Peppered with characters who are young amnesiacs, actors and heroin-addicted rockers, The East Village (http://www.theeastvillage.com) is a Melrose Place with twice the body piercings and tattoos. Like many of the 50 or so other soap operas frothing in cyberspace, Village serves up angst and intrigue for free. The twice-weekly soap lets viewers read dialogue or listen to it in audio clips while perusing characters' "diaries" and still photos.
"We looked at prime-time soaps as a model," says Charles Stuart Platkin, 33, an entrepreneur who started the company that launched Village two years ago with fellow New Yorker Jonathan Braun, 45, a former editor at Parade. As with their TV counterparts, cybersoaps seek profits through advertising.
Unlike TV, however, the Internet lets viewers play a role. At Ferndale (http://www.ferndale.com), a soap set in a mental ward (no relation to Norman Lear's 1977 oddity Fernwood 2-Night), viewers can express preferences for various plotline options—and Fern-dale creator Tom Arriola, 36, listens. "They're more like friends [than fans]," says Arriola, a former graphics designer, who lives in Sebastopol, Calif.
For the actors, who work for nominal fees, the Net is now a viable career move. "I didn't think much of it when I auditioned," says Hope Adams, who plays "tastefully neurotic" Eve Erin Ramsay in Village. "But I got an agent out of this."
They sniff, they stalk. They even purr. They're the felines of Catz, available on CD-ROM (PF.Magic) or on the Web (http://www.pfmagic. com). Like their Dogz predecessors, they actually live in your computer, periodically romping unbidden across your screen and among your icons. You start by playing with five orphaned kittens and choosing your favorite. Your onscreen fuzzball will need daily doting: chow, playtime (food and toys provided) and, of course, catnaps. Caring for Catz soaks up lots of precious computer time, not to mention memory. But if you're a pet lover, a new feline friend may just be worth it. And it won't need declawing.
>New York Online's Omar Wasow
IN A NEW YORK STATE OF MIND
A MISTY IMAGE OF A 1970S NEW YORK City subway token, accompanied by a sweet trumpet riff, greets visitors to Omar Wasow's corner of cyberspace. The New York Online service explores "New Yawk cultcha" the way its dread-locked, 25-year-old founder sees it: with lively, literate bulletin boards dedicated to hip hop and independent film, paeans to jazz, chats with luminaries like Harvard professor Cornell West and mass kvetching about mass transit. "I wanted to capture the city's intellectual energy," says Wasow, a Stanford University graduate who has run the service out of his Brooklyn brown-stone apartment since the fall of 1993 (the $50,000 startup costs came from savings, credit cards, family and friends). "I also wanted it to be exemplary of this incredible, heterogeneous, international hodgepodge that is the New York I grew up in." True to Wasow's vision, nyo.com (for software, write to info@nyo.com) attracts a far more diverse crowd than the online giants: Of its 2,000 subscribers nationwide, over half are African-American.
"New York Online is like the subway, a network that links the entire city," he says. "The difference is that here people are talking to one another."
- Contributors:
- Anthony Duignan-Cabrera,
- Laura C. Smith,
- Samantha Miller.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
