DotCom Boom & Burst

The DotCom Boom & Burst

My dotcom adventures

My first attempt at setting up an online business was to jump on the band wagon of the dotcom (.com) craze at the later part of the 90s. It was a total failure.

I first went online at 1994 when my HQ sent me a 2.4k modem because every body in the company got to be connected.By connected, it only means to be able to send and receive emails that is all.
During off hours I was very active in IRC chat rooms,Yahoo! Chat,Chat24. Then there was this new craze called "ICQ", which I also quickly got hooked.And MSN also was quick to respond with its Insatnt Messanger.
I was tirelessly asking people in the chat rooms and forums about ways and means on how to start and run an online business.

The great internet boom

Everyday there was story about people striking it rich on the internet!
Examples like: 13 years old kid owning million-dollars internet company, a young Taiwan migrant founded the Yahoo! search enginee portal and become instant millionaire, Amazon.com selling books online like hot cakes, people are selling their unwanted items on eBay and paying the site owner handsome commissions and websites with long members lists like Hotmail.com were sold for millions!

The internet bubble burst

The new owners will keep the domains but reconstruct the websites to reflect their companies' images.They will post the latest information about their products on their newly acquired websites hoping the members on seeing it will go to their retail outlets and start buying. What a smart idea!
Not many are selling their products online then partly due to the size and weight of their products and also the confidence level of both buyers and sellers towards each other was low then.
But the giants were happy and were willing to wait for the online market place to be mature, and more and more websites were bought for huge sums, this was known as the "internet boom".
Everybody was trying to get online and mimicked them hoping to sell their websites for millions. Everybody was pasting messages in every chat room and forum: "Please visit my homepage!"

I was also busy building my information site and offering free membership to everyone whom I happened to bounce into. But the response was poor. There were hundreds of thousands websites springing up all offering free memberships and gifts to woo people to join. How many membership sites can one join?
Then the hackers started to hack the mega websites just for kicks. The site owners were already growing impatient after such a long wait for their business to increase two folds or three folds as anticipated, now with this new nuisance. Many of them simple shut down their sites. More followed suit. This was known as the "internet bubble burst".

With the "burst", my dream of hoping to sell my website for big money also "burst". I did not close my site because great amount of efforts and time were spent on building it, I can't bring myself to doing it. But I am not so hard working to gather information to feed the site any more.

Keep your dream alive

The story of "YouTube" being bought by Google recently makes many people to start to mimic it again.But not me, I had have enough, lol.
However, if you have a great idea and want to turn it into a great website, go do it. Who knows maybe your website will the next YouTube?