Top 10 Web Fads

October 15th, 2005

Via Google Blogoscoped, an article
which looks at the top 10 web fads of yesteryear. Among the fads are
portals, splash pages, communities, hit counters, guestbooks, e-cards
and awards.

Portals
I remember this quite well. There used to be services such as Moreover
which would allow you to add the latest news to your own website. Stuff
like weather, search and that was also there with the aim of
encouraging “repeat visitors”. You could also offer free e-mail through
some other random services. Of course, when everyone realised that the
portal information which was supposed to keep users coming back just
turned them away because there were a thousand other websites with that
portal information. I never really understood the thinking behind this
- the way to get people to come back would surely to offer them
something new and different rather than the same.

Communities
I’m not really sure if I agree with this one. Building a community is
great. Back in the days of Ikonboard and stuff, people used to market
bulletin boards by saying things such as bulletin boards will bring
visitors back to your site. It doesn’t work that way - visitors come
back for regularly updated content. Every single forum I visit on a
regular basis, I go straight to the forums. By looking at the feature
set of most bulletin boards it is quite obvious that they were not
designed as website promotion tools - no website integration and 99% of
the time not even a link back to the main website.

Many people
mistakenly create communities in the hope that people will flock to it
and talk about things. The forum is not a quick easy way to get tons of
content written by members for free. Even with a good website, it takes
a lot of time and effort to establish a good community. I do believe
with wikis and websites with some community features built in, it is
possible to add value to existing websites but the forum in it’s
present state doesn’t.