Five years before Facebook

Nearly 20 years ago, both the trend toward membership communities that Zuckerberg exploited and the trend to play around with IT at work were already very evident

Note: both of the websites mentioned are now defunct (!)

This week’s prize for the best-named Internet firm must go to iToast, the Interactive Toaster Company, Inc, of Boca Raton, Florida. No, it doesn’t bring the Web to your Dualit, so making possible the perfect croissant. Instead, iToast helps you do two other things indispensable to modern living: set up your own website, and gamble. For free.

Scott and Dan Kurland, the founders of iToast, named it that way because they believe that toasters are a perfect example of easy-to-use interface design. So with iToast you key in www.membersites.com, think up a few names and passwords, blackball the relatives you’d like to bar from your exclusive list of members, and you’re away. Whether you’re building a virtual camp, temple, fraternity or sorority, the iToast people promise, MemberSites will create a ‘friendly, integrated community home where your members will feel comfortable’. Register the names of your inner circle of up to 500 mates, and, without programming anything, you can offer them chat rooms, bulletin boards, breaking news from your news team and, yes, your photo albums.

With this iToast offering, there are the inevitable crumbs. Although I’m an atheist, my JAMES AT HOME homepage calendar automatically tells members that Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are upcoming events in my diary. But otherwise the service, though demanding – I haven’t got a news team – should make it easier for everyone to become a publisher. It’s with iToast’s www.windough.com that I smell burning.

With WinDough, you join 150,000 other Netties by having a small browser window continuously at the bottom left of your screen, enabling you to win anything from a $10 mousepad to $25,000 in cash. Every 30 seconds, a new banner appears; if you see the legend ‘You Win’ on it, you’re in luck – provided you click on it within 30 seconds. Just registering your email does the trick.

Like all great innovations, WinDough is disarmingly simple. At present, it’s only available to residents of North America (sans Quebec). But when something like it arrives in this country, employers will be aghast. The window takes up space on crowded desktops and requires that users glance at it twice a minute, every minute, in the hope that they won’t have to worry about earning the next few months’ salary. There’s no Anthea Turner online, it’s true; but, by bringing an electronic scratchcard to every screen in the UK, WinDough looks like it could turn work into play. Bad for productivity, bad for chancellor Gordon Brown – and probably another case for kneejerk intervention by home secretary Jack Straw.