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/____________________________\
/______________________________\
» dig up a name « search the catacombs
» wander by decade · the most mourned · dead internet statistics · the wake · visitors log
rest in peace, signed off
:: the digital graveyard ::
« back to all categories · 207 graves in this section, sorted newest first
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
360doc Personal Library 📖 2005 - 2026 360doc opened in 2005 as somewhere to clip an article you wanted to keep. twenty years later it held more than eighty million accounts and 1.1 billion saved pieces of writing, almost none of it written by the people who saved it. in january 2026 the owners offered the whole platform to anyone able t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Myrient 📖 2022 - 2026 myrient was 390 terabytes of verified game preservation sets served over plain http by one administrator, with no account and no queue and no torrent client required. it held the no-intro and redump sets alongside the arcade and dos collections, which made it the address people sent each other inste |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
YggTorrent 📖 2017 - 2026 on the night of 3 to 4 march 2026 a hacker calling himself gr0lum deleted ygg's servers, and the largest french-language torrent tracker on the internet was gone by the next morning. it had six million members and had survived court-ordered isp blocks and years of domain seizures. what it did not su |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Listly 📖 2011 - 2025 on 15 september 2025 listly published a shutdown plan, and on 15 november it closed. for fourteen years it made a list that other people could add to, embedded inside somebody else's blog post, which is a curation tool and a comment section wearing one interface. the stated reason was spam. subscrib |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
MemeStreams 📖 2001 - 2025 on 8 november 2025 the dns zone for memestreams.net was edited and the address record came out of it, which is how a community that had been answering since 2001 stopped having a location. tom cross and nick levay built it as an experiment in recommending links to strangers whose taste you had come |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
BookmarkSync 📖 1999 - 2025 november 1998, a company called syncit shipped a tray icon that watched your favorites folder and copied every change to a server, so the same bookmarks appeared on whichever computer you sat down at. that was a genuine problem in 1999 and the fix was free. a server failure in september 2003 ended t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
ROMhacking.net 📖 2005 - 2024 dormant nightcrawler started official work in august 2005, months after the two archives the scene depended on had both gone dark. what he built lasted nineteen years and became the place you went for a fan translation patch. the end was not money: it was takedown notices on one side and, by his own account |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Subscene 📖 2001 - 2024 subscene was a search box on top of a pile of text files. it never hosted a single film. people who had already found the film came here for the words underneath it, in whatever language the copy they had did not carry. the notice went up on 2 may 2024 and the site was gone the next evening, the own |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
FileWarez 📖 2004 - 2023 the record industry got this one, and it did not need a raid to do it. ifpi and the brazilian anti-piracy body apdif brought in cyber gaeco, the cybercrime unit of são paulo's prosecutor office, and filewarez went dark two weeks before anybody announced anything. the operator wiped the whole databas |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
BayFiles 📖 2011 - 2023 bayfiles was gottfrid svartholm and fredrik neij's 2011 attempt to run a file-hosting service that followed the rules. they hired dmca agents. the terms of service explicitly banned copyrighted uploads. the site closed briefly around neij's 2014 arrest, came back under new operators in 2018 as an an |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
RARBG 📖 2008 - 2023 rarbg ran torrent listings out of bulgaria for fifteen years and collected court-ordered blocks in a dozen countries, which cost its users about the length of one dns change. no police force ever closed it. on 31 may 2023 the operators posted that some of the team had died of covid complications and |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Zippyshare 📖 2006 - 2023 zippyshare was the polish-run cyberlocker that lived from 2006 to 2023. forty-five million monthly visits at its peak. the blue download button at the bottom of a forum thread carried mp3 albums and software cracks across seventeen years. killed by ad blockers cutting revenue to near zero and the 20 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
iKeepBookmarks 📖 1999 - 2023 twenty-three years is a long run for a free web service that nobody wrote about. the site put your browser favorites on a server so you could reach them from any machine, which in 1999 was a real problem and by 2023 was a solved one, and it kept doing it in classic asp on a windows server the entire |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Kiwi6 📖 2009 - 2022 645,911 accounts, 6,880,357 files uploaded, 1,257,572,226 streams served, 46 terabytes at peak, three gigabits a second at the busiest. one person. peter cai started kiwi6 in 2009 as a place to put audio on the internet and get a link back, and closed it on the last day of 2022 because a side projec |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Legendas.TV 📖 2006 - 2022 half the price of a big mac a month was what the team asked for in october 2019, when it first said it would close. it got three more years. legendas.tv had opened on 6 november 2006, a month after the federal police shut the sites it replaced, and by 2019 it held more than 350,000 subtitles for 50, |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Memonic 📖 2010 - 2022 the goodbye page went up on 4 december 2022 and nobody has touched it since. behind it was memonic, a zurich notebook built by the people who made local.ch, which let you keep the one paragraph you came for instead of the whole document around it. it launched in november 2010 and wore a beta badge f |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
BobrDobr 📖 2006 - 2022 the biggest bookmarking service in the russian internet collapsed on the day it opened, under traffic its own launch blog had generated. maxim spiridonov wrote an apology and walked away, then built memori instead and sold it within a month. his former partners kept bobrdobr running for sixteen more |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Uploaded 📖 2007 - 2022 uploaded was the european cyberlocker that outlasted almost all of them. it survived the megaupload panic that killed the others in 2012 and kept selling premium accounts for another decade. what finally got it was not a raid but a slow grind through the german courts, one ruling at a time, until th |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Soribada 📖 2000 - 2022 the first korean peer to peer service, written by the yang brothers in 2000 and named ocean of sound. at its size it had around 22 million users in a country of 48 million. a seoul court ordered it off on october 31 2005 with a fine of ten million won for every day it stayed up, and it powered down |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Reading.am 📖 2011 - 2022 greg leppert built it inside svpply because the people he worked with kept asking each other whether they had seen some link. reading.am logged the page you had open, before you had worked out what you thought of it. he posted the ending on 2 june 2022, switched the service off on the 30th, then pus |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
fastSWF 📖 2012 - 2021 adobe set the date and everybody else kept it. fastswf spent nine years as the place you dropped a .swf when you needed a link to send somebody, and once flash player stopped running in early 2021 there was nothing left for the site to serve. it closed on halloween and left the explanation on its ow |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
StartAid 📖 2005 - 2021 the copyright footer never got past 2006. startaid launched in 2005 as an online bookmark manager with a personal start page attached, shipped a browser extension in february 2007, and then stopped changing in any visible way for fourteen years. the last working capture is 15 august 2021, still offe |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Warez-BB 📖 2005 - 2021 one person held the server passwords and the database, and in late 2020 that person fell seriously ill. that is the whole story of how warez-bb ended. the forum had run since march 2005 as a phpbb board where members posted links to files hosted somewhere else, and by september 2020 it counted 3.75 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Super Mario Maker Bookmark 📖 2015 - 2021 december 2015 bolted a website onto a game that had already been out for three months. you browsed strangers' mario levels from a laptop, signed in with a nintendo network id, and the ones you saved showed up waiting inside the game. nintendo announced the end on 25 november 2020 and set it for 31 m |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Ge.tt 📖 2010 - 2021 53.3 million files from 6.9 million users was the count on the homepage the week it closed. the danish service had spent a decade on one trick: the upload started the moment you picked the file, so the share link existed before the transfer finished. atomico put 350,000 euros in at the end of 2011. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
