where you could always get the super-low-price tokens.

Re:AllAdvantage

[RevAaron]

you may have ahd a mouse emulator, but i got you beat- i built a lil contraption with my lego mindstorms and a taken-apart trackball... hooked that shit up with alladbantage+everything else... i think there was about a 640x180 of usable space on the screen. but i didn't care- i did it whilst i sleapt, and in vmware. eh eh eh. worked like a charm, and nothing could detect it- alladvantage could sniff out a lot of the click emus later on... :D

Re:Kozmo/Urban Fetch

[The Cydonian]

Googled it up, and found a very amusing article [siliconalleydaily.com] about it:-

Although he did not say specifically how many DVDs BigStar ordered from Urban Fetch, company sources say they ordered close to $5,000 worth of DVDs before Urban Fetch established a limit of one DVD per order yesterday. "We were glomming for a few days," says Friedensohn. "Now we might switch to ice cream, which they also seem to sell below wholesale. Or maybe their VC can just send us the cash directly."

Somes it up nicely, doesn't it? :-)

Ricochet.

[torpor]

Had a 128kb/s Ricochet Wireless modem, man that thing was sweet. Anywhere in LA, I could get on the 'net as fast as my home connection (128k partial T1) ... at the time, that was pretty trick.

Had some great times in Griffith Park with that modem... so suck that they went under and couldn't manage their network, because it was huuuge to have wireless connectivity like that.

Not really a service but a hiuge bottom line build

[adzoox]

I used to take advantage of Buy.com's outreageous specials and free shipping deals. I was listing 20 epson printers on eBay a week in the summer of 2000. My price - shipped free overnight - was $50.00 - retail (lowest) for the exact same printer was $149.99. I shipped OVERNIGHT FOR FREE to ebayers. Lots of nice free feedback and profit - I sold them for $75-$90.

When sites were ad driven (as the parent suggests) things were very cheap if you knew how to exploit them right.

TellMe

[holland_g]

Used to make free calls from payphones using TellMe. A couple years later they dropped the payphone capabilities.

You can still use them to get a couple of different services, but cellphone apps today have the same capability.

Now their focus is VoiceXML applications.

Ahh, the Dot Com Boom, those were the days

[k4_pacific]

Boy the way Steve Ballmer said,
Unix now is finally dead,
Windows was king they all said
those were the days.
Didn't need no business plan
so said the investor man
And now the stocks are in the can
Those were the days.
We all ran Windows 98
Blue screens that we had to hate
Gee our Packard Bell ran great
Those were the days
Mr. we can use a man like Linus Torvalds again
Those were the days!

Re:TellMe

[Buster Chan]

With even rudimentary knowledge of VXML, you can still get away with some awesome stuff on TellMe! I used to use it all the time until their free service stopped being offerred in Canada. You can still access it free in the states, and when Canadians dial the American eight-hundred number (1-800-555-tell), we get a recording that says: "Oh, I'm sorry, but we currently don't offer our services in Canada. But you can still access all of our services, by calling us long-distance at..." -- and then they say the area code, and the number. TellMe survived in ways that MyTalk crumbled. I'll bet TellMe will evolve eventually into way more than what MyTalk was. MyTalk, and many of the other services that people mentioned in this discussion, are good ideas, but they weren't planned perfectly, because they were way ahead of their times. I hope their times come soon...

jackpot.com

[BTWR]

I did their opening promotion - you had to "play" a slot-machine game that came with 25 spins. Instead of cherries and bars, they were banners. Of course, you kept "winning more spins," so it took forever to finish an entire run. I had 25 friends sign up so that I could get a free Palm V (like $300 at the time) - I even signed up 30 just to be sure they wouldn't accuse me of cheating. Sure enough, they did. They would only send automated replies for like 2 weeks - even though I would email them all documented proof of my ~30 signups, until they just stopped replying at all. I sent one last email saying:

"You win. This is my last email I will send you. I have written a report of my experience with you, where you scam college students with the lure of a free Palm pda and then get your exposure, then don't give them their prize. I am planning on sending this to CNN.com, ABCNEWS.com, Yahoo, MSNBC, etc"

Wouldn't you know it, not 5 minutes later, the VP of the site emailed me. I had my Palm the next week.

Re:Not really a service but a hiuge bottom line bu

[Monkelectric]

Yea remember when outpost.com had -- free air shipping? I used to order shit from them like a pack of CD-R's, they were rediculously cheap (14$ for a 50 pack), no tax, and they'd arrive the next morning. It was cheaper/easier then driving 9 miles out of my way to the closest best buy.

14$ is STILL a pretty good price for 50cdrs, and this is three years later.

The list

[Animats]

I maintained Deathwatch, the list of doomed dot-coms [downside.com]. It's still up, with the predicted death dates and a current stock chart. Most of the stock charts now say "Chart not available for this symbol", of course.

Wierdly, some of them are still trading. Ziplink [ziplink.net] (ZIPL) is quoted at $0.0001 on NASDAQ. Their web site is still up, although most of the pages are bad links. Their last news item is "ZipLink, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZIPL), a wholesale Internet connectivity provider, today announced that the company plans to suspend its operations effective today, November 17, 2000."

Despite this, the stock is still tradable, and a few people trade it each day.

How to screw everyone???

[octalgirl]

I know I am posting this so late, that no one may ever see it - but I just have to say, after reading through the replies - We were basically asked - what was cool, what do you miss about the dot.com era, and most of the replies are about how easy it was to screw over a vendor!!!! So many ppl found a way to profit over a vendor's attempt to offer a deal to the customer - buying online then selling it for more on eBay, while having the vendor ship for you?? Getting extra checks and just keeping them? Signing up to browse the web then having a mouse emulator do it for you?? The list goes on. Just one more element to add to the long list of failed business practices that led up to a very fateful economical crash. And some of those very same ppl who did the screwing, are now themselves screwed as they are unemployed, etc. Sheesh!!!

Survival of the fittest

[quinkin]

You have a point, but don't really consider the fact that the "customers" (scamming bastards or not) are an intrinsic part of the business environment.

If the business model does not take into account the basic greed, selfishness and cunning of the environment, then it is doomed to failure.

That is not to say that I agree with the actions of the above posters, but it is naive to believe that the companies did not bring it upon themselves.

Q.