The following article is based chat sessions that were held Feb. 15, 2001 and Feb. 22, 2001. Thanks very much to the participant-experts.
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Perhaps the trend toward online discussion sites is related to the decline of newsgroups, which used to be the heart of the Internet, before there was a Web. For years, services like AltaVista and Deja gave Web users easy access to the enormous volume of content posted each day to tens of thousands of newsgroups. But AltaVista dropped its newsgroup search over a year ago.And after a long slow decline, Deja.com recently folded. Google bought their service, but temporarily has left it in limbo. Yes, there are alternate ways of connecting to newsgroups, if your ISP happens to offer that service -- either by way of your browser or through email programs like Outlook Express. But most Web users have never even heard of usenet newsgroups, and hence wouldn't know what they were if they accidentally stumbled on them. And no commercial service has made a concerted effort to educate the public about these long-standing online discussions and help bring new users in.
Rather, the natural urge to gather in groups of common interest and discuss anything and everything has found other outlets.
Yes, a handful of little-known Web-based services help keep newsgroups alive, for instance:
http://www.cyberfiber.com/index.html
But numerous separate Web-based discussion services now thrive:
http://www.multicity.com/ which includes automatic translation, also offers auctions
http://www.quicktopic.com which provides Web conferencing "hybridized" with email
http://www.delphi.com forums
http://www.nicenet.org forums
http://www.topica.com mail list hosting
http://www.server.com mail list hosting
http://www.egroups.com now owned by Yahoo
http://www.liszt.com newsgroup search and search of email discuss groups
http://www.forumone.com search of Web-based forums
Some of these sites as well as major portals, like Yahoo and Excite, provide free chat rooms as well. Other sites specialize in chat, for instance:
And HumanClick http://www.humanclick.com makes it free and easy for you to invite visitors to your Web pages to open up text-chat sessions with you. (See my article about that at http://www.samizdat.com/fishing.html).
At the same time many of these services are moving beyond text to provide voice interaction. Yes, much is lost when you can no longer save a transcript of what was said and search through it later. But the novelty and convenience of voice -- which works well even with a 28K modem -- is compelling for many.
So what does this mean for business on the Web? In the past, I marketed
my services with plain text Web pages, and offered consulting face-to-face
and by phone. Now, I suplement my marketing with HumanClick chats, and
I offer for-a-fee consulting through text chat rooms I set up on request
and through a voice chat room I've set up (for free) at Excite. The range
of what you can do to interact with customers keeps growing. In some cases,
the free services are all that you need. In other cases, the free version
gives you the experience you need to decide on a professional solution.
In any case, now is a good time to experiment and learn and figure out
new ways to grow your business.
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