YYeTs (人人影视) 📖 2003 - 2021 fourteen people were detained in shanghai in january 2021 and a subtitle group that had been running since 2003 was finished. yyets began with a handful of chinese students in canada timing english-language shows for people back home, and grew into the way roughly eight million registered members wa |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
DanishBits 📖 2009 - 2020 a copyright lawyer named thomas heldrup signed up to danishbits as an ordinary member around 2016 and stayed four years, reading the staff threads and working out who mrdb was. the money finished the job, a bitcoin-to-kroner channel that ended at a bank in belize, and in the autumn of 2020 danish po |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Firefox Send 📖 2017 - 2020 mozilla's encrypted file sharing tool. you uploaded a file up to 2.5 gb and got a link to send. the recipient downloaded once and the file was deleted from mozilla's servers. it ran from august 2017 as a test pilot and hit public release in march 2019. mozilla suspended it in july 2020 after malware |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Tfile 📖 2006 - 2020 fourteen years and four domain names, and the thing that finally stopped it was nobody renewing the fight. tfile opened in november 2006, peaked in 2007, and spent the 2010s walking down a ladder of top-level domains ahead of russian court orders. the last mirror served a working index on 13 june 20 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Kozmos 📖 2017 - 2020 google's chrome web store killed kozmos with a robot. azer koçulu built the thing alone in 2017, a bookmarking service where you pressed a heart button in your browser and found the page again in your new tab, and he charged $4.99 a month for it. for two years the extension review system sent him au |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
宅ふぁいる便 (Takufile-bin) 📖 1999 - 2020 osaka gas built a file transfer service in 1999 so it could swap large files with its own suppliers. the suppliers asked whether they could use it for other things, and it spread by word of mouth until it had millions of japanese accounts and called itself the pioneer of the category. at 10:50 on th |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Highly 📖 2017 - 2020 twitter took the team in april 2019 and left the product running without them. the apps went first, on 26 april 2019, and the web service limped on for another nine months. users got five days' notice to export their highlights in january 2020, with the official exporter capped at a thousand, and th |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
PirateBox 📖 2011 - 2019 david darts was teaching at nyu when he put a cheap router and a usb stick in a lunchbox in 2011 and released the whole design under the free art license. anyone in wifi range could open a browser, drop files into a shared folder and talk on a message board, with no internet connection and no accoun |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Openload 📖 2015 - 2019 openload was the streaming-tier cyberlocker of the late 2010s. it hosted pirated films and shows for embedded players on hundreds of streaming aggregators. by 2018 it was pushing more traffic than hulu. the alliance for creativity and entertainment forced a settlement in germany in late 2019. the do |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Share-Online.biz 📖 2007 - 2019 for more than a decade share-online was where the german-speaking internet parked files that were too big to email and too hot to host under a real name. eighteen million of them sat behind 1.3 million registered accounts, and close to three quarters of the traffic came from inside germany. on the a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
TNTVillage 📖 2005 - 2019 a million users, said the publishers' association when it sued. the site's own counter said 610,000, and its statute said nothing newer than twelve months and nothing by microsoft. luigi di liberto built it in the spring of 2005 under the name scambio etico, ethical swapping, and his team took it do |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
CiteULike 📖 2004 - 2019 citeulike let you save a paper's citation straight off the journal page and tag it, then look at who else had saved the same thing. richard cameron built it in november 2004, back when tagging your own library in public still looked like where scholarship was heading. the closing notice went up on 1 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
ClubBox (클럽박스) 📖 2004 - 2019 on 6 march 2019 clubbox stopped answering, and the page that replaced it explained only what had happened to the points. it had been running since july 2004 and its operator counted as many as seventeen million members across it and its sister site. the files did not move. the new operator said it c |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Biquge 📖 2011 - 2019 four hundred thousand pirated novels on a single mirror, two point one billion clicks: those are the numbers a beijing court cited in 2025, six years after the original site was already gone. biquge opened around 2011 as a free reader for novels other people were paying for, and it lived on ad-netwo |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Torrents.md 📖 2006 - 2018 270,000 registered members in a country of under three million people, and in december 2018 the volunteers running it decided they had finished the job. the notice went up for 27 december and it is still there. non-commercial and charitable from the first day, with popularity and volunteer involveme |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Marumaru 📖 2013 - 2018 marumaru opened in june 2013 and became the biggest illegal manga site in south korea, carrying links to around 42,000 translated japanese works and drawing more daily traffic than the portal nate. it hosted almost nothing itself, which was the design: the scans lived on separate servers and the dom |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Demonoid 📖 2003 - 2018 the semi-private bittorrent tracker that ran on invite codes and strict ratio enforcement, with a forum culture more careful than the pirate bay's. it hosted everything from cam rips to obscure flac discographies for fifteen years. its mexican founder, known only as deimos, died in a 2018 car accide |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Darkwarez.pl 📖 2006 - 2018 on 13 august 2018 a polish warez forum holding two and a half million registered accounts went dark in the middle of a civil case, taking its file host catshare with it. darkwarez.pl had been running since early 2006, selling premium accounts and indexing other people's links rather than storing any |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
EmuParadise 📖 2000 - 2018 emuparadise pulled its entire rom and iso library on 9 august 2018, eighteen years after founder masj started it in march 2000. nintendo had just won a $12.2 million judgment against loveroms and loveretro, and masj decided the risk was no longer worth carrying. the rest of the site stayed up as an |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
The ISO Zone 📖 2009 - 2018 nintendo filed against loveroms and loveretro in an arizona federal court in july 2018 and never had to file against anybody else. inside six weeks emuparadise stopped serving roms and the iso zone quit outright, first the download links and then the front page. its operator, signing off as tiz, wro |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Bamtoki 📖 2016 - 2018 thirty-five million visits a month made bamtoki the thirteenth most popular website in south korea, and every page on it was somebody else's comic. a programmer in his forties ran it out of an incheon officetel with two helpers and a paper company, scraping paid episodes off the subscription platfor |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Zeropaid.com 📖 2000 - 2017 on christmas day 2017 zeropaid started returning a database connection error, and that was the end of it. nothing was announced, and one of its own writers tweeted the admin account two days later and got nothing back. for seventeen years this was where the file sharing world read about itself, open |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Gimme Bar 📖 2010 - 2017 a bookmark points at a page, and then the page changes. gimme bar saved the thing itself, the image file rather than the address it was living at, into a library that belonged to you. fictive kin in brooklyn ran it for eight years on the design-web crowd, then closed it in december 2017 because usag |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Kinilog 📖 2011 - 2017 you checked in to a book. ntt solmare opened it on 4 august 2011 as bookcrew, a reading log where the states ran from acquired to finished and the books landed on a shelf you could open to friends. in october 2012 it was renamed kinilog and widened to cover anything that caught your eye, though the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Shareaza 📖 2002 - 2017 shareaza was the windows file-sharing client that searched four networks from one box, written by michael stokes in 2002 and released under the gpl in june 2004. on 19 december 2007 the shareaza.com address stopped pointing at it and started serving a rebadged imesh installer calling itself the offi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
SceneAccess 📖 2006 - 2017 the farewell page carried two dates and nothing else that mattered: 10.10.2006 to 10.09.2017. scc was an invite-only tracker for scene releases that ran for eleven years, dropped its mandatory share ratio near the end, and closed because the community that used it stopped paying for it. the staff ha |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
