Notes from the Epicenter: Six Degrees of Summer Camp
I grew up in Baltimore, and by the time I was 11, Mom decided it would be a good idea for me to go somewhere during the summers (reasoning that the city was stiflingly hot and besides, things like horseback riding and wilderness hiking are good for building character). So for six years I traveled to summer camp in the mountains that separated Maryland and West Virginia. My first summer I played Alice in the summer camp production of Alice in Wonderland (the apex of my stage career), I had my first boyfriend in summer camp, rappelled down my first cliff, took my first white water rafting trip. Mom was right: Summer camp did build character.
Of course, that character went into recession in my teenage years, when hanging out in parking lots drinking purloined peach schnapps began to seem like more fun than singing songs around the campfire. So I stopped getting on the charter bus every June, and summer camp began to fade away. All of the campers and counselors I met over my six-summer tour were left behind. After the first few years I forgot about most of them. I never actually expected to see them again. But now, thanks to the Internet, it looks as if I will.
Instant Reunion
Last week I got a call from an old camp counselor. It took me a while to place his name. It seems he’d heard my name on the local NPR station (I work two days a week helping to produce a public affairs show) and figured there couldn’t be so many Andrea Dudrows in the world. He was right. He got my e-mail address and signed me up for Yahoo! Groups, where my old summer camp has set up a virtual meeting corner. I spent the better part of a day reading messages from past summer camp cronies and browsing pictures of a recent reunion, matching the old names to the changed faces (some changed more than others).
As interesting as it was to see how 15 years rests on various faces, what I found most interesting was that I was seeing it at all. Back in 1986, there was no Internet and there was no Yahoo!. And I can’t help but wonder if my re-introduction to a world I’d left far behind would have happened without the cooperation between these two entities.
The Übersite
Yahoo has cornered the market on dot-com business plans. Think about it: Pretty much any idea that’s gotten venture capital funding in the past three years has a counterpart on Yahoo!. Yahoo! Auctions. Yahoo! Invites. Yahoo! Games. Yahoo! News. Yahoo! Personals. Yahoo! Careers. Yahoo! Finance. Not to mention Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Clubs, and Yahoo! e-mail. Yahoo! may be a portal site, but it’s a portal mainly to itself. It’s like a latter day America Online. Except free. For more and more people, Yahoo! is the Internet.
My friend Roger has a Yahoo! e-mail account. He has all of his friends’ e-mail addresses stored in a Yahoo! address book. He organizes his weekly poker night with the boys using a Yahoo! Club (don’t worry, they play for Necco wafers, not cash). He has a personalized Yahoo! home page (you can get a Badtz Maru design scheme). He gets his news (at least his online news) from Yahoo!. And of course it’s all free.
Roger and I sometimes talk about what would happen if Yahoo! decided to start charging for its services (and the company could use the extra income right about now, as it’s proving that it’s not immune to the dot-economy slump). At this point, when consumers are used to the idea of a largely free Web, implementing a fee system might chase away a good portion of Yahoo!’s membership, but a pay service could be just the thing for the future. Especially with so many Yahoo! users signed up for so many different Yahoo! services.
Spreading Itself Thin Works
It looks as if trying to be all things to all people is working for Yahoo! as much as it isn’t working for sites like Amazon. Though it may just be reaping the benefits of having been there first, I’m willing to bet that Yahoo! will be one of the only major dot-coms to survive the economic downturn. And it will do this by being the every-dot-com. That is, by putting every dot-com business plan and every Web-based service idea into practice, not just one.
Personally, I know I will be spending much more time on Yahoo! from now on, looking at photos of my old summer camp cabins and the friends I’d made, and forgotten.
This article was last modified on January 8, 2023
This article was first published on April 9, 2001
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Yahoo needs to look at their customer support system. It took me almost a month to get a problem with Yahoo Groups straightened out. I could not do it myself and lacked any e-mail or telephone info to get them to straighten it out. I finally backed in a door after a problem with a security code which provideded a number. They need an e-mail system that works and is east to use. Even the yahoo group moderators do not know how to contact Yahoo.