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- Observer.co.uk,
- Sunday May 26 2002
Most people's journey into cyberspace involves crossing a series of thresholds. There is, for example, the first e-mail message and the terrible question of what to put in the 'subject' line. To this day, that bothers some of my regular correspondents, and they invariably chicken out by typing something anodyne like 'Friday' or 'Thoughts'.
The second threshold involves bridging the chasm between email and the Web. I often include interesting URLs in messages, but for some correspondents that simply doesn't work. They look at the string of characters beginning "http://" and see only gobbledegook. And then one day the penny drops. They click on the link and - Bingo! - they realise that email and the Web are, somehow, part of a seamless whole.
Next comes the Amazon experience. For a time, newbies listen incredulously to the rest of us burbling on about buying books online. Fancy being so stupid as to give out your credit-card details on the internet. But then they find that the Amazon catalogue is in itself a wonderful resource, so they get into the habit of looking things up on it. And finally comes the Awful Moment. They realise that there's something they really want that the local Waterstones never stocks. With trembling fingers - and one or two abandoned shopping carts - they lose their online virginity and actually buy something on the internet!
For many users, the next epiphany came with Napster. They had heard about all these people downloading music tracks from the net and then one day clicked on Napster.com and downloaded the 'client' program. Next time they connected to the net, something funny happened - the Napster programme called home, letting the mother-ship know that they were online. They then searched hesitantly for a song, found it, downloaded it - and later discovered that, in addition to having it on their hard disks, their PCs were sometimes - apparently of their own volition - serving those same tracks to others on the net. It was an eerie feeling, but they got used to it.
Now, Napster has come and gone, but the file-sharing habit endures via Gnutella, LimeWire, Morpheus and a host of other programs and services. Tens of millions of people now share files every day, to the teeth-gnashing fury of the record companies. But they can't put the genie back in the bottle. Too many people have jumped that particular hurdle.
There is, however, one more threshold to be crossed. It leads into eBay, which is one of the wonders of the world. eBay was the first - and is still the pre-eminent - online auction site. It is possibly also the only dot-com business that was profitable from day one.
Most newcomers to the net initially affect a sneering incredulity towards eBay, seeing it as a kind of global car-boot sale. And indeed it is astonishing to see what people sell - and buy - on it. Who could possibly want such tat? But eBay gets most people in the end - and often for the most unexpected reasons.
It might be that you need a piece of kit - perhaps a charger for an obsolete mobile phone or elderly PDA - that no self-respecting dealer would nowadays stock, or that they would charge an arm and a leg for. But if you hunt for it on eBay, the chances are that someone, somewhere has one and is trying to get rid of it.
Or you might be a desperate parent seeking a 'retired' beanie baby for your daughter's looming birthday. The creature in question has long disappeared from the High Street, but your little girl has her heart set on it and on nothing else. So what do you do? Try eBay of course.
How do I know this? Reader, I am that parent. And it worked.