imgh.us 📖 2007 - 2017 699,927 images were sitting on it at 11:10 UTC on the morning it was supposed to close. the announcement had gone up seven weeks earlier and gave a reason most shutdown notices are too embarrassed to print: the domain was expiring. uploads were switched off two weeks ahead of time so nothing new wou |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Torrent Project 📖 2010 - 2017 eight million torrents in the index and not one of them on its own disk. torrent project was a search box over other people's indexes, which is why it was still standing in the summer of 2016 when the raid on kickasstorrents and the surrender of torrentz.eu removed the two names everybody used, and |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Eroshare 📖 2007 - 2017 for ten years eroshare was where people put adult photos and video that no general-purpose host would accept, and by 2017 it was the default file store behind reddit's amateur communities. the two operators, known in public only as randy and paul, wrote that the growth had been phenomenal and that t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
T411 📖 2008 - 2017 t411 was what survived quebectorrent, a canadian tracker a court closed in 2008. part of the same team rebuilt it in europe with the torrents and the membership carried across, and it grew into the largest french language torrent site there has been, past five million registered accounts and inside |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Delicious / del.icio.us 📖 2003 - 2017 the social bookmarking site with the goofy domain (del.icio.us, before domain hacks were normal). it invented social tagging at scale. yahoo bought it in 2005, neglected it, sold it to youtube founders in 2011, who sold it to pinboard in 2017, who took the user data and turned the lights off. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
ExtraTorrent 📖 2006 - 2017 extratorrent ran from 2006 to 17 may 2017 under a single anonymous administrator known as SaM. it sat in the top five torrent indexes globally for most of its life, ranked the 291st most-viewed site on earth at shutdown. the operator closed it voluntarily ten months after kickasstorrents was seized, |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
FFFFOUND! 📖 2007 - 2017 ffffound was an invite-only image bookmarking site built by tha ltd in tokyo under yugo nakamura, with yosuke abe and keita kitamura on development. it launched in 2007 as a designer's private mood-board. invites stayed scarce by policy for ten years. yugo announced the closure on twitter in april 2 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
BitSnoop 📖 2008 - 2017 blocked by isps in britain from october 2013, and in italy as well. bitsnoop was a torrent search engine whose crawlers read hundreds of other sites and repaired the tracker lists of what they found, and at the start of 2013 it was the eighth most visited torrent site in the world. the blocks took t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
RefME 📖 2014 - 2017 chegg paid 1.8 million dollars in december 2016 for the assets of a london startup that had raised 5 million and signed up more than a million students. refme's trick was the phone camera: point it at the barcode on the back of a library book and a formatted citation came out, in any of 7,500 styles |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
DivxPlanet (Altyazı.org) 📖 2004 - 2017 divxplanet was the turkish subtitle archive, started in 2004 and named after the codec that made a film fit on a cd. volunteers translated films and series for nothing and uploaded the timing files, and by 2009 the site had 55,000 registered members with 150 to 200 thousand visitors a day. it rename |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
iFolder.ru 📖 2006 - 2017 dmitry medvedev was president of russia when moscow police switched off a file host, and two days later his interior minister was told to check whether that had been legal. ifolder.ru came back on 20 march 2010 with a bigger upload limit. it was the ad-funded file host of the hosting company agava, |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Bundlr 📖 2010 - 2017 coimbra is where this one was built, by two founders with fifteen thousand euros of portuguese seed money and an idea worth more than the money it got: a bundle kept the photo or the tweet itself rather than a link to it. by 2016 the public bundles had been colonized by seo spam, and on 4 january 20 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Zone Téléchargement 📖 2010 - 2016 nassau, in the bahamas, is where the domain was registered in march 2010. the people behind it were two school friends from toulouse who later moved to andorra. zone téléchargement was a french-language index of direct download links to files sitting on other companies' servers, and by 2016 it was t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
What.CD 📖 2007 - 2016 what.cd was the largest private music tracker in bittorrent history. it opened on october 27, 2007, the same day oink's pink palace got shut down by uk police. by 2010 it had crossed one million torrents on a single tracker, with five million peers and an interview-based gatekeeping process that kep |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Cubby 📖 2012 - 2016 cubby was logmein's dropbox competitor. its one real differentiator was that any folder on disk could become a sync target without moving into a special inbox, with optional direct peer-to-peer sync that bypassed the cloud entirely. it ran for about four and a half years. logmein retired it on 16 no |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
EX.UA 📖 2009 - 2016 ex.ua was the largest file host in ukraine, a cyberlocker where a whole country kept and traded its music and its films. it was so woven into ukrainian internet life that when police raided it in 2012 and hauled off two hundred servers, the public answered by knocking government websites offline unt |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
AllMyVideos 📖 2011 - 2016 an anti-piracy trade report had put this one at just under a million dollars a year in profit on an 85 percent margin. the man running it said the real number was minus twenty, that he was selling about five premium subscriptions a week for roughly two hundred dollars total, and that advertising no |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Putlocker 📖 2011 - 2016 putlocker was the streaming index that inherited megaupload's audience. it did not host the files, it just pointed at the hosts that did, which made it slippery to kill and easy to rebuild. the courts blocked it and the domains got seized. the original went dark in october 2016, and what carried the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Wawa-Mania 📖 2006 - 2016 a maintenance page in october 2016 said the reverse proxy was down and the forum would be back in a few hours. it never came back. wawa-mania was a french link board opened on 11 november 2006 by dimitri mader, who signed as zac, and by 2011 it claimed more than two million members. a paris court ga |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Readability 📖 2009 - 2016 readability was one of the big read-it-later tools of the early 2010s, the button that stripped a cluttered webpage down to just the words and saved it for later. it tried something the others did not: charge a subscription and pass most of it to the writers you read. publishers hated the middleman |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
TorrentHound 📖 2007 - 2016 the founder's explanation was less traffic and less revenue against bills that kept piling up, which is a rarer obituary for a torrent site than a raid. torrenthound ran from 2007 to 15 september 2016 and was still inside the top ten most-visited torrent sites at the start of its final year. it went |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Kingsoft Kuaipan 📖 2010 - 2016 kingsoft kuaipan was one of china's big personal cloud drives, launched in 2010 by the software house better known abroad for its wps office suite. it grew into tens of millions of accounts syncing files across their machines, a chinese answer to dropbox. xunlei bought the consumer side in 2014. the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Torrentz.eu 📖 2003 - 2016 torrentz.eu was not a tracker. it was a search-over-trackers, the layer above thepiratebay and isohunt and demonoid that let you compare seeders across sources with one query. the operator, known only as flippy, ran it for thirteen years and then walked away on his own timing. the shutdown message a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
UKNova 📖 2003 - 2016 vhs tapes of eastenders, mailed across the atlantic after bbc america dropped the show in 2003, were the first version of uknova. the tracker that replaced them allowed only british tv that nobody was selling and capped itself at 40,000 members. fact ordered it to stop in august 2012. members rebuil |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Kifi 📖 2014 - 2016 google wanted the engineers and had no use for the product, which is the whole story. the kifi team announced on 12 july 2016 that it was joining the spaces team, and told users the service would keep working for a few more weeks and then be an export form. spaces itself was switched off on 17 april |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Readlists 📖 2012 - 2016 arc90 built it as a side project off the readability parser: paste a stack of urls, get back an epub with each article as a chapter. no account required, which was the whole charm. the shutdown was announced on 12 july 2016 for the end of the month and then arrived early, so the people who had been |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
