Sean Carton has created a list of his top ten web fads that today make us cringe. You know, I think every one of these has been built into Microsoft FrontPage at some point.
- Portals - News tickers, stock quotes, personalization, forced registration, Web search boxes, link lists…no content was too much (or too irrelevant) in this "more is more" trend.
- Splash Pages - Unfortunately "rage" was also the reaction many users had when they had to sit through interminable rasterbatory gimmicks to get to the content they were looking for.
- Community - All of a sudden sites started sprouting "community" sections in an effort to get users to chat, hang out, and generally become part of the "community."
- Page Counters - Who cares how many visitors your site has?
- Homepages - There was a time when no cybercitizen could hold their head up without having their own "homepage" filled with bad family photos, resumes, descriptions of hobbies, and personal details that nobody but the homepage designer's mother cared about.
- MIDI Songs, Animated GIF Icons, Divider Bars, and Other Garbage - One of the most obnoxious fads was the one where people felt compelled to decorate their sites like a trailer park Christmas tree.
- Guestbooks - Not only were they annoying, but they were often a feeding ground for spambots who pounced on them to suck up e-mail addresses left behind.
- E-Postcards - While many sites were ethical about what they did with the e-mail addresses "e-cards" were sent to, many weren't and "friends" who got a postcard often found themselves bombarded with spam.
- Mobile Access / Mobile Content / WAP - The dot.bomb crash put the final nail in the coffins of many of the startups that popped up to serve this market that never developed.
- Awards - Eventually folks began to realize that earning "Site of the Hour" on "Billy Bob's Big List o' Links n' Stuff" wasn't that much of an honor and most of these things went away.
And now, the top five web fads of the future. There's only five? I guess were getting smarter.
- Podcasting - Who's going to write the content and research the Podcasts? Who has time?
- Weblogs - There's nothing worse than a contrived PR-written blog that screams "marketing." Unless your company has the stones to let bloggers actually blog (rather than write news releases), the talent to actually write the blogs, and the time to keep them fresh, don't do it.
- Video - Video is expensive and difficult to produce.
- RSS - Just putting an RSS feed on your site doesn't mean diddly if people don't want to read it.
- Social Networking - Unless you've got a stable of really engaged customers who want to meet each other, can stomach user-submitted content, or care if your customers think that the XB3337 Floor Scraper is "hot" and the W45XJR Lard Tender is "not," chances are that building social networking functionality into your site isn't going to be a major competitive advantage unless you've got a really new and innovative idea of how to use it.