Erica Douglass › Comments

I'll bet byte.me was taken - Bob Gannon

you're too late to get much of anything that's a single word now (at least a "good" single word). There's still some phrases to be had. I registered 13 very cool ones this morning only to have them come back failed an hour later. I only managed to get one decent one this afternoon. My excitement has officially waned. - Fa La La La Lindsay

I got hammerti.me - Ryan Kuder

bein' from Maine, I shoulda been all over this. Oh well. - Anthony Citrano

I got "www.photostakenby.me" - Johnny Worthington

you totally need hehhehheh.me ;) - Erica Douglass

I got adapt.me, horrify.me, and streamline.me :) - Neal Jansons from twhirl

Where can I purchase a .me domain? - Joe Dawson

Can think of a few X rated but won't lower the tone too much so - poke.me - touch.me haha!! - Joe Dawson

Joe, too late, I bet they're taken. In fact most half decent terms were - Duncan Riley

Domize should probably include support for .me domains... Hm.. - Chris Chua

Did they leave those things up on the poles? I guess so, there is no compelling reason to take them down and no salvage value to speak of. - DGentry

I had one of those. Downloaded betas of Windows 95 several times on one. - Robert Scoble

I had one for my Newton MessagePad. Never used it that much. Did think a lot about apps that I could build for them. - scott anderson

Metricom made no provisions for taking their equipment down when they secured the mounting rights for their network. Thus, when they went belly up, there was no budget to yank their old equipment. Cities around the country learned their lesson. Now, pretty much every pole attachment agreement you encounter will include a "Metricom/Ricochet" clause that requires the radio removal to be ensured by a bond. - Christopher Sacca

Memories... I remember when they first started... - Mitchell Tsai

I still have my old Ricochet modem. There was talk among city services types here in SF that it might come back as a utility - since the city now owned all the equipment. Fortunately they figured out that municipal wifi is smarter. Still hope it happens. - Hillary Hartley

back then you'd tell people "wireless internet, it's the future!" and they'd just look at you funny. - Karim

I had a repeater on my roof and got free service. - Oldengrey (Jay)

96kbps and all the Hamster Dance you could stand. Thems were the days. - Leo Laporte

Brings back memories of my dual twisted pair 56kbps ISDN lines from USWest. Circa 1997 - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

Leo, I believe it's spelt "Hampster Dance" :-D - Karim

Leo: 96kbps? On my Ricochet I was happy to get something close to 19kbps. Usually I only got 12. - Robert Scoble

I remember driving to work with my laptop on the passenger side, sending IRC messages saying "I'm chatting in the car!!!" while at stop signs. Probably one of the dumber things I've done, but I was in awe of such a cool device :) - Patrick Lightbody

Star mode! - Joel Franusic

cradlepoint + verizon 3G evdo card = personal mobile wifi cloud. very powerful. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

Still have my Ricochet USB modem! Ah, the memories. :) (I have a Sprint card now) - Erica Douglass

Scoble: The second version of their service, which they had rolled out to limited service areas by the time they died, had a theoretical bandwidth of up to 128kbps or something like that. - ⓞnor

I had Ricochet service back in ~2000-2001. I used it on my laptop as well as my pocket PC. It was great at the time, and I was so disappointed when they went belly up. I was getting 200-300 kbps download speeds, which was pretty good at the time. I drove from Foster City to San Jose once with my pocket PC connected the whole time just to prove I could... - Jeff P. Henderson

Ricochet is why I never connected to the internet on a dial-up modem. When I was young, I only had internet access at work or school, where we had a fast connection. Later, I had internet access with a cable modem. In between, when everyone else used dial-up, I used Ricochet. - Amit Patel

This technology should be reused rather than taken down. However, I'm sure there's lots of legal stuff that needs to be cleared before that happens... - Franklin Naval

I loved Ricochet service, but the lesson I learned from Metricom failure was much more valuable. I got an access to a certain insider report proving Metricom will never reach profitability for one simple reason - Ricochet network would collapse before the number of users could make it profitable. Sure thing, one would use this insider info to profit by shorting the stock, right? Of course the stock eventually reached zero. The only problem was that on it's way from $40 to zero it touched $200. He-he. - ǝuǝƃnǝ

The best part was the little beeps it made when it connected. - Oldengrey (Jay)