KickassTorrents 📖 2008 - 2016 kickasstorrents was the torrent index that took the top spot from the pirate bay in late 2014, on a cleaner interface and a stricter moderation policy. on 20 july 2016 the us justice department seized the kat.cr domain and arrested artem vaulin in poland on a four-count federal indictment. the origi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
BearShare 📖 2000 - 2016 bearshare was the gnutella client that lived on after napster died. december 2000 launch, riaa settlement in may 2006 for thirty million dollars, sold to musiclab, refitted as a paid imesh frontend, then quietly removed from download in june 2016. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
iMesh 📖 1999 - 2016 imesh was the rare 2000s file-sharing brand that made it out of the riaa litigation alive by settling for 4.1 million dollars and rebuilding itself as a paid music store. the legal pivot bought it twelve more years, but by 2016 there was no audience for a subscription music store that was not spotif |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
PSharing 📖 2007 - 2016 at 17:49 on 11 may 2016 the server stopped answering, and by 19:34 both of its domains were pointing at the operator's webhosting business instead. no notice went up on either address, and none went up on the facebook page with eight thousand followers. an archiveteam volunteer had been pulling the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Kippt 📖 2011 - 2016 kippt was a place to keep links, built in 2011 by two finnish designers who wanted bookmarking to be shared and searchable instead of a lonely folder in your browser. it landed just as delicious was falling apart and a lot of people were suddenly looking for somewhere to put their links, and for a w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Letitbit 📖 2007 - 2016 registered in the seychelles and cyprus, hosted in the netherlands. letitbit opened in 2007 promising unlimited file size with a winking smiley, paid its uploaders by the thousand downloads, and reached alexa rank 274 in the spring of 2012 with its biggest audience in russia. the payments ended on 1 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Bookmarks (Japan) 📖 2001 - 2016 17 april 2013 is the date yahoo! japan announced this one was closing, on 17 july, along with yahoo! clip. enough users asked for it back that on 29 may the company withdrew the announcement and kept the service running, stripping out the social bookmarking half instead. that reprieve lasted two yea |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Mp3skull 📖 2010 - 2016 mp3skull was an mp3 search-and-direct-download aggregator that launched in 2010 and reached alexa's top 500 by 2013. the major labels sued jointly in april 2015. the court entered a 22.2 million dollar default judgment on 25 february 2016 and ordered transfer of the primary mp3skull domains. clones |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Reference Manager 📖 1984 - 2015 two beutlers wrote it in 1982, a hematologist and his son, and it shipped for cp/m before most researchers had a hard disk. thomson bought their company in 1994 and then bought both of its competitors, and the development money went to endnote, whose founder was by then running the division. referen |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
YIFY 📖 2010 - 2015 a computer science student in auckland started compressing movies in 2010 and named the releases after himself. by 2013 yify was the most searched term on the big torrent indexes, because a 700 megabyte file finished downloading on a connection where a blu-ray rip never did. the mpaa filed in the hi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Fotoalbum.hu 📖 2006 - 2015 in july 2015 a hungarian photo site holding nineteen million pictures stopped answering, and the notice that went up called the problem temporary. the notice was still there two years later. the owner, cewe hungary, said the photos were safe and asked anyone who wanted theirs back to email a usernam |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Pomf.se 📖 2013 - 2015 "this month a whopping 12 000 unique people used pomf and i made 0$." that line sat on the front page in march 2013, which tells you the whole business model of pomf.se: one person, a swedish domain, a 50 MB upload box and no revenue. after about two years the operator announced the end on 8 june 20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
OMGTorrent 📖 2009 - 2015 on a tuesday morning in june 2015 the site simply stopped answering, and it took two days for anyone to publish why. the section de recherche in reims had spent a year on a complaint from alpa and sacem and picked up six people around omgtorrent, starting with a 27 year old administrator who was tak |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Yandex.Zakladki 📖 2000 - 2015 fewer than two thousand people a day were still opening it at the end. yandex launched zakladki in june 2000 as the first russian service for keeping a catalog of your links on someone else's machine, back when bookmarks lived in one browser on one computer and stayed there. then the browsers learne |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
EZTV 📖 2005 - 2015 eztv started in may 2005 as a volunteer television release group and spent ten years as the default place a new episode showed up first. it carried no advertising and nobody involved was ever prosecuted. in early 2015 scammers picked up its suspended .it domain, then used a matching uk company regis |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
RapidShare 📖 2002 - 2015 rapidshare was the link in the email forward and the link in the forum post. it was the url a friend on msn would send you because his cousin had ripped a movie. you uploaded a file and got back a url. you could not search the site for anything, only follow links. that was the whole product, and for |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Favoor 📖 2005 - 2015 cem bozok and murat polat launched favoor in 2005 and kept it running for ten years. it was a personal start page in german, bookmarks and rss feeds on one screen, with a turkish-german dictionary linked at the bottom of every page. start.me bought it on 10 march 2015 and retired the name the same d |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Indowebster 📖 2007 - 2015 indowebster started on 15 april 2007 as a place to put files that indonesian connections could actually reach, and grew into the country's own upload host with 1,261,080 members and 130 terabytes stored. juny maimun built it out of an earlier service called indofile and it climbed to the top fifty s |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
MediaCrush 📖 2013 - 2015 375,595 files and fifty petabytes of bandwidth, and then the disks were full. mediacrush was an ad-free media host built in 2013 by drew devault and jose diez, and its trick was converting every animated gif you uploaded into an mp4, which loaded faster for you and cost less to serve for them. it st |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Blubster 📖 2001 - 2015 a developer in his early twenties wrote his own peer-to-peer protocol in madrid in 2001 and put a music search box on top of it. seven years later the spanish labels and promusicae came after him for thirteen million euros and lost, which made spain one of the few countries where writing file-sharin |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
oneview 📖 1998 - 2015 a cologne advertising agency built a link saving site in 1998, five years before anybody was calling this social bookmarking. it took a german multimedia award and a new york festivals medal in its first year, then went through the dot com crash and came out the far side as an asset somebody bought |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Nakido 📖 2004 - 2015 doylestown, pennsylvania is not where you expect a file locker to come from. nakido ran from 2004 to the first weeks of 2015 and claimed 39.6 million people had used it, which was the sort of number everybody in that business claimed and nobody audited. the thing it genuinely did better than its riv |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Kienu 📖 2011 - 2015 kie.nu reads in japanese as "does not disappear", and the whole pitch was that your files would never be culled to make room. on 11 december 2014 the uploader posted that it had started accepting files up to 15gb and would hold them with no time limit at all. the last working capture of the site is |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
