Catharina and myself set up Myster in march 1995, as it seemed logical - through my experience with several magazines like Computer Info and Net-INFO, that people needed a place to meet in the flesh, but more important I wanted a kind of laboratory to see what people were actually doing with e-mail, internet, videophones etc. You can try anything at your editorial office, but you need real people if you want to know what they want. We already had two large web-sites (net.info.nl and mind.lift.nl) and wanted to get in touch with our customers. As Myster is pretty large, we can have some 300 people there, the place is also suitable for conferences and lectures.
We choose to become involved in the internet and the web, because at that time (my Internet-site of 5000 pages dates from september)
It seemed the logical choice not to go with a service like Aol or CompuServe, in Europe the alternatives like Compuserve are more expensive and less applicable and geared towards the situation here
What do we get from it?
Experience, and the truth is that an Internet cafe is not really such a good business, most customers are from overseas (USA, many scandinavian) and just come to do email.
That is in fact my observation after a few months, the web has no appeal for experienced people, they do mostly e-mail, send electronic postcards from Amsterdam, but very little web-surfing. This in turn has led me to seriously doubt the future of the net in its present WWW.form.
This has led to my belief, that the Web is actually in danger, unless we find real interesting applications and ways to make people do something with it.
Data is no Info, the stuff you get off all those pages doesn't really change you. We need to re-structure the whole thing, make it more real, more local and more human.
How, I don't really know, but looking into the depth's of Cyberspace is a new science altogether, isn't it?
Luc Sala
email sala@euronet.nl
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