Okay, this whole article is going to seem a bit Andy Rooneyesque. But I just can't help it. I have to say this. What happened to concern over page load times?

Back in 1996, I subscribed to my first ISP, GNN (soon acquired by AOL) for $19.95 per month. This, of course, is back in the days of metered service. I think it included 16 hours per month of use. Although it was slow, I do know that it was a fun time to be online (as long as you kept an eye on your watch). Page loading was slow due to the 14.4k modem, but the excitement was there. I was an information pioneer. Shortly thereafter, I heard about a company called EarthLink. They were giving unlimited dialup for the same $19.95. Then came the 56k modem. I was sold!

Now, fast forward a few years to 1999. I got DSL and boy was that nice. I was surfing and downloading (anyone remember Napster?) to my hearts content. DSL truly was, as the marketers were saying: "lightning fast", with "blazing downloads". Why? Well, pages were still relatively purpose-built without too much extraneous information, advertising was used more sparingly, and you had technologists keeping us marketers in our places. After all, the Internet was envisioned as this place of free thought and free information sharing. It was a new world and the early inhabitants respected it.

I should add that besides writing articles I've done a lot of things, particularly in this area of technology. I began my career in technology back in 1996 when I began working in global Telco at a company called Concert Management Services. It was a joint venture between BT and MCI to serve large, global corporate customers with networks and telco services. Then I was at UUNET, when, at the time, it was the worlds largest Internet backbone provider. From there, well, I went to work at EarthLink, my beloved ISP, to leave the wholesale world to get closer to the customer.

It was at EarthLink where we had to do a balancing act between ad revenues and customer experience. Our ad group, bless their hearts, worked so hard to get deals and folks like me in Customer Experience (that was what the product management group was called) shot them down half of the time. Why? We were looking out for our subscribers. We were concerned about intruding on their time. They were paying us for access, not to be barraged with ads. We were concerned with page load times. On our start page, we took tremendous efforts to ensure that pages were well-designed from both a performance perspective and aesthetically.

Finally...fast forward to 2008 and the point of this article. I am sitting here on a DSL connection in my Web 2.0 world waiting for the pages to load...Java, AJAX, rich media ads, embedded videos, blah, blah, blah...Yes, the marketers have done what the early inhabitants feared and developers have capitulated because they've become obsessed with pushing the envelope. My page load times are back to circa 1996 and what am I waiting for? I am waiting on flashy content that I am not even interested in, so-called targeted ad content, and whatever else. All I want is an experience like 2000. I want my page fully loaded in under 2 seconds. Let's take a cue from the classic blues guitarists: "Less is more" my friends.



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