FilesTube 📖 2007 - 2014 it hosted nothing. it indexed everybody else's lockers and handed you an outbound link, and for a few years that made it the front door to rapidshare and megaupload and everything like them. google processed 10,074,633 removal requests against one domain, which no site had ever managed before. on 1 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Fenopy 📖 2006 - 2014 a domain renewal that nobody paid, on purpose. fenopy launched around 2006 as the first torrent index that looked like a web 2.0 startup, and by march 2008 its front page offered 300,000 torrents and 500 points for signing up. its owner says a program he wrote ran the site alone from 2011. british i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Boerse.bz 📖 2008 - 2014 on 4 november 2014 about 400 police officers searched 121 homes in 14 german states, all over one forum. boerse.bz had grown out of gulli's closed download section in 2008 and reached roughly 2.7 million members, who came for links to films and e-books parked on file hosters. a week after the search |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Icebergs 📖 2013 - 2014 two barcelona designers, césar isern and albert pereta, built a private corner of the cloud where you could keep the images and notes a project runs on, and they called the people who used it penguins. pinterest announced on 30 july 2014 that it had bought them. the service was switched off on 1 sep |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Dropjack 📖 2007 - 2014 a canadian search-engine company called jayde online launched a digg clone in 2007 and named the votes jacks. for a few years dropjack ran the way the whole social bookmarking cohort ran, with a submit button, a front page and a share bar full of logos that are now mostly graves themselves. then it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Ryushare 📖 2012 - 2014 132 billion dong moved from a domestic payments company into one man's account in bình dương province between january 2013 and march 2014, and that ledger is what ended ryushare. the site was a paid file host with 803,000 members and nothing of its own. the machines were rented in france and the net |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Zootool 📖 2008 - 2014 zootool was a bookmarking service that treated your saved links as pictures. instead of a list of blue text it gave you a grid of thumbnails, the images and pages you had kept, laid out like a wall you could scan with your eyes. it came out of a german design school in 2008, built by bastian allgeie |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Series Yonkis 📖 2007 - 2014 series yonkis was where spain watched television for most of a decade. it hosted nothing itself. it kept an index of links to files sitting on other people's servers, and spanish law in 2007 had nothing at all to say about that. alberto garcía sola built it and sold it in 2009 to burn media. on 1 ma |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
HotFile 📖 2006 - 2013 the second cyberlocker shoe to drop. ran the megaupload economic model from a panama shell with anton titov operating it from florida. the mpaa stripped its dmca safe harbor in august 2013. four months later it signed an $80 million consent judgment and went dark on the same day the paperwork cleare |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
isoHunt 📖 2003 - 2013 isoHunt was a canadian torrent index that ran for ten years on the argument that it was just a search engine. the MPAA disagreed and the los angeles federal court agreed with the MPAA. gary fung settled for $110 million he could not pay and shut the site down with a rickroll on the homepage. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Pando 📖 2006 - 2013 one gigabyte was the number pando sold. in 2006 that was an impossible email attachment, and pando's answer was to send a tiny descriptor file instead and move the actual bytes over a mix of peer-to-peer transfers and its own servers. the consumer product stayed small. pando media booster ended up o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Team AlexandriZ 📖 2009 - 2013 a scanner, a proofreading pass and a numbering scheme kept french publishing awake for four years. team alexandriz took printed novels apart, stripped drm off ebooks that had it, corrected the text by hand and released the results under a numbered series that anyone who read french and used bittorre |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
GoMusicNow 📖 2007 - 2013 nine cents bought a song and nineteen cents bought a better copy of it, but the wallet you loaded to pay with needed twenty dollars in it before the site would take your card. that was the deal gomusicnow offered for six years: a russian mp3 store with no drm, a catalog that looked copied from its o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Mister Wong 📖 2006 - 2013 mister wong was germany's answer to delicious and for a few years it beat delicious inside germany, which almost nothing did in any category. it ran out of bremen holding eight million bookmarks, and in 2007 it was the most-linked page in the german web. then google decided that links from a bookmar |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Winny 📖 2002 - 2013 isamu kaneko posted the first build of winny to a 2channel board in may 2002 under the handle 47, and the kyoto police arrested him two years later for the crime of having written it. the network passed half a million users and leaked more classified japanese material than any hack of the period, be |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
DivShare 📖 2005 - 2013 a file host from the years when the web still needed one, built for podcasters and teachers who wanted to embed audio and video without running a server. it never had the notoriety of the big pirate lockers, it just quietly held everyone's files. on the first of july 2013 it shut down and deleted al |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
BO.LT 📖 2011 - 2013 five million dollars from benchmark capital paid for a button that copied any page on the web, let you rewrite it and handed you a short link to the result. the copyright question that follows from that sentence was asked at launch and never really answered. the service was reported shut in april 20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Clipboard 📖 2012 - 2013 gary flake had run microsoft live labs and yahoo research before he started clipboard in january 2011, and his pitch was that saving things would be the fourth wave of the internet. what he built clipped live working pieces of web pages rather than flat screenshots of them, and about 140,000 people |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Connotea 📖 2004 - 2013 connotea was nature publishing group's attempt to build del.icio.us for scientists, launched in december 2004 and free the whole way. you pasted a doi and it went to crossref and came back with the authors and the journal already filled in, then you tagged the thing in your own words and it quietly |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
eSnips 📖 2004 - 2013 esnips gave you free storage for any file and folders you could open to the public, and what people put in them was music. that made it one of the sites a song title in a search box used to land on, and it carried over nine million visitors a month at the top. emi came calling in late 2007 and the f |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
FilePlanet 📖 1999 - 2013 the gamespy game-file portal where every mod or demo you wanted lived behind a queue. free users waited. fileplanet plus subscribers cut the line for six dollars a month. when ign sold gamespy to glu and shut down the secondary sites, the whole download model went with it. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
MyLinkVault 📖 2005 - 2013 on 22 january 2013 mylinkvault's homepage was 3,713 bytes of working product. on 2 march it was 436 bytes, and by the end of that month it was down to 272 and rendered nothing. nobody wrote a goodbye. it had been a free online bookmark manager since december 2005, and by the end its public feed of n |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Audiogalaxy 📖 1998 - 2013 audiogalaxy was the p2p tool that felt curated. you queued songs in a web browser and your machine downloaded them in the background, with chat-enabled groups attached around genres. then the riaa filed suit in 2002 and the filter settlement turned the network into a husk. a placeshifting reboot in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Snip.it 📖 2011 - 2013 fifteen months from launch to switch-off, and the switch-off happened the same day the acquisition was announced. yahoo wanted ten engineers for its social news push and paid about ten million dollars plus retention earnouts to get them, with the product thrown in as something to turn off. users got |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
SharedCopy 📖 2007 - 2013 chew choon keat built a way to draw on somebody else's web page and hand the result to a colleague, and for a stretch of 2007 that looked like the next layer the web was going to grow. sharedcopy kept its own cache of whatever you marked, so the note survived the page being edited underneath it, and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
NZBMatrix 📖 2007 - 2012 nzbmatrix indexed usenet. it stored no files at all, it read the raw binary groups and produced a small pointer file telling your downloader which scattered posts to fetch and reassemble. in december 2012 a london law firm sent one notice on behalf of a copyright body and six film companies, and the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Newzbin 📖 2002 - 2012 newzbin did not host anything. it read usenet and worked out which scattered binary posts belonged to which film, then handed you a small file that told your downloader where to look. that was enough for the high court, which ruled in march 2010 that the site authorized infringement and put the comp |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
livedoor Clip 📖 2006 - 2012 ディタ and セト were two cartoon girls drawn for livedoor's research data release, and their names said together make データセット, the japanese for data set. they belonged to a social bookmarking service that opened as a beta on 27 june 2006 and never once left beta. new clips stopped on 10 september 2012 and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Kazaa 📖 2001 - 2012 the mp3 sharing app of choice after napster got sued. kazaa, limewire, and bearshare all ran on similar networks and all bundled spyware. you used them anyway because they had every song. the music industry sued them all to death between 2005 and 2010. kazaa folded officially in 2012. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
