There's no doubt that "social networking" is hot. With sites like Friendster, Match.com, Flickr, Facebook, and del.icio.us burning up the newswires (and sucking up the traffic), it's hard to talk to anyone these days about Web development without the topic coming up.

And if the topic's hot now, it's only going to get hotter with the recent beta launch of Ning.com, Marc Andreessen's latest baby. Billed as a "playground" for social networking applications, it provides a free platform for developers who want to create their own social networking apps.

But does everyone (or every company) need to incorporate social networking into their sites? Just because it's popular does it mean that it's always a good thing? Probably not. While sites like Flickr and del.icio.us have blazed new trails by combining user-contributed content with social connections, their success doesn't necessarily translate into the commercial space. And while it's tempting for developers (and their clients) to want to jump onto the virtual bandwagon of development fads, it's important to examine what you're trying to accomplish before hopping on board with new technology. What might seem cool and cutting edge today might seem pretty darn silly next quarter.

So to help you save money, development time, and client relations, today we present the list of the Top 10 Web Development Fads of the Past as a public service and a reminder about what happens when fads get the best of us. Try not to cringe and remember to forgive yourself if you participated in any of these.

1. Portals: One of the most irritating trends of the late '90s was the move to make every site a "portal." From corporate sites to publishers to personal home pages, this fad took the Web by storm. News tickers, stock quotes, personalization, forced registration, Web search boxes, link lists…no content was too much (or too irrelevant) in this "more is more" trend. The base of the idea was good—provide content to make your site "sticky" and drive repeat visitors—but the executions were often unusable and the sheer number of "portals" made competition fierce. Besides, why do you need to know the weather when all you need is the link to customer service.

2. Splash Pages: Ugh. Gag. Barf. Everyone hated these things (so expertly parodied at the famous "Skip Intro" site), yet for some reason there was a period of time when having a fancy Flash intro page to your site was all the rage. Unfortunately "rage" was also the reaction many users had when they had to sit through interminable rasterbatory gimmicks to get to the content they were looking for. Good riddance.


Trying to control digital content is insane. Click here to read more.

3. "Community": Back in 1997, McKinsey's John Hagel wrote a book called Net Gain which contained the famous quote that "community precedes commerce." Realizing that loyal customers constituted a "community" wasn't a bad idea, but the execution of what many sites took away from the quote definitely was. All of a sudden sites started sprouting "community" sections in an effort to get users to chat, hang out, and generally become part of the "community." Unfortunately not many did. Who wants to define their social group by the kind of soap they use?

4. Page counters: Who cares how many visitors your site has? Not that these things have gone away, but there was a time when no self-respecting site seemed complete without some annoying odometer-looking GIF announcing how many people had beat you to the site.

5. Homepages: There was a time when no cybercitizen could hold their head up without having their own "homepage" filled with bad family photos, resumes, descriptions of hobbies, and personal details that nobody but the homepage designer's mother cared about. The trend extended into the commercial space with companies encouraging visitors to make their site their "homepage." Yeah. Right. Of course, today we have blogs, but that's another story.

6. MIDI songs, animated GIF icons, divider bars, and other garbage: One of the most obnoxious fads was the one where people felt compelled to decorate their sites like a trailer park Christmas tree. Visitors were often first assaulted by an endless MIDI song loop and then forced to wait as animated GIFs of letters mailing themselves and obnoxious background patterns loaded. If you were really unlucky your wait might have been rewarded by the "man digging in a pile of dirt" "under construction" icon that was popular around the same time.

7. Guestbooks: Why anyone thought that asking visitors to leave their name and a comment in a virtual "guestbook" was a good idea is beyond any rational explanation (and why people actually did it also defies logic). But there was a time when "guestbooks" were common. Not only were they annoying, but they were often a feeding ground for spambots who pounced on them to suck up e-mail addresses left behind.

8. E-Postcards: Nothing prompts copycats like wild success, so it was no surprise that after the early success of BlueMountain.com everyone began to think that e-postcards were a good idea. While many sites were ethical about what they did with the e-mail addresses "e-cards" were sent to, many weren't and "friends" who got a postcard often found themselves bombarded with spam.

9. Mobile access/mobile content/WAP: Remember when everyone thought that the mobile internet revolution was just around the corner? After NTTDoCoMo's success in the 90's with i-Mode in Japan and multiple modest successes with 3G content in Europe, it seemed as if everyone figured that U.S. consumers would be surfing the Web with their cell phones next. Developers scrambled to make their content available to WAP browsers and handheld devices only to find that most U.S. users didn't care, preferring to take their content in the comfort of their desktops. The dot.bomb crash put the final nail in the coffins of many of the startups that popped up to serve this market that never developed.

10. Awards: Oh the "award" banners! At one point, no self-respecting site was complete without a dozen or so award banners announcing their worth to the world. Unfortunately most "award" sites were really just thinly veiled scams designed to capture cash via entry fees or vanity sites for folks who just liked to feel that they were the final arbiters of taste. Eventually folks began to realize that earning "Site of the Hour" on "Billy Bob's Big List o' Links n' Stuff" wasn't that much of an honor and most of these things went away. Good riddance.

So goodbye to the fads of the past! But what about the future? I'll cover that next week in my Top Ten List of Future Fads. Until then, update your homepages, keep tweaking your mobile content, sign those guestbooks, personalize your portals, keep clicking those pagecounters, and don't forget to update your animated GIFs. Oh, and if anyone wants a "Big Sean's Super L33T Link List Site" award banner, just send me an e-mail along with your $20 application fee.

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