Whats Hot And Whats Not

Life on the intertubes is fickle. Keeping up with the lastest in technology, hardware, software, programming nuances etc is hard enough, but then with the added burden of keeping up with the terminology is just as consuming.

Internet trends come and go fast. What is hot today, could leave you embarrassed tomorrow if you make mention of it. Those who buck this notion leave themselves open to aging fast, in an even faster moving industry. So lets have a look at some of the trends that have been left behind that were once 'all the rage'.

Anything prefixed with My. Beginning with the MySQL database, this seemed like a cute enough idea for application developers to start naming their applications in the same manner, MyWord, MyThis, MyThat, My God... Finally myspace.com evolved and soon every website that had missed our on a decent domain name thought it would be NAF to prefix their domain with My until the net is flooded with them and it passed into obsurity. For those left with a company named My>insert domain here< you have been left behind.

Anything containing the word cyber. With the 1990's concept of "cyber space" came a glut of domains and companies featuring the word cyber. The culmination of this came with the registering of the domain cyberia.com which has fallen into disuse.

Rate My Anything. These sites were prolific around 2000 and sites such as rate-my-cat, rate-my-pet, rate-my-rack and spawned such sites as amihotornot.com all of which enjoyed success at the time, but then the novelty wore off and soon the emergance or rate-my-poo.com put a stop to the silliness. However, it should be noted that rotten.com purchased rate-my-poo.com for a tidy sum to the owner.

Anything called eXtreme. Of course everybody wants to be noticed, and whoever thought of large X in extreme, or eXtreem or any variation that comes to mind, had a not unpleasant idea. The problem with good ideas is that whoever thinks of it first, is rarely the same as the person who capitalizes on it. So, as with other fads, everybody had to have eXtreme as part of their name. Added to this can be anything ending in the letter Z Lookz, bookz, etc etc.. Get over it.

Leet Speak or l33t 5p34k. This most annoying of fads had its birth from AOL and seems to enjoying a resurgence with mobile/cell phones. The idea is that numbers and alternating case can 'encode' you message so that less savvy folks are left pondering its meanin LOL.

A plethora of acronyms exist for this and while it can actully save key entries on you mobile/cell phone keypad by subsituting letters for words, it is often more annoying than anything else.

U R n0t FuNNi3