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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 · 814 graves in this section, sorted newest first
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
PHOTOHITO 📖 2008 - 2026 kakaku.com runs japan's price comparison site, and in february 2008 it hung a photo community off the camera half of its own database. for eighteen years every picture on photohito carried the body and the lens that made it, which turned the whole site into an argument about equipment conducted enti |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
LINE VOOM 📖 2021 - 2026 japan does not use whatsapp, it uses line, and for five years one of the four tabs at the bottom of that app was a tiktok. line voom replaced the friends-only timeline in november 2021 with an algorithmic video feed nobody had asked for. it was switched off around 11am on 30 september 2026 and the l |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
DataLounge 📖 1995 - 2026 datalounge opened in may 1995 as a gay web portal run out of new york and turned into an anonymous forum that outlasted almost everything it started alongside. thirty-one years, more than thirty-six and a half million posts, one webmaster persona and a house style it never updated. it closed on 31 j |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
holoearth 📖 2022 - 2026 three point one nine nine billion yen is what cover wrote off when it closed holoearth at nine in the evening on a sunday in june 2026. the hololive metaverse had been open to the public since late 2022 and had only been a finished 1.0 for fourteen months. the reason cover gave was a change of devel |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Horizon Worlds (Quest) 📖 2021 - 2026 horizon worlds on the meta quest headset was zuckerberg's metaverse bet in its purest form, the vr social world the avatar selfie was supposed to sell. it launched december 2021 for quest owners in the us and canada, struggled to keep more than a few hundred thousand monthly users, became a meme abo |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
iSpot 📖 2009 - 2026 on 27 june 2009 the open university put up a website where you could post a photograph of an insect and have somebody who knew insects tell you what it was. seventeen years later the university decided it could no longer provide the support the site needed, and switched it off. by then 77,000 observ |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Workplace by Meta 📖 2016 - 2026 workplace launched on october 10, 2016 as facebook's bet that the office wanted its own facebook. it grew out of an internal collaboration tool the company already ran, then opened as a paid product where admins paid per seat and employees got news feed, groups, chat, and live video aimed at coworke |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
X Communities 📖 2021 - 2026 twitter announced communities at analyst day in february 2021 and started the beta on september 8 2021. it was meant to be a reddit-style topic forum inside twitter where posts only went to community members but stayed publicly visible. it never crossed 0.4% of platform usage. by 2026 the feature wa |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Jeeran 📖 2000 - 2026 omar koudsi and laith zraikat started jeeran in amman in 2000, handing out free homepages when there was almost nothing on the web in arabic to put on them. it became a blog host in 2005 and a restaurant and business review site for arab cities in 2010, and at its widest it was drawing close to seve |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Deutsch für dich 📖 2013 - 2026 the goethe-institut ran a free forum for german learners anywhere in the world and kept it going for more than twelve years. on 18 february 2026 it switched off the social half, chat and messages and comments and the forum and the groups, and gave one reason: the online world is changing fast and so |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Maxmodels.pl 📖 2008 - 2026 marcin tymkowski built a portfolio site for polish models and the photographers who wanted to shoot them, interia bought it inside two years and kept him on it, and the whole thing was switched off on 20 january 2026 with 626 thousand accounts and 5.6 million photographs inside. the farewell post we |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Snapzu 📖 2013 - 2026 in july 2015 reddit's moderators shut their boards in protest and a few thousand people went looking for somewhere else to post. snapzu was one of the addresses they found, a link aggregator with communities called tribes and posts called snaps, and the traffic knocked it over for a day. the ones wh |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Triller 📖 2015 - 2025 triller was the loudest of the tiktok rivals during the 2020 india ban and the trump-era tiktok-divestiture noise. ryan kavanaugh wrapped it in a boxing-event marketing budget, claimed user numbers that nobody verified, burned through SPACs and IPO attempts, then got delisted from nasdaq on 30 decem |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Amino 📖 2012 - 2025 amino shut down without warning on 19 december 2025. the servers stopped responding and the apps stopped loading. medialab ai, which had owned the platform since january 2021, never issued a public statement. amino was originally launched in january 2012 by yin wang and ben anderson, who came up wit |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
POCO.cn 📖 2003 - 2025 poco was one of china's first photography communities, opened in 2003 in guangzhou and grown over twenty-two years into a place with more than a hundred million registered names and two hundred thousand photos going up a day. it was where a generation of chinese amateur photographers learned to shoo |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Chemistry.com 📖 2006 - 2025 helen fisher spent a career mapping what the brain does when it falls in love, and in 2005 match.com hired her to turn that into a signup funnel. chemistry.com opened the following february with a fifty-six question test and an advertising campaign built around people eharmony had refused, one of th |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Oshiete! goo 📖 2000 - 2025 from november 2000 to september 2025 this was one of the two places japanese people went to ask strangers how to do something, and for most of that run it shared its question database with okwave, so one answer could sit under two brands at once. ntt announced the end in april 2025 and said in the s |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Pandlr 📖 2015 - 2025 a jovem pan radio fan community on orkut in 2005 turned into the loudest pop culture forum on the brazilian internet. pandlr got its own domain in march 2015 and spent ten years producing the gifs that everybody else reposted, including the 2017 cuca clips that traveled well past brazil. registratio |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Thinkspot 📖 2019 - 2025 december 2018 is where it starts. patreon banned carl benjamin, jordan peterson and dave rubin said they would build the platform that could not do that, and a beta opened at the end of july 2019 with a short list of invited writers and a waiting list behind them. the rules were the interesting part |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
