The iPad’s imminent release, along with the 10th anniversary of NASDAQ’s peak at the height of the dot-com bubble, made me wax a little nostalgic about the “good ol’ days” of the late 90s and early 2000s. The internet was becoming mainstream and computers were gaining wider use. A brand new web design industry was born and I was privileged to be a part of it.

It was a fun era, and while I sometimes miss the adventure of it all, there are a lot of things I’m happy to leave in the past. Here are just a few:

CRT Monitors
These hulking beasts can still be found in many offices and homes, but they are becoming extinct as LCD screens have become more affordable. Moving these things around is real pain in the biceps, and if you stare at them long enough you can almost feel your eyeballs melting.

Floppy Disks
Slow, noisy floppies hold a measly 1.4 megabytes of data. They were basically useless for shuttling large graphic files around, forcing us to use larger capacity ZIP disks (or, god forbid, JAZ disks) because CD writing drives were still pretty pricey.

Spam
Until Gmail came along in 2004, unsolicited “spam” email was just something I lived with. When you receive 50-100 spams a day, the “new message” alert loses all meaning. Sure, there were client-side spam filters, but they needed to be “trained” for several months, and they were far from perfect. Gmail’s sophisticated spam filter restored that little bit of glee at receiving a new message in my inbox.

Beige Boxes
For a time I actually enjoyed tinkering with home-built PCs (though I often enlisted the help of my unofficial AV/IT guy, Voidious) but eventually I’d had enough. I remember the exact night, in fact. It was 3:00 in the morning on a very hot summer evening and my machine was in pieces. Sweat dripped from my brow as I struggled to troubleshoot a hard disk issue. Or was it a power supply problem? Either way, I was done with that shit.

Video Plug-Ins
Remember RealPlayer? Before Youtube and Flash video, we needed specific browser plug-ins to watch video onilne. It was slow, buggy, and the picture sucked. Incidentally, I recall my buddy Chuck experimenting with using Flash for video sometime in ‘03 or ‘04. At the time I thought it was radical and a little crazy. Guess I was wrong. :)

Viruses/Malware/Spyware
There was a time when security holes in browsers and operating systems were so rampant that it was practically inevitable your computer would become infected. Some of this malicious software was so insidious–actually, wait, some of you are still using Windows and Internet Explorer, aren’t you? Ugh, this is awkward. Yeah, nevermind, I guess this one isn’t a thing of the past just yet. ;)

My excitement about Buzz correlates precisely to my increasing disillusionment with Facebook. What once seemed like a dynamic social forum is actually just a stream of disconnected, shallow, narcissistic chunks of bullshit from people I sorta know. There is no dialogue on Facebook, only monologue. Like most Facebook users, I only interact with a small percentage of my “friends”, while the majority are more like an audience than a group of people with whom I wish to converse (or who wish to converse with me).

Buzz, by contrast, should consist of people I do wish to engage in conversation, since the friend list is based on my email communications. It supports existing services (such as Picasa and Twitter) without any need for clunky applications and APIs. And best of all, I won’t have to sift through dozens of game results, horoscopes, and notices about people joining cleverly named groups. Incidentally, the people who join these groups will never actually participate in them. They simply join as another means of expressing their individuality.

Facebook offers the promise of socialization, but it is really just a platform for self-expression. It’s like blogging on training wheels. We get to “publish” our thoughts to a safe audience, free from fear of exposure to the entire internet. Unfortunately that safety is derived from the fact that most of your “friends” don’t care about your musings and won’t even read them, much less comment on them. So Facebook fails both as a social network and as a mechanism for public expression.

Now, mockery would not be be an unreasonable response to my complaints about Facebook. Indeed, accusations of hypocrisy would be quite justified. If I’m so dissatisfied with this “social network” then why don’t I just delete my account? Why do I persist with logging in each day, sharing links and photos, and commenting on people’s posts?

I guess the answer is that, like many people, I enjoy socializing online. Sadly, Facebook leaves me feeling hollow. It fails to deliver on the promise of a true social network.

I simply refuse to accept that Facebook is the future of the web. A buggy, walled-in platform can’t be the answer to sharing and socializing on the web. If I want conversation, I’ll use email, chat, Twitter, or hopefully Buzz. If I seek an audience, I’ve got my website and blog.

People may not leave Facebook in droves and flock to Buzz, but if Google’s new foray into social networking lives up to its promise, I certainly will.

And thank God!

Ever since Murdoch began yammering about this I prayed the news industry would follow his lead. Like most people, I will never, ever, pay to read articles on NYTimes.com or any other website, so this kind of thing is exactly what I need to keep from inadvertently consuming news, which has brought me nothing but heartache and misery.

Don’t get me wrong, I like to know what’s going on in the world, but I can do without the “in depth reporting” and “insightful analysis”. Usually a few words (y’know, like those found in a tweet) is sufficient to let me know what’s happening. I don’t need the high definition photos either; a shot from a camera phone is just fine. The vast majority of “news” articles out there are just so much blather. Am I a better person for “being informed”? Nope. Would I have acted differently if I hadn’t “been informed” during those years I was addicted to news? Probably not.

Sure, keeping up on current affairs, analyzing them, and debating the issues is a nice exercise for the brain, but unless you have some direct connection to the story that’s pretty much all it is. You’d be better off trading in the New York Times for Sartre, Camus, or Lao-Tzu.

And let’s face it, most of us, most of the time, don’t have that direct connection with news stories. Will your familiarity with the current health care debate cause you to take actions you wouldn’t otherwise have taken? Do your daily obligations change depending on Obama’s standing in the polls? Has Google’s decision on China resulted in any change in your behavior? I’m guessing the answer is no.

I say good riddance, NYT. Hopefully other news organizations will follow suit and the internet will be cleansed of their drivel.

Cheers to the bloggers, webmasters, wiki editors, copywriters and all who add substance to the web.

Cheers to the tweeters with something meaningful to say.

Cheers to the forum members and commentators who listen, reply, and carry on a dialogue.

Cheers to the programmers and designers who put flesh on the web’s bones.

Cheers to the artists, photographers, and videographers who feed our eyes’ appetites.

Cheers to the musicians who crank out new material, knowing we may or may not pay for it.

Cheers to anyone and everyone who conceives an original thought, offers unique insight, or shares a novel idea.

Cheers to those who give us something new.

Mattdude’s Goals for 2010:

1. Stay More in Touch with Friends & Family – 98%
2. Stay Current on Utility Bills to Avoid Late Fees – 47%
3. Visit Mikedude in Colorado At Least Once – 99%
4. Get a New, Newer Model Blue Lumina – 2%
5. Redesign Mattdude.com – 97%
6. Perform Better at My Job – 74%
7. Read Some Books – 25%
8. Never Login to Facebook – 0.4%
9. Hold My Own with Patchdude in a Quake Live Duel – 7%
10. Be Nice at Work – 51%