Dreamcast Online at OnlineConsoles.com

It seems with each passing day the landscape of Dreamcast online continues to evolve. Sometimes for better, and most times towards the inevitable idea that any official mainstay of Dreamcast online, will eventually shutdown, and move on. In late october/early november, the developer of North America's premiere net browsing software, shut down their Dreamcast portal. PlanetWeb has always been an iconic entity in the eyes of DC users, and directly associated with the Dreamcast and it's internet capabilities. Their software took many online with their Dreamcast's for the first time during the console's launch, and still to this day.

Recently, The Dreamcast Browsers Group reported with an email sent to planetweb. The CEO replied with the following response:

> At this time we have no plans to bring back
> dreamcast.planetweb.com, but if
> we receive a significant amount of email regarding
> it we may re-consider
> this decision.
>
> Sincerely,
>
>
> ----------
> Ken Soohoo
> President and CEO
> Planetweb, Inc.

This was a warrented and justified move for planetweb. They need to move on, and their portal for Dreamcast users was not being used enough to warrent keeping it online. More importantly I would also like to point out tools.planetweb.com is also down, and currently re-directs to their home page. So PlanetWeb is definatly re-adjusting to push forward with their business and website.

Side Comments:
To those who are, for whatever reason, looking to take up Ken's offer to put the sites back up. Please stop, and think about this for a minute. Why would you want them back online? What purpose would it serve? The site hold's a lot of nostalgic value, it has a large VMI cache with tons of game saves, as well as the basic historical log from it's forums and user reviews, but that's pretty much it. The only reason having it back up would be for it just to exist. While dreamcast.planetweb.com served as an excellent archive of it's historical presence. It currently was serving little to no modern use.

I see a lot of people mobilizing to start emailing the CEO and get the site back up. However I don't think these people even went to dreamcast.planetweb.com on a regular basis. Hey, maybe I'm wrong, maybe you guys used the site every day for the past 5 months str8 and it was a staple of your life. If you have a real concrete and justifiable reason to email planetweb, then by all means do so. If you do not, think it over, and think whether your really emailing them to have the site back up "for the hell of it".

However, I do think there is an opportunity we can take advantage of here. There are some java games, scripts, and possibly the vmu archive(if its small enough), that could be sent to us....IF we contact him in a serious and presentable way. (Remember, he is looking for motivation to take the time out of his day to do this. So just a few emails nagging him isn't going to do anything at all, and just serves as spam in some respects.)

Seeing as how he did offer to do something, if he got a large enough response, here is my proposition:
I will work on, draft, and write a thank you letter, thanking PlanetWeb for their dedication to the Dreamcast Online community over the years, etc etc. Everyone at the website...or even at other websites can add their own replies and we can send it to PlanetWeb in one large email. Overall this would be a THANK YOU email. Not a petition. At the end of my response I would say something to the effects of "Any software, scripts, or archived material from the original portal that you could provide to the Dreamcast community would be greatly appreciate." Or something like that, I still gotta think of how I would word that.

Also, a lot of people seem to "not get" my motives sometimes, and keep flipping things around as to why OnlineConsoles exists. This isn't an email from OnlineConsoles. It's an email from the Dreamcast community. And any scripts, files, or archived information retrieved from PlanetWeb, would be presented in full (of course if PlanetWeb were to condone that)....like I said...presented in full and hosted for everyone to download. OnlineConsoles is here to make information publically available, so that when websites go down, the users have the power to keep dreamcast online alive.

Let me know what your thoughts are on this.