OSzone.net 📖 2001 - 2025 a forum opened in november 2001 to answer questions about windows, hit three hundred thousand visitors a day around 2005, and then spent twenty years getting quieter while search engines learned to answer the same questions directly. the announcement went up on 23 july 2025. read-only from 1 august, |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Ziilch 📖 2011 - 2025 michelle power started ziilch in 2010 because she had watched too much usable furniture go out with the hard rubbish, and launched it in july 2011 as a site with no price field in it. you posted what you no longer wanted, strangers asked for it, and you chose which one of them could come and collect |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Whisper 📖 2012 - 2025 whisper launched on march 31 2012 from a venice california outfit run by michael heyward and brad brooks. the format was an anonymous post against a kerning-heavy stock photo backdrop, a confession card that read like a tumblr quote. monthly active users hit 30 million by april 2016 and peaked at 25 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Fillos de Galicia 📖 1997 - 2025 a galician community built for the galicians who were not in galicia. manuel casal lodeiro started it in 1997, in galician, for emigrants and their children, and it ran as a non-profit association with its own forums and its own blog farm for most of three decades. the members' assembly voted unanim |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Politics.ie 📖 2003 - 2025 david cochrane started politics.ie in 2003 and it became the place irish political argument happened outside the newspapers, in english and in irish, through a banking collapse and the bailout that followed it. it won best discussion forum at the irish web awards in 2011 and it was already breaking |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Letopisi.ru 📖 2006 - 2025 a wiki for russian schoolchildren went up on 27 january 2006 with intel and the railway telecom operator transtelecom behind it, and the premise was that pupils and their teachers would write up their own towns and their own schools. by august 2021 it held 59,973 articles. the encyclopedia was never |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Tastebuds.fm 📖 2010 - 2025 two bandmates in london built a dating site on the idea that your top artists said more about you than any profile could. it ran fifteen years, carried over a million people and 49 million messages, and then announced its own death in march 2023 for an april date it did not keep. it kept serving the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Penny Arcade Forums 📖 2001 - 2025 penny arcade started as a webcomic in november 1998 and grew a message board in the early 2000s that ended up being the more durable half of the operation. it produced the greater internet fuckwad theory, which is still the most cited thing anyone at penny arcade ever wrote. it closed in may 2025, a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Citadel Olmera 📖 2000 - 2025 vladimir smirnov named his site after a chieftain in a nick perumov novel and ran it from june 2000. litforum, the board attached to it, registered more than forty thousand people and was one of the busiest literary forums in the russian internet in the mid 2000s. by 2013 almost everyone had left, a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Read.cv 📖 2021 - 2025 read.cv was the text-first social network for product designers and the slightly online corner of tech. andy chung, a former product designer at facebook and mozilla, started it in 2021. you put your resume on a clean page. you posted short notes about work in a feed called posts. the timing was goo |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Qruiser 📖 2000 - 2025 at twelve noon on 1 april 2025 the biggest queer community site in scandinavia switched off, one day after the date its publisher had announced in february. twenty-five years, a hundred thousand members at the high point, and a closing reason with no drama in it at all: the platform needed rebuildin |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
NaNoWriMo 📖 1999 - 2025 twenty-one people in the san francisco bay area wrote novels in july 1999 because chris baty thought it sounded like a good month. by 2022 the event drew 412,295 participants across 671 regions. the nonprofit that grew around it ran at a deficit for most of six years, lost its forums to a child-safe |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
DSLReports 📖 1999 - 2025 dslreports launched on may 28 1999, justin beech building it from new york as a place for us broadband subscribers to compare their isp speeds and complain about their provisioning. for twenty-six years it was the broadband-forum-and-speedtest community for the verizon and comcast side of the us. ka |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Vodkaster 📖 2009 - 2025 télérama sent the email on 13 march 2025 and the logins stopped working the same evening. what died was a francophone film community that had run since 2009 on reviews capped at the length of a tweet, plus an ambassador system that let heavy users adopt a single film and speak for it. the site itsel |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
RateBeer 📖 2000 - 2025 bill buchanan started ratebeer in may 2000 and joe tucker ended up owning it. for twenty five years it was the reference database for anyone who cared what a beer actually was, finishing with over 640,000 beers and more than nine million ratings from drinkers who were paid nothing. in october 2016 a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Polywork 📖 2021 - 2025 $44.5 million went into the idea that a professional profile should list everything you do instead of one job title. peter johnston founded polywork in 2018 and opened it to the public in june 2021, with andreessen horowitz and the collison brothers behind it, and through 2021 and most of 2022 it wa |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
