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Wow, finally someone who remembers Xoom! Here's perhaps a more innocent perspective on the service :)—back when I was 10 or 11 years old I wanted so much to mak

Wow, finally someone who remembers Xoom! Here's perhaps a more innocent perspective on the service :)—back when I was 10 or 11 years old I wanted so much to make my own websites using HTML and CSS. Making sites on members.xoom.com and hanging out in the help desk (Java based) chat room trying to solve other people's website issues was how I first learned to make websites back in fifth grade. That room had a super friendly and helpful set of volunteers/staff. From the skills I learned in that chatroom I would wind up making sites for a fee (I think I charged $30, felt like a lot of money but wow must have been a steal for the business folks). Years later I've been working in SF, recognizing the locations you describe and envying the rent. A website on overfishing I hosted on xoom as a project for fifth grade science class got me an A, so there's one site that was legal and in (in my teacher's opinion) good taste! This all reminds me how important free things are to kids who want to learn things but can't spend any money (even $5 for a SquareSpace is prohibitively expensive).

apathy 10y ago
That's really cool to hear! The customer service people at Xoom were great ones, many of the more colorful characters I've ever met. Ed went off to start a security firm, Bryan moved to LA to star in gay porn, and I dated a crazy pink haired girl who ended up in SF by hopping trains all the way from North Carolina. It was a good group of people, by and large. As previously noted, many Xoom ops people eventually ended up at Google, and I like to think it was a net positive there, too. Of course we also made mushroom-and-peanut-butter sandwiches in the break room and piped the heat exchanger from the "machine room" into the rest of the building (an old bank building on Montgomery), but overall it was a good group.

apathy 10y ago

That's really cool to hear! The customer service people at Xoom were great ones, many of the more colorful characters I've ever met. Ed went off to start a security firm, Bryan moved to LA to star in gay porn, and I dated a crazy pink haired girl who ended up in SF by hopping trains all the way from North Carolina. It was a good group of people, by and large. As previously noted, many Xoom ops people eventually ended up at Google, and I like to think it was a net positive there, too. Of course we also made mushroom-and-peanut-butter sandwiches in the break room and piped the heat exchanger from the "machine room" into the rest of the building (an old bank building on Montgomery), but overall it was a good group.