subject: The Free Gifts From Internet Portals [print this page] Given their chance, some Internet sites would probably keep you from checking out several sites. Instead, you would be having all your communication needs met at an Internet portal. In fact, the foremost goal of any Internet portal is to create a sense of belonging within a virtual community.
Otherwise known as Web super sites, Internet portals are there to meet your every need. People can avail of the services offered by these sites without spending, making the sites themselves so attractive. Internet portals provide free e mail accounts. Sites like these also provide instant messaging, chat rooms, and message boards which have become quite popular. A free search engine is of course a feature as well.
Because of these services, you feel as if you are doing much more than just simply going through one Web site. This is what I fondly labeled as the American express approach to Web sites. The term members stuck well with people more than customers or cardholders, as revealed by an American express survey.
Membership has its Privileges eventually became a slogan. This is also how portals operate. What value can these portal sites give to this sense of community? It's all about the money. In order to create income for themselves, these sites turn to selling online advertising space. The thinking is that the more free services they provide and the more they make you feel like a member instead of simply a user, the more time you're likely to spend at that site. Advertising space would be given to advertisers at much high cost.
Portals will have advertisements everywhere. One of the earliest to adopt the portal concept is Netscape. It is able to offer free services not because it had to start from scratch, but because it decided to team up with other companies online. The free e mail service of the netcenter resulted from its tie up with USA.net, which conducts the net address e mail service.
Netcenter includes business related discussion groups and a personal finance area among the services available to you. Web surfers almost always use Internet search engines. Thus, popular search engines have now begun to provide the same features as portal sites.
There are suitable portal features also in AltaVista. Texts from different languages other than English can be translated here. Indeed, Yahoo is now more than a highly favored search engine because of the presence of portal features. Searching is for free, so is an e mail account. A personal yahoo account called my yahoo can be yours as well.
You can either download Yahoo pager or look for its online java version if you are a macintosh or unix user. Getting Yahoo as your ISP requires your signing up. Grocery shopping can be done at home thanks to eGrocer. The excite product finder makes online shopping a different experience. Just type your need and everything will be presented to you. The use of the search engine is also given.
The same features can be found in lycos. Lycos may be a worthwhile site, but it already offers the same as any portal site. What sets lycos apart from other portal sites is that it offers free home pages.