sub.club 📖 2024 - 2025 a hundred and fifty creators had signed up by the time bart decrem's studio ran out of money. sub.club launched on 29 august 2024 selling paid subscriptions and premium feeds to people already posting on mastodon, taking six percent plus card fees, and published its own closing note on 16 december, |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Niconico Shunga 📖 2011 - 2025 niwango opened it in august 2011 with a stated goal: moderators could not judge obscenity objectively, so the users would be asked to do it instead, and if the experiment worked the rules on adult expression might be relaxed. fourteen days later they were. the corner then ran for thirteen years on a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Cohost 📖 2022 - 2025 cohost launched in june 2022 from a four-person not-for-profit cooperative called anti software software club. the team built a twitter-shaped indie network where posts had no visible engagement metrics and supported full css inside the body. it peaked at around 227,000 registered accounts by august |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Ubuntu Forums 📖 2004 - 2025 ryan troy started it in october 2004 as a personal side project a few weeks before ubuntu shipped its first release, and canonical took the whole thing over by 2007. at the end it held 2,285,605 threads and 13,567,143 posts from 2,182,465 registered members, with 91 of them active on the last day an |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Qoos.com 📖 2001 - 2025 macau has about seven hundred thousand people and for most of the 2000s it had one place online where they argued. qoos opened in september 2001, hit sixty thousand visitors a day by may 2007, partnered with the macau daily news and with government departments, and then spent a decade losing its own |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Mozilla.social 📖 2023 - 2024 in december 2022 mozilla said it was joining the fediverse, and plenty of people looking for a way off twitter read that as the cavalry arriving. the server opened as an invite-only beta on 4 may 2023 and never came out of beta. around sixty people were laid off it in february 2024, the custom front |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Foursquare City Guide 📖 2009 - 2024 foursquare was the check-in game. you tapped a button on your phone when you got somewhere and earned points against every friend who did the same. dennis crowley and naveen selvadurai launched it on 11 march 2009 out of new york and grew to about fifty million registered accounts. in 2014 they spli |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Renren 📖 2005 - 2024 renren was china's facebook for the late 2000s university generation. it launched in december 2005 as xiaonei.com (literally 'on-campus network') and was renamed renren ('everyone's network') in august 2009 after the parent company decided to push beyond colleges. at peak around 2011 it reported 160 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Ask.fm 📖 2010 - 2024 ask.fm launched on june 16 2010 in riga, latvia, founded by brothers ilja and mark terebin with three other co-founders. the format was an open inbox where anyone, registered or anonymous, could post a question to a user's profile and the user answered publicly. teenagers picked it up first and hard |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Garnek.pl 📖 2007 - 2024 poland got a photo site in 2007 that refused to let you sort anything. no albums, no folders: you uploaded and it all went into the same pot, which is what garnek means. marek futrega built it right after kurnik.pl, then it passed to o2 and later to goldenline. on 25 november 2024 the advertising st |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Empire Avenue 📖 2010 - 2024 empire avenue launched out of edmonton on february 23 of 2010 as a virtual stock market where you bought and sold shares in other people based on their online influence. duleepa wijayawardhana ran the platform with co-founders through 2015. peoplebrowsr acquired and rebranded to empire.kred in septe |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Curious Cat 📖 2016 - 2024 curious cat was a link in your twitter bio that let anybody ask you something with no name attached to it, which is the same bargain formspring and ask.fm made before it. two cousins in spain built it in 2016 and sold it to a korean quiz company two years later. its main domain expired at the end of |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Koinup 📖 2007 - 2024 brescia, march 2007: two italians built a photo-sharing site for people who took pictures inside virtual worlds. koinup indexed second life and a dozen smaller worlds behind it, and claimed a hundred thousand uploaded items by november 2008. you could send a postcard from inside a world straight int |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
TV Cream 📖 1997 - 2024 tv cream was a british website about british television, written by people who had been children in front of it. it ran for twenty-seven years, indexed hundreds of programs from what it called the cream era, produced four books and a weekly mail-out, and described itself as celebrating defunct pop c |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
buildspace 📖 2019 - 2024 farza majeed posted at 17:11 utc on 23 august 2024 that buildspace was closing that day, and gave a reason almost no founder gives. the money was there and the business was the strongest it had ever been. he was burned out. buildspace had put around 125,000 people through its programs, raised ten mi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Lego Life 📖 2017 - 2024 lego built a social network for children and made it safe by taking the words out. you posted a photo of something you had built and you answered other people in emoji, under a username the app picked for you. it ran seven and a half years and reached nine million users in nearly eighty countries. i |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Fitocracy 📖 2011 - 2024 fitocracy was a fitness social network founded in february 2011 by dick talens and brian wang. it gave you points for every workout and levels for every milestone, with bonus quests on top. growth peaked between 2013 and 2017, then an undisclosed 2016 acquisition starved the development cycle. the w |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
