Little known historical facts about
what is today a large industry, Vacation Timeshare, are soon to be
published in a book authored by the operator of the world's oldest
Internet timeshare website, Larry Hayden.
As the sole timeshare broker who was
online on the Internet in the early 90's he shares his unique
perspective and first-hand knowledge of the very beginnings of timeshare
marketing on the Internet.
Back in 1991, which was before the Internet became
popular, Larry was the only one marketing timeshare resales via
electronic computer bulletin boards.
Bulletin boards were a very
important part of corporate business for small and large businesses
alike. Bulletin boards as they were used then have now disappeared with
the advent of the Internet.
But, Larry recalls being fascinated by a book he read about a little known subject called the Internet.
As he read the book, he states that it quickly became
obvious to him that vacation timeshare would be the perfect vehicle to
market to a worldwide audience, and the Internet was a worldwide medium.
After all, is there anyone in the entire world who doesn't like to
vacation?
With computer bulletin boards, people had to place a
long distance telephone call in order to connect and use the bulletin
board. How marvelous it was that with the Internet, the connection did
not require payment of a long distance telephone call.
Larry saw that his bulletin board
would soon be moth-balled along with the several thousand dollars he had
spent in programing the software for it.
The Internet was developed and used only by the
government for non-commercial activities, so back in those days it was
considered an abuse to post anything of a commercial nature, and the
Internet purists predicted that commercial activity would be the end and
downfall of the Internet.
Well, in effect, they were right. There was no way that
such a powerful worldwide medium would not be used and overtaken by
commercial interests, and the end of the Internet, at least as the
purists had conceived it, did in fact take place. The connection was
done via a telephone line, so anyone with a telephone had potential
access to the online world.
Connection via a telephone line was the standard for a
couple of years, but, behind the scene, entrepreneurial cable and
telephone companies were feverishly working to develop the technology
for a faster connection that is commonly known today as "broadband"
meaning cable or dsl connectivity. Technology development to attain ever
faster speeds continues to this day.
Back in the computer bulletin board days, Larry knew nothing about web design or html language.
HTML stands for hyper text markup language. It is the
computer language source that causes web pages to display and read the
way they do, such as the layout, the fonts displayed, the colors, the
graphics, etc.
When you are viewing a web page, you
can view the html code that creates the page you are viewing, by
clicking on "view" then click on "source". So when web designers create a
web page, they create the html, not what you are looking at when you
view it online.
Larry has since learned a good deal about writing html
and he wrote a good portion of what appears on his company website.
But back years ago, Larry hired someone to design his
first website and launched it immediately. Back then there was only one
search engine, Yahoo, and for the search term "timeshare" there was only
one website that came up, which was Larry's. It actually remained that
way for months.
Larry remembers talking to other timeshare brokers who
seemed casually interested in the Internet but who really didn't seem to
grasp the powerful marketing potential of the Internet as a worldwide
medium.
But Larry's "monopoly" on Internet timeshare marketing was not to last long.
Larry states: "I remember the first time when some other
company came up in the search engines, a now defunct company that was
designed by a former employee of RCI. That marked the beginning of the
end of my Internet timeshare "monopoly", and as the years progressed,
untold numbers of companies, legitimate and otherwise have crowded the
online world. I just did a search on Google for the term timeshare, and
it returned 3,870,000 hits. That is a few more than my 1 hit years ago."
Says Larry, "I will leave it to you decide if the
Internet is a good or a bad thing. Like all modern marvels it has
elements of both. But I can't imagine the world without it now, can
you?"
For more information, visit Larry's website at www.alltimeshare.com.
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