Small rant on Internet "permanence"
Friday, 24. April 2009, 15:08:40
I just read that Yahoo! is going to close GeoCities...
Gaaahh!
I deliberately migrated my old university-based home page to GeoCities years ago... precisely because I thought it would be a site that stayed online for a long time! The idea was that wherever I was in the world, I could still get access to my bookmarks and a few pictures to show people.
Okay, it's true that since the coming of the blog and then MyOpera's automatic bookmark updating (handy on my phone, that one!
) I haven't been using the home page much any more - in fact for the last five or six years the GeoCities one has just been a redirect to a "local" copy of the home page on whichever server I have it - but even so it marks the passing of an era.
Looks like MyOpera will end up being my only place for keeping stuff now... let's hope Opera doesn't go tits-up in the near future!
On the other hand, for mail I have had almost exactly the opposite problem. I got locked into OperaMail when it used to be a very open service (no data limits, free SMTP and POP access, etc.) and decided to adopt it as my permanent address. I hate it when friends keep changing mail addresses - I have a couple with about ten different addresses next to their contact details! - so I vowed never to do the same.
Unfortunately for me, OperaMail then moved to a different provider (Outblaze) and the service was severely restricted (3MB mailbox, no POP or SMTP - webmail only). I found web-to-POP solutions, so I stuck with it. But unlike GeoCities - OperaMail seems totally frozen in time... destined to stay forever with draconian mail limits from the mid-nineties. Years after all the other services have gone up to multi-gigabyte-sized mailboxes, I still have a TOTAL(*) LIMIT of 3 MEGABYTES!!! (And I still have to run web-to-POP software to get the mail at home.)
(*) Which can be annoying when people complain that their single mail containing a 5MB movie clip didn't get through... not that I really want to receive huuuuge mails either, thinking about it.
Gaaahh!
I deliberately migrated my old university-based home page to GeoCities years ago... precisely because I thought it would be a site that stayed online for a long time! The idea was that wherever I was in the world, I could still get access to my bookmarks and a few pictures to show people.
Okay, it's true that since the coming of the blog and then MyOpera's automatic bookmark updating (handy on my phone, that one!
) I haven't been using the home page much any more - in fact for the last five or six years the GeoCities one has just been a redirect to a "local" copy of the home page on whichever server I have it - but even so it marks the passing of an era.Looks like MyOpera will end up being my only place for keeping stuff now... let's hope Opera doesn't go tits-up in the near future!
On the other hand, for mail I have had almost exactly the opposite problem. I got locked into OperaMail when it used to be a very open service (no data limits, free SMTP and POP access, etc.) and decided to adopt it as my permanent address. I hate it when friends keep changing mail addresses - I have a couple with about ten different addresses next to their contact details! - so I vowed never to do the same.
Unfortunately for me, OperaMail then moved to a different provider (Outblaze) and the service was severely restricted (3MB mailbox, no POP or SMTP - webmail only). I found web-to-POP solutions, so I stuck with it. But unlike GeoCities - OperaMail seems totally frozen in time... destined to stay forever with draconian mail limits from the mid-nineties. Years after all the other services have gone up to multi-gigabyte-sized mailboxes, I still have a TOTAL(*) LIMIT of 3 MEGABYTES!!! (And I still have to run web-to-POP software to get the mail at home.)
(*) Which can be annoying when people complain that their single mail containing a 5MB movie clip didn't get through... not that I really want to receive huuuuge mails either, thinking about it.
)
(50%)
WIDGETIZE