It’s funny how fast things can get dated on the internet. I guess that as I continue to age, time starts slipping past. To me, 2009 doesn’t seem that far away. For a lot of the Solid Signal staff, it was a time that they were in elementary school. For the up and coming generation, the folks who will be heading off to college this year, it’s before they even started school. But I’m getting off track I guess.
How social media worked back then
Back in 2009, part of our social media strategy was a dedicated blog that did nothing but point to our YouTube videos. I guess the whole idea was that somehow people wouldn’t be able to get to YouTube by themselves? But whatever. It’s a neat idea, but these days it seems a little silly, like trying to explain to people how to send an email. I remember once telling someone…
You know, it’s like, you have to press the little “at” button, it’s the shift and the 2, and everyone has like their name, and then the at button, and then aol dot com. No, don’t type the word “dot”, it’s a period.
(Come on, you probably had a conversation like that at some point.)
What you post, lives forever
The thing is, the internet never forgets. The Solid Signal Blog was around in 2009, but so was our partner site SolidSignal.TV. That site’s long since gone, but the content lives on, partially thanks to The Internet Archive. The Internet Archive is a non-profit repository of a lot of things, including old web pages. You can put in a URL and see what it looked like at different points in time. For example, SolidSignal.TV looked like this: (click on the link to go to the archived version of the site.)
It’s actually a decent looking site if you ignore the chunky smartphones. Back then wireless charging was so new that most people didn’t know what it was, and today of course every top-end phone has it.
All that great content is still around
You can still read and watch all that content. Well, most of it anyway. SolidSignal.TV’s YouTube channel is still out there, hosting videos from 13 years ago. It hasn’t seen much activity lately, but then again our regular YouTube channel has really grown since then. You can read the articles from that old blog, too. I’ve integrated them into this one. All the articles here at The Solid Signal Blog are organized by date. You can click on the years, either on the side of the window or toward the bottom (it depends on your device) and read content from 2010. It’s all there. There’s also a ton of older content from the days when Blackberries roamed the Earth. This blog has been publishing since 2007, and while a lot of that content is no longer up, you’ll find a good selection in those archives.
Check them out and see what we were doing back then!
