Do you forgive him??
AFTER clogging computer screens with webcam girls and male enhancements for two decades, the inventor of the pop-up has finally apologised.
Ethan Zuckerman, the head of the Centre for Civic Media at MIT, developed the code for the first pop-up in the mid-90s while working as a programmer at web hosting service Tripod.com.
But in an apologetic essay at the Atlantic , the computer whiz insists he had no idea of the horrors the function would inflict.
Nerd.........
“At the end of the day, the business model that got us funded was advertising,” Zuckerman explained. “The model that got us acquired was analysing users’ personal homepages so we could better target ads to them. Along the way, we ended up creating one of the most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolkit: the pop-up ad.
“It was a way to associate an ad with a user’s page without putting it directly on the page, which advertisers worried would imply an association between their brand and the page’s content. Specifically, we came up with it when a major car company freaked out that they’d bought a banner ad on a page that celebrated anal sex. I wrote the code to launch the window and run an ad in it.”
A few weeks later Geocities used the code to introduce pop-ups, the coder said, and the internet’s ad-based business model was born.
“I’m sorry. Our intentions were good.”
Pop-up ad inventor Ethan Zuckerman says, ‘I’m sorry’ | News.com.au