Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Nostalgia for the days of dial-up

Remember 2400 baud modems?  Many of you, of course, will not.  But even so, you are experiencing the same thing we did back then.  I am talking about waiting for pages to load.

As bandwidth has grown, so has the density of pages.  Many pages have far more advertisement density than content density.  So much so that it takes as much time to load the pages as it did back in the days of 2400 baud.

I think that Yahoo email is a perfect example.  Try opening their latest and greatest email without at least a T1 line.  More than three quarters of the time I try it, the page gets so bogged down in loading flashy ads that the messenger app never does load.  Or the the inbox only half loads.  You can see the emails but you cannot select them.

And I do not mean to single out poor Yahoo as the only culprit.  There seem to be more offenders than not these days.  How many articles never get read because we just get tired of waiting for the damned page to load and so we close the window and move on?

We have all this bandwidth band but we are still waiting for pages to load.   If you want your content to draw eyeballs to the ads, then build your pages so the content loads first!  Because if all I see are ads and the content still hasn't loaded, I'm leaving.

1 comment:

  1. Yes, we are impatient to read what we want, but to keep the inter toobes free, we need to visit ads. Reality bites us in the rear.
    We are just spoiled internet kids acting out, when we should be thankful that we get what we get free. Free porn, free news from around the world, free information, free free free almost everything related to letters and pictures!
    I too was trying to log on yahoo tonight and it kept hanging, stalling, and my chat window never materialized. Maybe Yahoo was having a bad internet day.

    ReplyDelete

All comments are screened, but you don't have to agree with me to get published. You do have to make sense though. If you are not sure what I mean by making sense, read this. Unless what you say is really, really stupid, and then I may publish it just so I can make fun of you.