WorldCosplay 📖 2011 - 2024 seven hundred and twenty thousand accounts and six and a half million photographs, in twelve languages, on a site run out of tokyo for a hobby that had stopped being japanese decades earlier. worldcosplay opened as an nhn japan beta at the end of 2011, passed through pixiv's cure subsidiary, inherit |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
dbna 📖 1997 - 2024 du bist nicht allein. a german site for gay and bisexual teenagers ran under that sentence from 1997 until july 2024. it began as a forum and ended as a magazine with a community attached to it. the team that closed it said the running costs and the legal paperwork had outgrown what a small operatio |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Girls in Tech 📖 2007 - 2024 seventeen years, more than fifty chapters on six continents, a quarter of a million people reached. then an email to 130,000 members in july 2024 saying the money had stopped arriving. adriana gascoigne had founded the organization in san francisco in february 2007 and built it on corporate sponsors |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Koo 📖 2020 - 2024 koo was an indian twitter alternative built around hindi and other indian languages. it launched in march 2020 from bengaluru. the founders aprameya radhakrishna and mayank bidawatka rode a wave of attention in early 2021 when the modi government and twitter fought publicly over a takedown order. th |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
プリ画像 (Puri Gazou) 📖 2007 - 2024 gmo media switched it off at noon on 26 june 2024, japan time, and took the chat service and the teen news site down in the same minute. prcm.jp had spent seventeen years as a place where japanese middle and high school girls posted phone wallpapers for each other, which is three generations of hand |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Coco.gg 📖 2003 - 2024 isaac steidl put coco.fr up in 2003 and it kept the same shape for twenty-one years: rooms sorted by french department, and no account of any kind to make before you walked in. the category it belonged to emptied out everywhere else around 2010 and this one kept growing, reaching 778,000 unique visi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Mozilla Hubs 📖 2018 - 2024 mozilla's browser-based vr social platform. you opened a link in firefox or chrome and stepped into a 3d room without a headset required. it launched april 26 2018 as a webxr experiment and ran for six years. mozilla ended support on may 31 2024 and handed the open source codebase to the hubs founda |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Post News 📖 2022 - 2024 noam bardin tried to build a quieter twitter for journalists and readers, with per-article tipping instead of subscriptions. 1.4 million signups, eighteen months, then the post that admitted it was not growing fast enough to matter. the post-musk wave produced a lot of these and post news was one of |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
LINE Play 📖 2012 - 2024 line play gave you a character and a room and then sent you to a different app to talk. nhn japan launched it in november 2012 on the back of the messenger everybody in japan had just installed, and it grew into the largest mobile avatar community in the world, past forty million registered users by |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Taringa! 📖 2004 - 2024 taringa launched on june 8 2004 in buenos aires when fernando sanz was eighteen. he sold ninety percent for five thousand dollars in 2006 to alberto nakayama plus the botbol brothers. the platform peaked in 2014 at 75 million unique monthly users with 27 million registered accounts, the dominant soc |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Anon.cafe 📖 2019 - 2024 the administrator gave nine weeks of notice, said plainly that nobody had pressured them and that the decision was entirely their own, and closed anon.cafe at midnight utc on 15 march 2024. it had run since 2019 as a quiet home for boards that needed somewhere to go after the large imageboards colla |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
İTÜ Sözlük 📖 2004 - 2024 itü sözlük opened on 1 march 2004 as a collaborative dictionary for istanbul technical university, reachable only from inside the campuses for its first month, then open to everyone. it passed 185,000 members and grew a museum of deleted entries, a member-run radio station and a habit of throwing bi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Lang-8 📖 2006 - 2024 lang-8 ran on reciprocity. you posted a paragraph in a language you were learning and a native speaker struck through your phrasing and wrote theirs beside it. you paid that back by doing the same for somebody writing in the language you grew up in. it held over 750,000 accounts and around 90 langua |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
画吧 (Huabar) 📖 2013 - 2024 the founder wrote the goodbye at dawn on 13 january 2024. he said he had gathered up dozens of screenshots covering every home page redesign since 2013, and then deleted them one by one and kept only the text. eleven years together, he wrote, and finally it is time to say goodbye. 画吧 was a chinese d |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Designer News 📖 2012 - 2024 two founders of a failing version-control startup built a link aggregator for designers on the side, and the side project outlasted the company by nine years. it changed hands twice and filled with spam once registration opened, then went off in early february 2024 with no farewell post. the domain |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
queer.af 📖 2018 - 2024 in february 2024 a ministry in kabul suspended a domain name, and a small social server in another hemisphere stopped existing. queer.af had run for five and a half years on a pun nobody expected anyone to collect on: .af is afghanistan, and by then afghanistan had an owner again. the admin had alre |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
CGSociety 📖 2001 - 2024 on 9 december 2001 leonard teo started a forum for the company he worked for. the company fell apart six months later and he kept the forum, which is how cgtalk came to exist for twenty-two years as the place 3d and effects artists posted unfinished work and got told what was wrong with it. ballisti |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Smeet 📖 2007 - 2024 at eleven at night on 5 january 2024, after an in-world goodbye party, a berlin company switched off the 3d chat world it had been running for sixteen years. twenty-two million people had registered over that time and hardly any of them were still there. no insolvency, no buyer, no drama: coin sales |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Ryze 📖 2001 - 2024 adrian scott finished a mathematics phd at twenty and had money from being an early investor in napster, and in 2001 he spent some of it on a website where business people kept a profile page and joined networks. it got past a million members. its real legacy is secondhand: jonathan abrams was a use |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Peach 📖 2016 - 2023 peach was the january 2016 app. dom hofmann shipped it fresh off vine's success, showed it off at ces, watched it climb to number 10 in the ios networking chart the same weekend. by mid-february it had cratered. hofmann drifted to other projects. the app went zombie-alive for years. peach.cool expir |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
