Death Anniversaries

~ 2025 ~

• 5 May 2025 Skype — blue logo, the boop boop ringtone, washed out video. how you called your grandma when she lived in another country. microsoft bought it for 8.5 billio

~ 2024 ~

• 26 Jun 2024 ICQ — "uh-oh." it was the sound of being wanted.

~ 2023 ~

• 2023 Yik Yak — anonymous campus gossip. died of moderation, scaled by reputation. a chaotic, location-based ghost town.

~ 2022 ~

• 15 Jun 2022 Internet Explorer — the punching bag. the universal default. the <blink> tag's mortal enemy. retired with grudging respect.
• 1 Nov 2022 Google Talk / Hangouts (Classic) — remember when google had ONE messenger? then six? then zero? rest in the merge.

~ 2020 ~

• 31 Dec 2020 Flash Games — an entire civilisation of bored office workers, school kids on library computers, stick figure animations. a renaissance lost to a single calendar dat
• 31 Dec 2020 Adobe Flash — the engine of the early creative web. for two decades, half the internet was a SWF file.

~ 2019 ~

• Mar 2019 MySpace — the top 8 was a public love letter and a public knife fight. tom is still your friend.
• 2 Apr 2019 Google+ — they made you join it to comment on youtube. circles were a great idea. nobody asked.
• 31 May 2019 BlackBerry Messenger — PIN exchanges were corporate intimacy. R / D ticks were status anxiety. it died defending its keyboard.

~ 2018 ~

• 30 Jun 2018 Pebble — the kickstarter that started kickstarter. e-paper smartwatch. fitbit ate it. apple buried it. it is, quietly, being resurrected.
• 17 Jul 2018 Yahoo! Messenger — buzz!! the loudest possible way to say "are you there?"
• 6 Aug 2018 RuneScape Classic — the original 2001 client kept alive for veterans. seventeen years of sentimental life support. finally turned off.
• 18 Oct 2018 Path — "a smaller, more personal social network." capped at 150 friends. nobody wanted intimate; everyone wanted reach.
• 20 Dec 2018 Club Penguin — disney bought it, milked it, killed it for an app. the millions of children who waddled there are now adults who still log on in dreams.

~ 2017 ~

• 17 Jan 2017 Vine — six seconds. the most economical comedic form ever invented. murdered before it could collect rent.
• 1 Jun 2017 Delicious / del.icio.us — social bookmarking when bookmarking was social. tags were the future. then they weren't.
• 8 Oct 2017 Windows Phone — live tiles were genuinely cool. nokia hardware was beautiful. nobody made apps for it. the third platform died for lack of an instagram client.
• 15 Dec 2017 AOL Instant Messenger — the running yellow guy. away messages as confessional poetry. the door slam that ended high-school relationships.

~ 2016 ~

• Sep 2016 BlackBerry — the keyboard purists. emails on the metro. the pope had one. obama had one. they swore touchscreens were a fad.

~ 2015 ~

• 9 Apr 2015 FriendFeed — the geek's social aggregator. facebook bought it, hired the team, pretended it never existed.
• 30 Apr 2015 Grooveshark — free music streaming with no apparent licensing. legally questionable. spiritually beloved. eventually sued out of existence.
• 14 Jun 2015 Friendster — the original social network. it figured out the model. lost the audience. died as a filipino gaming site.
• 22 Dec 2015 Rdio — spotify's prettier european cousin. better UI, smaller catalogue, no chance.

~ 2014 ~

• 2014 Neopets — we taught ourselves html on neopet profiles. an entire generation of programmers were forged in pet customisation.
• 1 Jan 2014 Symbian OS — nokia ran the world on it. the iphone came out. nokia kept shipping it for six more years out of denial.
• 14 Jan 2014 Winamp — it really whipped the llama's ass.
• 8 Apr 2014 MSN Messenger — the chatroom of an entire generation's first crushes.
• 30 Sep 2014 Orkut — google's first social network. weirdly enormous in brazil and india. 300 million users could not save it.

~ 2013 ~

• 1 Feb 2013 MiniDisc — sony's beautiful, ill-fated cassette successor. better than CD, smaller than CD, ignored by the world. a true cult hardware.
• 3 Apr 2013 Hotmail — your first email address was probably @hotmail.com. that handle is your shame and your archive.
• 1 Jul 2013 Google Reader — the open web's last great central nervous system. killed for nothing in particular. nobody got over it.
• 8 Jul 2013 AltaVista — the search engine of the pre-google internet. babelfish died with it.
• 18 Jul 2013 Bebo — UK and ireland's myspace. AOL bought it for $850M, sold it for $10M three years later. friend luv was a finite resource.
• 6 Nov 2013 YouTube Comments (the original) — they were chaos but they were ours. the google+ unification was when youtube comments officially died as culture.

~ 2012 ~

• 2012 Digg — power users had a religion. the v4 redesign was the schism. reddit ate the whole pie.
• 2012 Habbo Hotel — virtual hotel rooms. virtual currency. virtual relationships. real hours wasted. unforgettable.
• 2012 Kazaa / LimeWire / Bearshare — downloaded a virus and an album the same afternoon. installed three browser toolbars by accident.
• 15 Oct 2012 Microsoft Zune — the brown one. squirting songs to friends. the saddest social music device ever shipped.

~ 2011 ~

• Dec 2011 Hi5 — huge in latin america and turkey. profile customisation paradise. eventually pivoted to gaming, then gave up.

~ 2010 ~

• 2010 Angelfire / Tripod — still up. their hearts stopped beating in 2003. cousins of geocities, smaller, scrappier.
• 2010 Ask Jeeves — a butler answered your questions. then they fired the butler and renamed it "ask.com." nobody asked anyone anything anymore.
• Apr 2010 Palm Pilot / PalmOS — graffiti handwriting. PIM in your pocket. "a computer in your hand" before phones did it. acquired, mismanaged, vanished.
• 4 Aug 2010 Google Wave — "what if email and chat had a baby?" they shipped it. nobody understood it. dead in fourteen months.
• Oct 2010 Sony Walkman / Discman — the walkman invented "personal music." the discman taught us anti-skip protection. the iPod evicted them both.

~ 2009 ~

• 26 Oct 2009 GeoCities — the city of personal homepages, where everyone had a window with a candle.

~ 2008 ~

• 1 Mar 2008 Netscape Navigator — the browser that opened the web. lost the war to internet explorer. its ghost is firefox.
• 2 Dec 2008 MP3.com — this was the place where bands uploaded their own mp3s, before anyone really knew what to do about music on the internet. it ran for a few years, then

~ 2007 ~

• 2007 Clippy — "it looks like you're writing a letter." nobody asked. everyone hated him. now we kind of miss him.

~ 2005 ~

• 2005 RealPlayer — they wanted to invent streaming. they invented dark patterns instead.

~ 2002 ~

• 3 Jun 2002 Napster — the bullet that the recording industry took. nineteen years old. lasted three years. changed everything.

~ 1997 ~

• 1 May 1997 Tamagotchi — the first digital being most of us ever loved. the first one we ever killed.

~ 1995 ~

• 1995 The Personal Homepage — an html page with your name, your hobbies, your dog's photo, an email link, a hit counter. social media ate it. cool people are bringing it back.

~ 1992 ~

• 1992 Dial-up Internet — "GET OFF THE PHONE I'M DOWNLOADING SOMETHING."

~ 1989 ~

• 1989 AOL Trial CDs — they came in cereal boxes, magazines, mailboxes. coasters for an entire decade. an estimated one billion mailed. one billion landfilled.