Ok for those who don’t know what meebo is you are missing out. meebo is a great web based IM client, it allows you to use AOL, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo IM’s through your web browser using that fancy thing they refer to as AJAX. Its a great tool, because it allows you to IM no matter where you are as long as you can get to the web, it has the functionality you need without the bloat of the other messengers and no more annoying slowdowns because you have 3 or 4 messenger clients installed on your computer. They also introduced this new cool feature that you can see on my sidebar on the right that allows users who visit my webpage to talk to me directly using meebome. Give it a try and let them know what you think, they are always willing to listen to their users and use the feedback they get for new functionality, improvements etc.

So here I go again, this time I’m going to take this blog thing a little more serious. I’ve decided that I’m not going to worry about who sees this, what they think etc, honestly I can’t imagine anything I will say here will be useful to most individuals but my goals are to provide a place for me to muse, to give out thoughts and opinions and maybe even provide some useful content. Blogging to me is like a soapbox, everyone seems to have one nowadays, they love to get on their little soapboxes and rant and rave and complain about the world, be it politics, the fact that Walmart sucks, the war in the middle east, or that the person down the street from them plays their music too loud at night, its a place to air grievances and blow off a little steam.

It seems the Internet nowadays is so very very different to when I first visited 14 years ago. I was just starting college and got my email account and wanted to do all those cool things like email friends etc, now at this point in time the web was very much in its infancy, no fancy browsers, no Ajax or JavaScript and certainly no tabbed browsing. You had a choice of gopher or lynx I believe, then of course Mosaic came about and changed everything, but that’s a different story. I remember when you could surf the web in a day, when search engines didn’t exist, or when search engines were so simple that well, you get the idea.

The web is a very different animal nowadays, so very interactive and very rich in content and ideas. I’ve seen it grow up, become a necessity in peoples lives, I personally cannot begin to imagine what I would do if I couldn’t just lookup something I didn’t know by typing in a search in Google. Before then I guess we had libraries and encyclopedia’s, now we have Google and Wikipedia.

So what am I getting at, nothing, I’m not trying to make a point, or blow of steam, its an observation. As I’ve grown up on the web, I’ve observed what’s been going on around me, I’d like to say I’ve been a part of it, but really I’ve not had that much influence, I wish I had, and I could have, but that’s just the way the web is, its growing so fast and quickly. It seems to me that when it comes to the Internet, the generation gap is much smaller in years, but larger in terms of change. I’m figuring 10 years probably the gap as it stands now, but that gap is huge. In 10 years the world has changed, and the Internet has along with it, its become prolific in every aspect of our lives and will do so more so in the next 10 years, we carry the Internet around in our pockets, we have access to it 24/7/365. It won’t be long that it will be part of who we are, of course privacy advocates will scream and complain, but that’s progress, if progress doesn’t happen we might as well not got out of the trees and started making sharp sticks and making fire.