aRGENTeaM 📖 2002 - 2023 around 100,000 spanish subtitle files came out of one argentine forum between 2002 and 2023, made by more than 500 volunteers who were never paid for any of it. argenteam existed because the sopranos and lost did not arrive in spanish when they aired, and it closed because streaming made that proble |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
OneHallyu 📖 2013 - 2023 8.2 million posts sat in the music section alone on the day the admins locked it. onehallyu ran from 2013 to christmas day 2023 as the largest english-language k-pop forum on the open web, with its own currency and a reputation for being merciless to the fandoms it covered. the closing banner went u |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Wikimedia RU 📖 2008 - 2023 vladimir medeyko co-founded wikimedia ru in 2008 and ran it for most of its fifteen years. in june 2023 he launched ruwiki, a fork of the russian wikipedia that the press described as kremlin-compliant. six months after that, on 18 december 2023, the members of the organization he had built voted un |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
QuestionCopyright.org 📖 2007 - 2023 karl fogel incorporated a nonprofit in california in february 2007 to argue that copyright restriction hurts artists more than it protects them, then spent sixteen years funding films and short animations that made the case instead of lobbying about it. he closed it in december 2023 because filing t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Jay Is Games 📖 2003 - 2023 dormant jay is games was a casual-games review and curation blog founded by jay bibby on 19 april 2003. for two decades it was the hub anglo flash-game culture pointed at when it wanted a curated daily feed of escape-the-room puzzles, point-and-click adventures and small browser experiments. it survived ado |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Gas 📖 2022 - 2023 gas was nikita bier's second run at the same product he had already built and sold once as tbh. it launched on august 29 2022 in a handful of southern us states and hit number one in the app store two months later on the back of a compliment-poll loop. discord bought the company on january 17 2023, |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
XeNTaX Game Research Forum 📖 2003 - 2023 90,443 registered members and 161,906 posts, nearly all of it about how to open a file that was never meant to be opened. a dutch commodore 64 demoscener called mr.mouse ran it, starting from a dos tool he wrote in 1997 in a student room in groningen. when the hosting stopped making financial sense |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Pebble (social network) 📖 2022 - 2023 gabor cselle and sarah oh both came out of twitter and started building a replacement for it in november 2022, the month the layoffs landed. it was called t2 for almost all of its life and pebble for the last six weeks. twenty thousand people signed up, which in that particular market was a rounding |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Twitter Circles 📖 2022 - 2023 twitter circles was a close-friends feed that let you post a tweet visible only to a hand-picked list of up to 150 accounts. it rolled out globally on 30 august 2022, hit a public security bug in may 2023 where circle posts leaked into the for-you timeline, and was retired on 31 october 2023 under t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Rukkola.hu 📖 2012 - 2023 roughly 480,000 books moved between strangers in hungary over eleven years, by post and by hand, paid for in points rather than money. the publisher that bought rukkola in october 2015 switched the swapping off on 1 october 2023 and kept the name on a bookshop instead. two years after that the name |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Kwangya Club 📖 2022 - 2023 a fight over who owned sm entertainment is what closed this one. kwangya club was sm's own fan club app, named for the wilderness in aespa's lyrics, and it opened in september 2022 to replace an older sm app called lysn. hybe and kakao then spent the first half of 2023 fighting for control of sm, an |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Lookbook.nu 📖 2008 - 2023 lookbook.nu was a pre-instagram street-style network where you posted a full-body photo of your outfit, tagged the pieces, and collected points called hype from other members. it started invite-only in 2008 and spent a few years quietly inventing what we now call influencer culture. then instagram m |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
SPACE10 📖 2015 - 2023 copenhagen's meatpacking district held a research lab that belonged to a furniture company. space10 spent the best part of a decade on flat-pack housing and vertical farming for ikea, publishing most of it under open licenses rather than turning it into product. it closed on 1 september 2023 with tw |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Fanhouse 📖 2020 - 2023 fanhouse launched in november 2020 as a sfw alternative to onlyfans, aimed at creators whose income was already coming from patreon and instagram. andreessen horowitz put twenty million into a series a in 2022. cofounder rosie nguyen resigned in july 2023 the same week passes announced the acquisiti |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Discord.io 📖 2015 - 2023 at 16:36 cet on 14 august 2023 the operators confirmed that the database being sold on a hacking forum really was theirs. four minutes later they began switching everything off. discord.io had spent eight years selling readable invite links of the form discord.io/yourserver, and the notice it left b |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Wysp 📖 2011 - 2023 françois chollet built a place for people to practice drawing, ran it for three years, then went to google and wrote keras. wysp kept going without him for another nine years, on about 25,000 monthly users at its best. on 1 august 2023 it told everyone to download their work because nothing would be |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Twitter (2006 - 2023) 📖 2006 - 2023 the public conversation site. 280 characters per post (originally 140). the timeline was where you watched things happen in real time. peak culture was around 2010 to 2018. musk bought it in october 2022, fired most of the staff, started undoing the moderation, and renamed it X on 23 july 2023. what |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Banciyuan 📖 2014 - 2023 the notice went up on 12 june 2023 and gave everybody exactly thirty days. 