The older I get, the more I observe that our lives are based on a series of never-ending cycles. The moon orbits the Earth, which orbits the sun, which orbits the galaxy.
On Monday, the work week begins, and on Friday, it ends. But a few days later the week begins yet again. I keep running into people on the street wearing retro 80′s style skinny jeans, shirts and sunglasses (thank God no biking shorts yet). Everything from philosophy to politics to fashion tend to circle back in one way or another. So that got me thinking: will old-school email address domains come back in style? And by “old-school” I mean email address from the likes of Hotmail, AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe.
I’ve had literally dozens of email address over the years, including some from the short list above, but the one I’ve kept the longest is my Hotmail account, which I figure I’ve had for about 15 years. I have since moved to the “cooler” and more useful Gmail service. I say “cooler” because Google did something that no other free online email providers did, as far as I know, which is to make their email accounts “invite only” for a period of time.
Getting an account meant that you were part of an exclusive club. Google has used this invite-only policy for other products, too, and once again you felt special to get the privilege of using it before the floodgates opened and anybody could use the service. Once that happens, the services ceases to be “cool” for some reason.
Coming back to the topic of retro addresses, I recently received an email from a relative that had an aol.com address. At first I laughed because, honestly, I haven’t seen this domain name in quite a while. But my second thought was, “hey, that’s actually pretty cool”.
Yes, I realize that there are approximately 4 million people that still subscribe to AOL but how many use @aol for email address? They likely use alternative and more popular free web email services such as Gmail. Plus, as an IT geek, it is a little embarrassing to have that as your email address. Can you imagine an IT professional handing out business cards with “name@aol.com” or “name@progidy.net?
Well perhaps, like everything else, these old-school email address will be in style once again. People might even go so far as to pay to have the privilege of owning a retro email account. I’ve seen crazier things.
Just to be safe, maybe I’d better hang onto that Hotmail account for a while longer. You never know when it’ll be cool again. Come to think of it, I think I’ll hang onto that MySpace page as well.
