Did you notice that Yahoo! has upgraded our email accounts with unlimited storage? I don’t know when it actually happened but I noticed it last week. I first got wind of this new development from Cyberpartygal‘s blog post, Unlimited Yahoo! Mail Storage in May but it isn’t something that I looked forward to.

My Yahoo! Mail account has been hijacked by spammers and there is nothing I could do but close it down, except that I have signed up with some websites with my Yahoo! email address. I don’t get it why some sites need us to sign in with an email address. Isn’t a user ID enough anymore? Don’t they know that email accounts could be closed? A couple of years ago, three of my email providers closed without prior notice and left me with a sticky situation of writing in to the various websites to have my log in ID changed because the email was no longer valid.

Anyway, back to Yahoo!’s unlimited storage, I don’t think that it is anymore more useful to me than it was last month. I have been using Google’s suite of services primarily for ages now and this new development won’t change a thing.

The only feature that I am looking forward with an unlimited email account is an unlimited attachment size. What is the use of an unlimited mail storage account when we could not even send a decent sized file?

Like I mentioned earlier, I have so many friends who set up a forum thinking they can be the next LowYat, thinking that they could optimize monetize it with Google Adsense and other forms of advertisements.

So there was this young friend of mine who is very talented and he was my first friend to have his very own forum. He Googlized it even before most of us here ever heard of Adsense.

What he did to keep our interest in being active in his forum was to offer incentives to us like accumulate points for each post that we made with more points for the thread or poll starter, points for each person that we referred, sweepstakes where we get to win points but not cash. You could say that these points are like legal tender in the forum.

We were all very excited of course, well, at least I was, and there was healthy competition because the top prize that is on offer where you can use your points accumulated from all the action was a mobile phone worth almost MYR2000 during that time.

By the time the first person had enough points to redeem the top prize for months later, the value of the mobile phone dropped but it still worth more than MYR1500.

Having this experience, I still think that it is of utmost importance that before setting up a forum, you need to identify first your core group of supporters, those who will post in your forum even without getting anything back in return.

Yesterday, my friend buzzed me on the messenger asking where I have been. Well, I have been VERY BUSY, can’t he see? LOL

Anyway, I soon realised that the reason he missed me was because he has just set up a new forum. Yes, he and 1000 people. Since my first forays onto the internet, I have had a long list of friends who started their very own forums. Sad to say, all of them died not long after. Even when the forum is not deleted by its forum host for being inactive, the forum is still there for all to see at its stale state. Perhaps I do not know the owners of Lowyat Forum but that is another issue altogether.

So this friend of mine started a forum and requested me to start a few threads to give it a seemingly active appearance in the hopes of attracting other members to participate. While I would love to help him, to be frank, I have done this for a few rounds already for various people who asked, and yet the forums died in the end.

It is not that I did not try my best to help. A forum needs not one person to post a hundred threads but a nucleus group to post and reply consistently and coming up with fresh content. I previously wrote about the state of our local forums and being shocked by the topics discussed but I am talking about achieving popularity WITHOUT going that route.

There was one forum that I participated in years ago that was very popular and I went all out to recruit as many of my friends as possible. The forum did survive for more than one year but even with my own posse of forum posters, the site still fell apart but that shall be another post for another day.

My friend was actually thinking of sending his son to a teen boarding school in the US because he said that the standard of education there is way higher than what is being offered here. We wonder if that is a wise move since I think that his son is still too young to handle life away from home.

However, my friend said that he has received quite a bit of useful information on private Boarding Schools on the internet and also talked to parents who sent their children to boarding schools and the feedback has been positive all the way.

My friend is convinced that by gaining an American education through one of the top boarding schools in America like those listed on MyBoardingSchool.com, there will be many more opportunities opened to his son once he comes out to the working world.

Since his son is all excited about the prospects of studying overseas, I guess he will do fine there!