BeSeen

» see beseen.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

19 August 2002 is still readable on a LookSmart FAQ page that outlived the thing it was announcing. The question at the top was "Why are you ending this service?" and the answer was arithmetic: the cost of providing BeSeen's services had proven higher than was economically feasible. Further down, a second answer explained that accounts would be disabled on the date and no content would be kept. If you wanted your guest book, you had a few weeks to copy it out by hand.

It began as a chat script. The oldest capture of beseen.com, from January 1998, is a page called Beseen.com's WWW Chat, navigated by image map, with a link to buy advertising on it. The company behind the name was incorporated in Texas on 3 August 1998 with Josh Elmore and Drew Duncan as its principal shareholders, and it lasted roughly ten weeks as an independent business. LookSmart signed the merger agreement on 12 October 1998 and paid in junior preferred stock.

What LookSmart bought was a catalog of things you pasted into your own HTML. Hit counters and guest books. Message boards that the site called boardrooms, plus voting booths. There was a library of free graphics for anyone who could not draw their own.

I was on a 33.6k modem in 1998 and a personal page was the only publishing most of us had. Nearly all of those pages ended the same way, with a counter graphic and a link to sign the guest book, and nobody wondered whose machine was drawing that image. That is precisely what BeSeen sold: a piece of your page that lived somewhere else. I cannot tell you which service any particular counter came from, and most of the people who pasted one in could not either.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it put on the page ~

The tools were free and the trade was visible. A BeSeen chat room ran on BeSeen's machines under a BeSeen header, the counter image came off a LookSmart host, and the setup pages carried LookSmart's ad rail. For a directory company selling placement to advertisers, webmasters pasting your hostname into their source was distribution you did not have to buy.

By 2001 the branding had settled into "Beseen Free Web Tools, a LookSmart Service", with a small blue "A LookSmart Service" graphic in the masthead. The catalog barely changed across four years. It did not need to, because the audience turned over on its own as one wave of home pages went quiet and another started.

~ the day it stopped ~

The notice was short. Service terminated on 19 August 2002, accounts disabled the same day, content not retained. One line addressed users of something called Vinyl, telling them to write in if they wanted news on that product's status, which is the only surviving trace of it. Nothing was migrated anywhere. LookSmart was cutting cost and the free tools went first.

The pages lasted longer than the service did. Copies of the FAQ and the tool listings were still being served from looksmart.com into April 2003, and beseen.com kept answering until the domain slid onto a Network Solutions "Web Page Under Construction" placeholder that autumn.

~ what the domain did next ~

From April 2004 it forwarded to looksmart.com and stayed that way for years. In 2007 the name came back on a shopping search page, selling product results instead of counters, which is what LookSmart had turned into by then. Today beseen.com redirects to Indeed.

Nothing about the catalog was rare enough to inherit. Guest books moved into blog comments and counters turned into analytics dashboards. What actually ended was the assumption underneath the whole category, that a stranger's server would render part of your page forever, for free, because your traffic was worth something to somebody.

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