It has occurred to me that there might be better things to be outraged about than my lack of birthday greetings and the occasional message from Mind-it informing me that nothing has changed. Just off the top of my head, the concentration of corporate power epitomized by AOL Time Warner and Microsoft, the assault on free speech and consumer liberty embodied in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and, worst of all, the unstoppable spread of pop-up and pop-under ads are probably better targets for outrage and despair than the collapse of the World Birthday Web.

And on the positive side, there's still plenty to be excited about online. Napster may be a shadow of its former self, but scores of new file-trading services have popped up to replace it. Webvan may have spent itself into oblivion, but does anyone doubt that established supermarket chains will be filling the online toilet paper delivery niche in the next few years? The cooperative software development movement producing open-source software may have receded from the headlines of late, but it is still alive and well, thanks to the advances in communication and collaboration made possible by the Net.

So what is it, exactly, that still nags? Is there any deeper significance to my annoyance, beyond the fact that I, and no doubt millions of others, can't imagine living without my e-mail but still hate spam? Surely I'm old enough (after yet another birthday) to understand, and accept, that everything has its price.

And there, upon further reflection, may be the real explanation for my discomfort -- that very process of acceptance. The e-mail address at which I receive (or don't receive) Mind-it messages and birthday greetings is the first address I ever had, and its eight years of existence make it a weird kind of historical document/archaeological dig. The end of the World Birthday Web and the reminder of the day I signed up with UrlMinder mark a passage of time that has taken on a significance out of all proportion to its actual duration.

Psychologically speaking, the excitement shared in the early days of the Net made everyone feel, regardless of their age, like a young pioneer in a gloriously undiscovered country. This excitement was different in quality from that experienced during the greed-driven dot-com boom. It was a glee generated by the realization that something truly amazing was happening. The growth of the Net was an incitement to optimism, an invitation to exult. Those who were in on the secret were transformed into babbling evangelists, and every hour spent online seemed to offer more undeniable holy writ.

Amazing things, as noted above, are still going on. But the glee, for the most part, has faded like the output of a printer running out of toner.

It had to happen. Glee is not an endlessly sustainable emotion. Nor should it be -- it's hard to see how a true revolution can be built on nothing more than giddiness. The real lesson of the failure of the World Birthday Web, not to mention so many dot-coms, aside from just the inevitability of a popping bubble, is that it takes hard work to make something really different succeed. Judged by that metric, baubles like UrlMinder and the World Birthday Web are hardly noticeable. Their absence doesn't mean the failure of the revolution -- they're just reminders that nothing is ever as easy as it seems in the glow of early passion.

And that reminder is sobering. In the end, I realized, the demise of the World Birthday Web annoys me not because I miss the greetings but because I mourn the passing of my glee.

Recent Stories