Everybody had a plan, an idea, a goal … and everybody had the next best thing.

Competition on the internet was fast and furious. You had to move or get left in the dust.

It’s not 1996 any more unfortunately. The internet used to be so vibrant, so full of life .. so dangerous .. yet .. so thrilling. The Grand Daddy companies of the internet are all now just a passing memory.

Back in the day, you won when you thought you never would.

I remember the days when you had to send an email to get your website submitted. There were no forms to fill out, no fancy captcha’s, and the wait was months instead of days to get your small, left aligned, frameset ridden, 50 page website listed into what seemed like a huge 1 million page index.

But we waited. We had faith that if one index wouldn’t take us, one of the next 50 indexes might.

Everyone had a hook, a gimmick, a line. Everyone had a search engine, or a directory of some type. Everyone had a niche, and the technology to go with that niche. There were smart people all over the place, doing smart things.

All of the effort, all of the drive, all of the tenacity, of all of those yesteryears, has somehow faded .. leaving us today .. with too few choices.

Today, we are left with a community driven internet. We are presented with the likes of Google+ and Facebook and all of the apathy that comes with.

There are no longer those daring internet search souls flaunting the next big thing. Innovation has given way to the bland, while the lawless, freebooting nature of the net dies a little each day with the advent of cloud computing and web 2.0.

Our daring ones have lost their place amongst the cubicles of the internet search giants. Giants that would rather sell you a pair of brown shoes in Aukland, than to provide any local shoe salesmen in your own town.

Young and fast applications have fallen away to the onslaught of backweb and bloat. Developers aren’t in the least bit motivated. So complacent with their job, these developers are, that they’ve nothing better to do with their time, than to keep fiddling with 10 year old technologies. Too frightened of the likes of Google or Bing to go out and live on the edge with their grand application schemes.

Though cloud computing may be touted as the next big thing, I doubt it will cover nearly the ground in 50 years that the entire internet did as a whole in it’s first 5.

As long as we have developers who are afraid to take on some risk, I doubt seriously that we will be seeing the next best thing coming along any time soon.