半次元 meant the half-dimension, the strip of ground between a drawn character and the real person dressed as them, and for nine years it was where chinese cosplayers and illustrators posted their work. bytedance bought it in ea |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Ello 📖 2014 - 2023 ello launched in march 2014 as an invite-only social network with a manifesto that said "you are not a product." after facebook started enforcing real-name policies in september 2014, drag queens and lgbtq+ users started signing up at 30,000 per hour. the hype faded inside three months. ello pivoted |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
bash.org 📖 1999 - 2023 bash.org was a database of funny things people said on irc, submitted by readers and voted on, running from 1999 under the name qdb. for most of the 2000s it was the closest thing the english-speaking internet had to a shared joke book, and its best entries got reposted so widely that people quoted |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Poparazzi 📖 2021 - 2023 alex and austen ma spent three years iterating ttyl inc into one final app called poparazzi, where you could not post a photo of yourself, only friends could tag you. it hit number one free in the us app store within days of the 24 may 2021 launch and pulled benchmark in for a fifteen-million-dollar |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
ЯRUS 📖 2021 - 2023 on 29 june 2023 the press office of a russian social network with twelve million registered accounts announced that support for the project was suspended "due to the political situation". the servers went off the following afternoon at three o'clock moscow time. five days before that, yevgeny prigoz |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Yandex Q 📖 2015 - 2023 dormant antonina samsonova was a journalist who wanted a russian quora, so she launched thequestion in march 2015 and had it past sixteen million monthly visitors by 2018. yandex bought it in 2019, renamed it кью, folded its own знатоки experiment into it and ran the result past three million people a day. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
YouTube Stories 📖 2017 - 2023 youtube stories arrived on 29 november 2017 under the name reels, three years before instagram put that word on something else. it was a stories clone with a seven day expiry rather than a day, open only to channels above ten thousand subscribers, sitting inside an app people open to watch things th |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
ARTDOXA 📖 2007 - 2023 sixteen years of posted artwork ended on a wednesday in june 2023, on a page 250 pixels wide that said thank you for your participation and sympathy. artdoxa gmbh had kept a non-profit art community online since 2007 and finally wrote, in its own farewell, that the money to maintain it and keep it s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
IRL 📖 2017 - 2023 irl was a group-messaging app that told investors it had twenty million monthly users on the way to a 1.2 billion dollar valuation. most of those users did not exist. an internal investigation in 2023 concluded that around ninety-five percent of them were bots. the board shut the company down that j |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Clash (clash.me) 📖 2020 - 2023 i never used clash. by the time it launched in august 2020 i was 36, working as an engineer, and the entire short-form-video creator subgenre had passed me by years before. brendon mcnerney built clash to fix the thing that killed vine, which was that vine paid creators nothing and then twitter |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Spotify Greenroom 📖 2021 - 2023 spotify greenroom was a clubhouse clone built on the betty labs acquisition. spotify paid about fifty million dollars for the technology in march 2021, launched greenroom in june, rebranded it to spotify live in march 2022, and shut the standalone app down on april 30 2023. the live-audio category c |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Clubhouse 📖 2020 - 2023 the app that turned the lockdown into a giant conference call you actually wanted to join. clubhouse was audio only and invite only, a live room full of voices you dropped into and out of, and for a few months in 2021 it felt like the whole tech world was in there at once, elon musk and mark zuckerb |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Tianya Club 📖 1999 - 2023 tianya club was the largest of china's first-wave bulletin boards, founded in haikou on february 14 1999. it ran BBS forums alongside a later blog and photo album product. by 2015 it ranked 11th most visited site in china with over 130 million registered users at peak. the human flesh search subforu |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
PinoyExchange 📖 1999 - 2023 pex was the philippine web's town square from 1999 to roughly the early 2010s, when facebook and twitter took the conversations elsewhere. michael nolledo started it on 12 july 1999 to debate local issues. jude turcuato, one of the cofounders, was the uaap play-by-play commentator known as kaboom, w |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Reddit Talk 📖 2021 - 2023 reddit talk was reddit's clubhouse competitor. the live-audio rooms feature launched on april 19 2021 at the peak of the social-audio craze, ran for almost exactly two years, and shut down on march 21 2023. reddit said it needed time to rethink audio inside the platform. the underlying third-party a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