FileSoup 📖 2003 - 2012 thegeeker opened filesoup in february 2003, months before the pirate bay existed, and ran it from england as a forum that taught people how bittorrent worked. on 27 july 2009 police and fact came to his door. the crown prosecution service dropped the case on 24 february 2011 and called it a civil ma |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
たぽろだ (Taporoda) 📖 2008 - 2012 moritapo was an electronic currency issued by mirai kensaku brazil, the small company that ran 2channel's search. taporoda was the uploader you spent it in. a downloader paid moritapo for a file and the operator passed that moritapo to the person who had put the file up, taking a fee on the way thro |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
BlinkList 📖 2005 - 2012 kuala lumpur had a del.icio.us competitor in june 2005 and it was better at several specific things. highlight any text on a page and blinklist filled in the description field for you, which nothing else did. mindvalley built it in ajax, it reached somewhere around 450,000 registered accounts, and t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
FileServe 📖 2010 - 2012 fileserve was one of a dozen one-click hosters that all looked the same, a countdown timer and a premium wall standing between you and a file. it paid people to upload the things everyone wanted, which is exactly the model that got megaupload raided. when the raid came in january 2012 fileserve did |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Wupload 📖 2011 - 2012 a file host that paid you to fill it. forty dollars for every thousand downloads, no questions asked about the file. that reward economy built the cyberlocker boom of 2011 and painted a target on every site running it. when the us seized megaupload in january 2012, wupload killed the payouts and qui |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
zSHARE 📖 2005 - 2012 on january 19, 2012 the us government seized megaupload, and for about two weeks every other cyberlocker on the internet looked like the winner. zshare was one of them. the hong kong host had been running since 2005 and its traffic spiked hard, then settled back to where it had been before the raid. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Clipmarks 📖 2005 - 2012 clipmarks was a new york tool from 2005 that let you clip a piece of a web page, a paragraph or a photo, and keep or share just that, years before evernote's web clipper made it normal. forbes bought it in 2007 and folded it toward a product called amplify. in early 2012 a venture-backed newcomer na |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Library.nu 📖 2004 - 2012 library.nu was the academic wing of file sharing, four hundred thousand books deep, most of them priced for a university library budget rather than for a person. it ran from 2004 under three different names and never pretended to be anything but a card catalog with download links. seventeen publishe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
BTjunkie 📖 2005 - 2012 btjunkie was a top-five torrent search engine through most of the late 2000s, with a clean index, an active community, and a single anonymous operator who decided in february 2012 that the safest move was to disappear. it had no court case against it. the megaupload arrest was three weeks old and th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Multiupload 📖 2009 - 2012 multiupload took one file off your disk and pushed it to a row of cyberlockers at the same time, then handed back a single page listing every copy, so a forum post could survive any one host going down or deleting the file. it ran from around 2009 on a domain that had been sitting on a german shared |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
FileSonic 📖 2010 - 2012 a top-ten cyberlocker that pulled its own teeth on 22 january 2012, the weekend the megaupload founders got arrested in new zealand. users could still pull their own files, nobody could share links anymore. the husk drifted through to a full shutdown by september. one of the cleanest dominoes the me |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Megaupload 📖 2005 - 2012 the cyberlocker that put a file behind a single download link, charged for premium speed, paid uploaders for popular files, and swallowed the global piracy market between 2008 and 2012. peaked at 50 million daily users and the 13th most-visited site on earth. the FBI seized the domain on 19 january |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
YouHaveDownloaded 📖 2011 - 2012 three developers put a site online in december 2011 that did one thing. you gave it an ip address and it told you which torrents that address had been seen sharing. all of it came from public data, the distributed hash table and open trackers, information that anyone in a swarm can already read. it |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Trunk.ly 📖 2010 - 2012 avos systems bought trunk.ly on 9 november 2011 and gave it two months to die. the australian service had spent its whole run doing the thing delicious never did well, watching the links you favorited on twitter and liked on facebook and indexing the words inside those pages. tim bull and alex dong |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Trackle 📖 2009 - 2012 two healtheon veterans in sunnyvale took money from nea in 2008 and built standing alerts for the web: tracklets, saved agents that watched a craigslist category or a local crime feed and mailed you when something moved. the consumer version lasted about two years before the site turned into a paid |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
SteekR 📖 2007 - 2011 bordeaux, 2002: three founders spent the first two years on research and then built the business around telecom operators, who put their own brand names on it. sfr sold it into french subscriber menus and virgin media into british ones, while steekr was the edition that carried steek's own name. f-s |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
AnyHub 📖 2009 - 2011 a student in melbourne ran a file host that was holding 1,122,585 files and 2.81 terabytes on the day he announced it was closing, 18 november 2011. anyhub asked for no account, kept files indefinitely, and allowed 10 gb per upload, which was an absurd number for a free service in 2009. the pink ban |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
ApexKB 📖 2008 - 2011 steve perry wrote it while working as a data integration consultant, and shipped it as a php script anybody could install on their own server. jumper was announced on 29 september 2008, reached a stable release the following march and stopped at version 2.0.1.9 on 15 november 2010. jumper networks, |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Faves.com 📖 2006 - 2011 faves was a social bookmarking service that launched as blue dot in june 2006 out of san francisco. mohit srivastava and sumit sen built it around a browser button that let a user "dot" a page and share it to a small friend graph. the rename to faves.com came in october 2007. by fall 2008 the full-t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
2collab 📖 2007 - 2011 2collab was elsevier's attempt at delicious for scientists. you saved the papers you read with their citation details attached, and shared a reading list with your lab. it launched in november 2007 and lived inside sciencedirect and scopus, the databases elsevier already owned. it never caught on, b |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Swebits 📖 2004 - 2011 on 31 may 2006 swedish police walked into a hosting facility looking for the pirate bay and carried swebits servers out with them, which took a year and seven months to undo. the tracker only indexed material with a swedish connection, swedish subtitles or music produced in sweden, and it went invit |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
VeryCD 📖 2003 - 2011 verycd was china's great index of the ed2k network, a site where you searched for a film or an album and got the emule link that pulled it down over the edonkey protocol. it started in 2003 as one man's page, kept alive by readers who chipped in for servers. it grew into the biggest file-sharing hub |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Spurl.net 📖 2004 - 2011 spurl was the icelandic answer to del.icio.us and it had one idea the winner did not. when you saved a page, spurl kept a copy of the text, so you could full-text search everything you had ever bookmarked, including the pages that had since gone dead. hjalmar gislason built it in reykjavik in 2004 a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Piczza (픽짜) 📖 2008 - 2010 the shutdown notice carried a time and not just a date: 13:00 on 17 december 2010. for two and a half years piczza had let koreans throw a file of up to six gigabytes at an email address or a mobile phone number, which in 2008 was harder than it sounds, and it deliberately kept nothing. the recipien |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
drop.io 📖 2007 - 2010 drop.io let you create a private file 'drop' at a custom url with no signup needed. you could send to it from email, web upload, voicemail, or even a fax machine. facebook bought sam lessin's company in october 2010 for the talent and shut the service down the same day. paid drops were given until d |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
LimeWire 📖 2000 - 2010 limewire was the file-sharing client your friend with the slow connection used. it was a slow java app full of mislabeled mp3s. the riaa came for it in 2006, and a federal judge shut it off remotely in october 2010 by tripping a kill-switch baked into newer versions. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Ma.gnolia 📖 2006 - 2010 magnolia was the social bookmarking site that lost everything in a single night. it launched in 2006 as the prettier alternative to delicious, gathered a small but loyal user base around its open-standards approach, then suffered total database corruption on 30 january 2009. founder larry halff spen |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
