A long time, when dotcoms rules the land, I was a Dev Manager for www.eTour.com (don’t bother following the link – they’re gone). In those days, we were still trying to introduce people to the web and there was a buzz in the industry that I hadn’t seen before or since. And one that will probably never occur again.
Well, one of the funniest, yet instructional moments came during our death throes. The conversation with the Product Manager went something like this:
Brian: Dmitry, check this out – we need to do this one the site.
Dmitry (walking over): BC, put that site away – this is the workplace – go look at that stuff at home.
BC: no, look at this (closes browser window). See that? There’s another window under it.
DK: yeah, ok. A porn site with pop-ups – what’s your point?
BC: No – check it out. They manage to put the pop-up under the main window. Watch again.
DK: OK – I see. Definitely interesting . . . send me the URL and we’ll figure it out.
Plain and simple, they came up with the ‘pop under’ which was much less obnoxious than the ‘pop-up’ that was so prevalent at the time. I then had to go to one of our (female) developers and ask her to reverse engineer how it was done. It turns out it was a simple call to a window.blur() function.
Its interesting that porn (followed by gambling) lead innovation in terms of technology. It certainly was the only thing making money at the time of the dotcom meltdown and a lot of the things you now see with streaming video (a la YouTube) was not developed by Google or some other well-known company, but by those in the ‘seedy part’ of the internet.
What does this have to do with ‘Identity Management?’ I’m not sure, but I’m willing to bet they will continue to innovate, and it will have some sort of impact on the rest of the computing field.
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