Trip down the Internet memory lane

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Today I had the trip down my internet surfing days. The day perhaps 6 years back when I opened my first email id, the days of slow dialup connections, high surfing rates in cyber cafes eating up most of my pocket money and the days of Yahoo! Those days it was total monopoly of Yahoo, from email to Instant messenger. It was so funny even to hear Yahoo, it reminded of a song in one old Hindi movie. Now days, I guess, people are using more of Google- for mails, Instant messenger, blogs, frappr, maps etc. I think Google has one of those networking database as well which I hate and never registered myself in any of them.

I remember funny things about Yahoo; they are not as old but not that recent as well.

Once I got totally hooked up with yahoo games- the ‘Literati’. I would wait whole day at work so that I could go home in evening and start playing. If you have played literati, which I am sure most of you, then you would know, it is really hard to win the games in your initial days, even if your English vocabulary is good. When you login to literati, I discovered that Yahoo puts a small square of different colors besides your name. For first few days you would be provisional, and then you would begin with black square. Depending on how many games you win you will progress to yellow, blue, green and red (I don’t remember them exactly). I had lost many games and won only one, which cause the other player abandoned the game. I decided to somehow improve my statistics and change the color of square from black. I decided that I will play only with newbie’s like me. I would go and see which all black players are waiting at the table and I would join them. This way I managed to win few games. I was happy.

Once as usual I pounced on one provisional user name. I like a seasoned player greeted with ‘gl’ (games lingo). The other player got the first chance and started with a bingo!(35 bonus points) I thought may be it was fluke but it was the worst game I had. Ten minutes later I had the most humiliating defeat and I was shocked. After the game, the other player said ‘gg’ (good game). I could not place this and wanted to know how it happened? I got my answer. She was a 47 years old American lady and she told me that she was playing this game for years but today created a new user name!!!

The other funny thing I had observed with Yahoo advertisement. I don’t know whether that advertisement comes now or not, the funny thing was the place it used to come. If you would see the webcam of the other person in an Instant message then just below the live picture of the other person you will find this advertisement. It would say something like ‘Want to be seeing someone else? Come to Yahoo personals, the best dating service’. Yahoo engineering infidelity!!!