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From Ethan Zuckerman, VP of Research and Development:

A few weeks back, I passed a substantial landmark in my life. January 6th marked my fourth year anniversary at Tripod. A little over four years ago, I bid goodbye to my professors and friends in my graduate program at Rennsalear Polytechnic Institute, put my Mac in my truck, and headed down the east slope of Berlin Mountain to join Bo and Dick in one of the most interesting adventures of my life. I thought that four years at one of the Web's most dynamic and exciting companies was quite an achievement.

Some of my colleagues felt otherwise. One of the techies who has recently joined Tripod came to my office and said, "What's the big deal? At the big scary defense contractor I used to work for, you weren't a veteran until you spent 30 years with the firm. You're just a newcomer like the rest of us!"

It was then I realized that not everyone understands the concept of "Web years".

The Web's changing so quickly that many folks within the Internet industry measure change in Web years. One human year equals between 7 and 12 Web years, depending on who you ask. I favor the 7:1 ratio, which makes Web years roughly equivalent to dog years. Proper usage of the term in context: "You just found out that Netscape is releasing source to their browser? That happened Web years ago!" In fact, it happened months ago, but since so much happens in a single day, the few months-old information is probably as worthless now as years-old information would be in another business.

Web years are actually a pretty useful metric. Since the Web as we know it didn't really exist until 1994, it's impossible to have more than 5 years Web experience. If you have been Webby for that long, you're (sometimes) treated with the deference you might have earned from 35 years work in a field. And if you get one of these guys talking about the old days, it can sound like you're talking to someone who has decades of experience under his or her belt: "Yeah, when I started this job, my browser was NSCA Mosaic 0.9, because there weren't any browsers out of beta yet. Yahoo was just one big long page. Every graphic had to dither to 19% grey 'cause every page had a grey background. No tables, no imagemaps, none of this javascript nonsense. In fact, when I connected to the Web at 9600 baud, I had to walk five miles through waist deep snow, uphill both ways..." And so on.

My increasing Web years have brought me to an interesting dillemma. Since I joined Tripod at the age of 22 and have lived over 28 Web years in my four years here, I'm facing Web middle age. In fact, there's a good chance that I've been delaying my Web midlife crisis: the moment I wonder whether I've spent my last 30 Web years well, and what to do with my few remaining Web years. In three more human years, I'll have a Web age of 71. I'll still be in my twenties, but facing the spectre of Web senility. I'll function well most of the time, but unpredictably forget HTML tags, names of the hottest new Web companies, phone numbers of venture capital firms...

Thoughts of Web years aside, I think the main reason I keep thinking about my four-year mark is that I've now spent more time doing Tripod than I have doing anything else in my life. It's longer than I spent in high school, college, grad school or any of my other jobs. And to be honest, it's lots longer than I ever expected to spend at this crazy place. My father and I talk about this often. He's an attorney with a long and successful career, which has largely consisted of decade-long stints with different state agencies. As he reminds me, when he graduated from college, folks tried to pick companies where they'd want to work for their entire life. When most of my friends left college, they looked for posts where they could learn something interesting before moving on to "something better" in two years.

I'm glad that I'm becoming old as dirt in Web years. It opens up an interesting possibility — a life where you can live seven lifetimes of experience, excitement, and challenge in one biological lifetime. First, though, I need to find out if one can survive Web senility. I'll let you know what I find out� if I remember to.

Ethan Zuckerman is Tripod's VP of R&D.; He'll stop you in the halls and tell you of life before Netscape if you're not careful.

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Read more "Letters from Tripod" in the archive.

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