NinjaVideo 📖 2008 - 2010 ninjavideo ran from february '08 to june '10 as a link-and-stream site for movies and tv shows. at its peak it was getting six million visits a month, mostly from the english-speaking web. on 30 june '10 the us immigration and customs enforcement service seized the domain as part of operation in our |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
SweTorrents 📖 2005 - 2010 a swedish appeals court ruled in may 2010 that telia had to hand over the name of the subscriber running swetorrents, under a copyright law that was barely a year old. seven days later the tracker closed, on its fifth birthday, at 12:45 in the afternoon. the goodbye post blamed lack of time and lack |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Twine 📖 2007 - 2010 twine was radar networks' bet that the semantic web would finally show up if you built the tools to make it easy. natural language processing extracted concepts from what you saved. rdf triples tied them to a wikipedia-derived taxonomy. the market wanted evernote and pinterest instead. evri bought r |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Simpy 📖 2004 - 2010 simpy was one of the social bookmarking sites that grew up alongside delicious in 2004. you saved and tagged your links, then searched the whole pile later, kept private or public as you liked. it was built by otis gospodnetic, a search engineer far better known for something else, and it always sat |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
a.scarywater.net 📖 2002 - 2010 october 2002, when bittorrent was barely a year old and nobody had worked out what to do with it yet, a german hobbyist server called wirebrain.de started tracking anime fansub releases. it became a.scarywater.net and spent most of a decade as the address fansub groups pointed at when they finished |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Torrents.ru 📖 2004 - 2010 torrents.ru was the largest bittorrent tracker in the russian-speaking world, open from 18 september 2004 and holding four million registered accounts and about a million torrents on the day its registrar switched the domain off. no court had ruled anything. an investigator in the chertanovo distric |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
BTChina 📖 2003 - 2009 btchina was the tracker most of china pointed its bittorrent client at, an index of films and shows that ran on foreign fansubs and cheap broadband. one man started it in 2003 out of his own interest and it grew to something like fifty million users. in december 2009 the broadcast regulator ruled it |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Mininova 📖 2005 - 2009 mininova was the default torrent index for the late 2000s, back when ten million visits a day was a thing a torrent site could have. a dutch court told it to filter copyrighted torrents in 2009. mininova said filtering wasn't possible, then complied anyway by going content-distribution-only. it kept |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Thumbtack 📖 2008 - 2009 live labs was microsoft's applied research arm, and the small print on everything it shipped said that nothing was guaranteed. thumbtack let you drop links and entire saved pages into collections and had machine learning sort them for you, which in december 2008 was a more ambitious pitch than del.i |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
OdSiebie.com 📖 2008 - 2009 a press conference in wrocław ended odsiebie.com on 30 october 2009, with the polish rights bodies standing next to the prosecutors and the police. it was the country's rapidshare, two million users in sixteen months, and unusually large on mobile for a file locker of that era. the anti-piracy coali |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Backflip 📖 1999 - 2009 backflip sold you a bookmark folder that lived on the web instead of on one machine, which in 1999 was a real problem worth solving. it survived the dot-com bust and ten years of having no business model, running on volunteers and paypal donations. then the power went out at the colo on 13 october 2 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
MediaDefender 📖 2000 - 2009 randy saaf and octavio herrera started mediadefender in los angeles in 2000 and sold decoys to every major label and studio, flooding kazaa and later bittorrent with corrupted copies so the real ones were harder to find. artistdirect paid $42.5 million for the company in august 2005. in september 20 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Furl 📖 2003 - 2009 furl was the page-archiving social bookmarking site of the mid-2000s. mike giles founded it in 2003 with a single distinguishing feature: every bookmark saved a full html copy of the page so the link would still work after the original rotted. looksmart acquired it in september 2004 and ran it on a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! MyWeb 📖 2005 - 2009 yahoo myweb was the social bookmarking service yahoo built internally in june 2005, four months before it bought delicious in december 2005. the two products ran side by side for three and a half years, splitting the same small social-bookmark audience inside the same company. yahoo announced in feb |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Times File 📖 2005 - 2009 in december 2008 the new york times emailed its readers to say that social bookmarking sites could do the heavy lifting from now on. times file had let a registered reader save any article to a private list since 2005, running on software the paper licensed from looksmart. the save link came off the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
xMule 📖 2003 - 2009 in june 2003 a fight over a hijacked project website split lmule and produced xmule, and two months later a subpoena split xmule and produced amule. what it was, underneath the arguments, was emule rebuilt on wxwidgets so the edonkey network would work for people who did not run windows. the last re |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Infostore.org 📖 2004 - 2008 on 4 december 2008 the ukrainian interior ministry spent twelve hours inside an office on tverska street in kyiv and left with the machines. infostore.org had been the biggest media-file resource in the country since may 2004, and the official reason given for the raid was pornography that users had |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Colombo-BT 📖 2006 - 2008 the guardia di finanza of bergamo reached two administrators on 25 july 2008 and the servers went with them. colombo-bt was the italian bittorrent hub, inside the top eighty sites in the country, and it was killed by a tax-police unit rather than a record label. what stayed at the address afterward |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Peerflix 📖 2004 - 2008 for 99 cents plus postage you put a dvd you were finished with in an envelope to a stranger, and a different stranger sent you one you actually wanted. peerflix ran that market from the summer of 2004 on 10 million dollars of venture money, with an internal currency called peerbux to settle the fact |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Morpheus 📖 2001 - 2008 morpheus was the streamcast networks brand of file-sharing client, originally a fasttrack frontend before the network owner cut it off and forced a rebuild on top of gnutella. the brand kept going through three protocol changes and one supreme court loss before chapter 7 took the company down in apr |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
TorrentSpy 📖 2003 - 2008 torrentspy was one of the big torrent index sites of the 2003-2008 window. peak around 2007 it indexed over a million torrents and was running in the top 200 of the entire web. the mpaa sued in february 2006 and the case turned on whether torrentspy had destroyed evidence by purging server logs of u |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
AllPeers 📖 2006 - 2008 on 2 march 2008 allpeers announced it was closing, and the service stopped the following day, eighteen months after the public beta. it was a firefox extension that let you drag a file onto a friend's name and send it straight to them, with bittorrent doing the transfer underneath and ssl wrapped ar |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
RawSugar 📖 2005 - 2008 palo alto, june 2005. ofer ben-shachar and a small team shipped rawsugar into the middle of the tagging boom, betting that if enough people labeled the web by hand, search could be refined by those labels instead of by keywords alone. del.icio.us added a search box a few weeks later and the bet stop |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Enjoy (炎ジョイ) 📖 2007 - 2007 a six-person company in tachikawa shipped a social bookmark for flame wars on 20 november 2007 and took it down on the afternoon of the 22nd. you registered a blog that was being shouted at, the service put a transparent layer over a capture of it, and visitors picked the attacking side or the defen |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
ShareConnector 📖 2002 - 2007 shareconnector indexed ed2k links and stored nothing, which is why the criminal case against it kept falling apart. dutch investigators seized the servers in december 2004 and the man who ran the site was acquitted of everything in july 2007. it died anyway, four months later, after the anti-piracy |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
