All Of Your Websites Are Belong to Us!

Remembering my attempt to use my first web page to get chicks reminded me of a funny story that came out of that little venture.  I used to chat with a girl, we’ll call her “Amy” (since that was her name), on a bulletin board called ISCA run by the Iowa Student Computing Association.  This was early 90s…BBS’s were the chat rooms of the time, and ISCA’s was like the Facebook or MySpace of BBS’s–we’re talking a userbase of college students well into the triple digits!!!  Lynx was the only real web browser at the time, and chatting on the web was a long way off.

Anyway, once I saw Mosaic, built a page, and had it out there I was super excited about it.  I was telling Amy all about it (the web) and giving her directions on using it at the workstation she was using while we were chatting.  For some reason I had to stop chatting once she got everything working and told her that I’d talk to her later.

The next time we chatted she was AMAZED!  She’d surfed the links from my page to other pages, and links to others and so on and so forth.  By the way, remember when you first used the web and you’d really surf?  I mean, you’d sit down with the intention of aimlessly surfing, not to get one little nugget of information and visit the same 15 sites over and over for updates.  The funny thing is that Amy thought I was responsible for the WHOLE THING.  She thought I’d posted the entire internet as it existed at the time.

I wasn’t really interested in her in that way, but looking back I missed an opportunity to reach the exact goal I’d set out to accomplish in the first place–getting chicks!  She was so impressed, and had I been interested, I’d gotten my foot in the door.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this phenomenon is pretty common in the online world.  Espcially with the viral nature of the web today, success comes at times and places where you least expect it.  Be prepared to strike while the iron is hot!