OiNK's Pink Palace 📖 2004 - 2007 oink's pink palace was a private bittorrent tracker founded by alan ellis in may 2004. it ran out of northeast england and grew into a roughly 180,000-member audiophile community organized around lossless flac releases. uk and dutch police seized the tracker on october 23, 2007 with the ifpi and bpi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Nico Nico Bookmark 📖 2007 - 2007 niwango took the comment layer from nico nico douga and tried to put it on the entire web. you submitted a url, the service grabbed a screenshot of the page, and anybody could stick a note anywhere on the image. within a day people were doing it to sites whose owners had not asked, and the lawyers-a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
eMule Paradise 📖 2004 - 2007 vincent valade started emule paradise in 2004 as a teenager and closed it on 5 january 2007, after 48 hours in police custody. the site listed edonkey links to 7,113 films without hosting a file, and an ad agency turned its 300,000 daily visitors into more than 400,000 euros. the verdict took until |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
TOWNPOCKET 📖 2005 - 2006 in august 2005 a hundred and fifty-three shops in the back streets of harajuku put a small reader near the counter. you held your docomo wallet phone against it and the shop dropped into an app, its hours and its number saved for later. techfirm built the service, urahara.org talked the boutiques in |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Kuro 📖 2000 - 2006 feiliu networks launched kuro in taiwan in 2000 and switched the billing on in january 2001, ninety nine taiwan dollars a month for a file sharing client. at its largest around half a million people were paying that bill every month. the taipei district court convicted the company's three top office |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
eDonkey2000 📖 2000 - 2006 edonkey2000 was the first p2p client that pulled a file from many users at once instead of one. it ran on its own network alongside the official client and the third-party fork emule. metamachine shut the official client in september 2005 after a riaa cease-and-desist, then settled with the recordin |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Overnet 📖 2002 - 2006 the network under the network. overnet was metamachine's own client for the edonkey world, a serverless layer meant to route around the central servers that made edonkey easy to sue. most people ran emule instead and never touched it. the grokster ruling reached the whole family anyway, and a $30 mi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
de.lirio.us 📖 2004 - 2006 running a copy of del.icio.us on your own machine was the promise, and the code delivered on it. the hosted version at de.lirio.us is what buckled, under load it was never resourced for. in march 2006 the maintainer announced simpy would take the userbase, by july the move was done, and a bookmarkin |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
eXeem 📖 2005 - 2005 on 19 december 2004 suprnova.org went dark and took the largest torrent index on the internet with it. five weeks later the replacement arrived, closed source and shipped by a company registered in saint kitts and nevis, with andrej preston's name on the press releases and cydoor's adware in the ins |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
i2hub 📖 2004 - 2005 i2hub only worked if your machine sat on a university network, because it ran over internet2, the research backbone american campuses had been given for science. wayne chang, an undergraduate at umass amherst, released it on 14 march 2004 and it reached more than 400 institutions. the transfers were |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Grokster 📖 2001 - 2005 grokster was the us-branded fasttrack client that existed mainly to be the supreme court's test case. it never had napster's name or kazaa's reach, but the june 2005 ruling against it rewrote the rules of secondary copyright liability for everyone. the shutdown notice was the loudest thing it ever s |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
WinMX 📖 2000 - 2005 winmx was a windows program that did one job. it found mp3s on other people's computers and let you queue them up. the interface was ugly and the queue could sit for an hour, but it still beat every alternative for finding obscure tracks. then frontcode got a letter from the riaa and turned the serv |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
NeoModus Direct Connect 📖 1999 - 2005 jon hess wrote direct connect in 1999 while he was still in high school, and paid for it with an ad banner sitting inside the client window. the network he started outlived the client that started it: dc++ was open source, carried no ads, and by the middle of the decade almost nobody was running the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
EliteTorrents 📖 2003 - 2005 elitetorrents was the biggest private bittorrent tracker in the world for about two years, and it ended six days after an admin posted a workprint of revenge of the sith ahead of the theatrical release. the justice department said more than seventeen thousand titles had come off it two point one mil |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
LokiTorrent 📖 2004 - 2005 lokitorrent was a bittorrent tracker with about 680,000 registered members that spent two months publicly refusing to fold. the mpaa sent a cease and desist in december 2004, the site announced it would fight, and members mailed in more than forty thousand dollars toward the lawyers. on 10 february |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
EarthStation 5 📖 2003 - 2005 earthstation 5 announced itself in june 2003 as a file-sharing network operating out of jenin refugee camp #23 in the west bank, on the argument that american copyright law had no reach there. it put out a press release declaring war on the mpaa and the riaa. it claimed sixteen million users, and th |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
SuprNova.org 📖 2002 - 2004 suprnova was the front door to bittorrent for a year and a half. before isohunt, before mininova, before piratebay had its meme phase, suprnova was where you went to find a torrent. 1.5 million visitors a day. a kid in slovenia ran it. then his ISP told him the police had the servers and he pulled t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Finreactor 📖 2003 - 2004 the finnish national bureau of investigation took the servers on 14 december 2004, acting on a complaint filed for microsoft and adobe among others. what they had seized was a finnish-language tracker with roughly ten thousand registered users that had moved 296 terabytes in three and a half months. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
ShareReactor 📖 2001 - 2004 sharereactor held no files. it held ed2k links, which are text, and the reason people used it was that somebody had checked them first. the edonkey network was full of fakes and half-corrupt archives, and a curated index was the difference between a working download and a week of wasted line. swiss |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Kazaa Lite 📖 2002 - 2003 kazaa lite was kazaa with the spyware removed, built in april 2002 by people who never gave their names and never charged anything. it ran on the same network and returned the same results, minus seven pieces of bundled software and minus the revenue that paid for kazaa. sharman networks spent late |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
WASTE 📖 2003 - 2003 justin frankel posted waste on the nullsoft website on 28 may 2003 and aol took it down three days later, replacing the download with a notice telling anyone who already had a copy to destroy it. it was a friend-to-friend network for ten to fifty people who knew each other, encrypted end to end, wit |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Aimster (Madster) 📖 2000 - 2002 aimster was a file-sharing tool that piggybacked on aol instant messenger buddy lists, built by rensselaer polytechnic professor john deep in august 2000 and named after his daughter aimee. you could share files with anyone in your aim contact list. encrypted transfers were added around march 2001 t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
OpenNap 📖 1999 - 2002 opennap was an open-source server implementation of the napster protocol, reverse-engineered in 1999 by a developer nicknamed drscholl with help from a small group of programmers. unlike napster itself, opennap servers could federate, and they let you share any file rather than just mp3s. when napst |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
FreeDiskSpace.com 📖 1999 - 2001 three hundred megabytes was an absurd amount of room in 1999, enough that the site listed warez in its own keywords to explain who it was really for. freediskspace.com handed that space out for nothing and kept the money in the page around it. by the summer of 2001 the brand was gone and the domain |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Scour 📖 1997 - 2000 scour was a multimedia search engine and, through scour exchange, one of the earliest peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, built by five ucla computer science students in 1997. it let people find and trade music and video across the early web, right as napster was doing the same thing louder. in 2000 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 1999|
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FilePile.com 📖 1996 - 1999 1.2 million files on a t3 line in wisconsin, indexed and searchable from a browser three years before that was ordinary. filepile.com was the web face of the exec-pc bbs, which bob mahoney had been running since 1983 and had grown to 280 phone lines. the web could read the archive but could not add |