AltspaceVR 📖 2015 - 2023 altspacevr was the social platform you visited if you owned a vr headset and wanted to be in the same room as another human inside it. eric romo founded it in 2013 and shipped the public product in may 2015. microsoft bought the company in 2017, kept it running for six more years, and announced in j |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Yammer 📖 2008 - 2023 yammer was the work social network nobody was sure they wanted. david sacks and adam pisoni spun it out of geni in 2008, won techcrunch50 that september, and grew on a freemium model where any employee could sign up with a work email and drag the rest of the office in. microsoft bought it in 2012 fo |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Zenly 📖 2015 - 2023 zenly was the friend-location app that a generation of european and southeast-asian teenagers used as their default group-chat backbone between 2017 and 2022. you saw every friend's pin on a live map. snap bought it for around three hundred million in 2017 and tried to learn from it for the snap map |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Stripperweb 📖 2002 - 2023 74 members in january 2002, 251,432 by january 2023, and in between the largest body of written knowledge the american adult-entertainment workforce ever put in one place: what to charge, and how to file taxes on an income that arrives as cash. the owner, whose name nobody knew by then, gave one wee |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Nexopia 📖 2003 - 2023 nexopia was a canadian teen social network started in edmonton in february 2003 by an eighteen-year-old named timo ewalds, who built it out of an earlier site called enternexus. peak was about 1.4 million accounts with ninety-five percent of the user base inside canada. the federal privacy commissio |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
We Heart It 📖 2008 - 2023 we heart it was the image curation site fabio giolito built in brazil on january 3 2008 as a personal weekend project. by 2011 it had moved to san francisco as super basic inc and was raising money. the audience was 70 percent female and under 24, the use case was hearting pictures of clothes and be |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
WikiPilipinas 📖 2007 - 2023 manila, 12 june 2007, philippine independence day: a publishing house switched on an encyclopedia forked from fifteen thousand wikipedia articles and told its editors to do the opposite of everything wikipedia asked for. original research was encouraged. neutral point of view was rejected on princip |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
U17 📖 2009 - 2022 u17, known in chinese as 有妖气, is where china's original web comics scene lived for about six years. it opened commercially in 2009 as a place for amateurs to serialize their own work, carried more than forty five thousand titles, and produced the properties that the animation studios then came shopp |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
ForumKristen.com 📖 2007 - 2022 a webmaster signing himself adi opened an indonesian christian message board on 9 december 2007 and kept it alive for fifteen years, moderated by volunteers drawn from several protestant denominations, with no church paying for any of it. the indonesian wikipedia entry gives the cause as a membershi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Twitter Moments 📖 2015 - 2022 the official twitter editorial team curated big news events, sports finals, and award shows into a slide-style story of public tweets. it never quite worked for normal users and twitter quietly hollowed it out across 2022. the curation desk got cut in the post-musk layoffs and the create button disa |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Facebook Live Audio Rooms 📖 2021 - 2022 facebook live audio rooms was meta's clubhouse clone, rolled out in the united states on 22 june 2021 during the peak of the pandemic audio-social wave. it lived inside facebook and messenger, verified public figures and group admins could host rooms with speakers on stage plus listeners in the audi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Rigveda Wiki 📖 2007 - 2022 rigveda wiki was the korean internet writing itself down: fifteen years of pop culture, slang and argument, started on 1 march 2007 as angelhalo wiki and read by most people through an unofficial mirror rather than the site itself. in spring 2015 its terms of service turned out to claim that everyth |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
mastodon.technology 📖 2017 - 2022 ash furrow ran a server for 23,561 people in his spare time and announced in october 2022 that he was done. the timing is the whole story: twitter had just changed hands and every mastodon instance on the network was drowning in new signups, and this one turned off registrations and went read-only i |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
TrekEarth 📖 2002 - 2022 on 28 november 2022 trekearth.com was still serving its own front page under the line learning about the world through photography. by the following morning the domain redirected to a flyertalk thread welcoming its refugees. adam silverman had built it in october 2002 around one rule: you uploaded a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Surrender at 20 📖 2011 - 2022 dormant moobeat started a blogspot page about league of legends patch notes in february 2011, and aznbeat ran it alongside a full-time job from 2015 onward. on 14 november 2022 they posted a preview of some winter skins and then simply stopped, with no announcement, because both of them were finished. the s |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Sogou Science Encyclopedia 📖 2020 - 2022 an encyclopedia written by working researchers and reviewed by users holding doctorates, launched by sogou in october 2020 and switched off two years later. the closure notice gave three weeks of warning and said exactly what 11 november 2022 would bring: every entry erased and the servers closed, w |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Blendr 📖 2011 - 2022 joel simkhai had already built grindr when he announced this one at sxsw in march 2011, under the codename project amicus. same location-first grid, opened to everybody, minus whatever it was that made the original work. badoo took over the backend in 2012 and ran it as a side property for a decade. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Everipedia 📖 2014 - 2022 two ucla students started everipedia in a dorm room in december 2014, on the complaint that wikipedia's deletion policy threw away too much. larry sanger, who co-founded wikipedia, joined as chief information officer in december 2017 and resigned less than two years later. the money arrived in febru |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Facebook Live Shopping 📖 2020 - 2022 taobao proved this format works. meta could not make it work anywhere else. for two years facebook let sellers tag products inside a live video and run a broadcast that was openly modeled on chinese livestream commerce, complete with a weekly friday slot and beauty brands reading scripts to nobody. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Heartless Bitches International 📖 1996 - 2022 in 1996 an ottawa software specialist named natalie prowse took the insult and put it on t-shirts. readers mailed in why somebody had called them a heartless bitch and the site printed it, week after week. it made yahoo internet life and got a webby nomination, went on hiatus in 2015 with the old co |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Facebook Neighborhoods 📖 2020 - 2022 calgary got it first, in october 2020, as a test nobody outside one canadian city could join. the idea was a dedicated space inside facebook for the people who lived near you, with appointed moderators reading the posts and, unusually, a separate profile you filled in yourself so your neighbors did |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Ablo 📖 2019 - 2022 ablo came out of ghent in january 2019, built by massive media, the company that had already made netlog and twoo. it did one thing and did it cleanly: it matched you with somebody in another country and translated the conversation in both directions, text as you typed it and captions over video cal |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Edmodo 📖 2008 - 2022 the facebook-shaped wall that lived inside a k-12 classroom, with the teacher as the only admin. edmodo was the thing americans used to mean "homework on a feed" for about a decade. netdragon, a chinese gaming company, bought it in 2018 for 137 million dollars. covid spiked usage briefly. then it sh |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
DMM Connect Chat 📖 2021 - 2022 dmm built the plumbing first. dmm vr lab shipped vr connect in november 2020, a free service that parked your vrm avatar in a dmm account so other people's unity apps could ask for it, and open-sourced the sdk eight months later. almost nothing plugged in, so the lab built its own client: connect ch |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Kandian 📖 2019 - 2022 kandian was tencent's answer to bytedance's douyin, the short-video app that took over chinese attention starting in 2016. tencent launched it in 2019, poured cash into creator subsidies, and still could not stop douyin from becoming the default. shutdown notice went out on 15 august 2022 with a dat |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
teacup. 📖 1997 - 2022 teacup. started in august 1997 as a free rental message board for people who had a personal homepage and nowhere to run a script. you signed up and pasted a link into your page, and the conversation lived on somebody else's server. it outlasted the personal homepage itself and four changes of owner, |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Twoo 📖 2011 - 2022 twoo was a belgian social discovery site spun out of massive media, the same ghent team that built netlog. it launched in 2011 as a soft pivot away from the dying european social network model toward the dating-adjacent flow that match group would eventually own. the platform claimed 181 million reg |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Unitel 📖 1996 - 2022 unitel was samsung sds's entry into the korean pc통신 boom, live from 1996 and the only one of the big four that made you install a windows client instead of dialing into a terminal. the 1997 film 접속 put its chat rooms on cinema screens across the country, which did more for it than any advertising co |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Club MyCE 📖 1999 - 2022 a hosting bill nobody renewed took down twenty-three years of forum archive on saturday 25 june 2022. the site opened in 1999 as cd freaks, the english-language place to go for optical drive firmware and burning software, renamed itself myce in 2008, and was sold in 2019 to an owner who never introd |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Oculus Venues 📖 2018 - 2022 on the evening of 30 may 2018 a few thousand headsets pointed at red rocks amphitheatre to watch vance joy play, each one sitting in a virtual crowd next to people it would never meet. that was the opening night of a four-year experiment in whether watching something with strangers is the part that |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
420chan 📖 2005 - 2022 420chan opened on 20 april 2005 as a joke about 4chan and drugs, and its raid board /i/ is where the people who began calling themselves anonymous organized the habbo hotel invasions. it then spent about fifteen years as something much quieter, a drug board where strangers talked each other through |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Furiffic 📖 2013 - 2022 on 6 march 2022 the owner of a furry art site pinned a post headed service termination, typed in pink, and gave everybody twelve weeks to take their pictures off. furiffic had run since 2013 on speed and a clean interface, with about eleven thousand members and a hundred and twenty thousand uploads, |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Hispachan 📖 2012 - 2022 a pseudonymous administrator called zeta opened a spanish-language imageboard in november 2012 because there was not one, and by 2021 it was among the busiest boards of its kind anywhere, with over thirty percent of its traffic coming from venezuela. the boards took their last posts on the night of |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
RaidForums 📖 2015 - 2022 raidforums was the largest english-language breach-data forum of the 2015 to 2022 window. its portuguese founder diogo santos coelho started it as a teenager under the handle omnipotent and grew it into the main distribution point for stolen databases from major public breaches. by shutdown it had a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Hospitality Club 📖 2000 - 2022 hospitality club was a hospitality-exchange network founded in koblenz in 2000, where members hosted travelers for free and hosts were never allowed to charge. it grew to more than half a million members across two hundred countries and predated couchsurfing by several years. it never built the orga |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Hello 📖 2016 - 2022 orkut büyükkökten built orkut inside google as a twenty percent project and then watched google close it in september 2014. hello was his answer, launched on 1 may 2016 through his own company, organized around what you were into rather than who you already knew. it never came close to the scale of |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
StudiVZ 📖 2005 - 2022 studivz was the german-speaking world's homegrown facebook. founded in november 2005 in berlin by ehssan dariani and dennis bemmann, it grew into a 15 million member network across the dach region by 2009. holtzbrinck publishing bought it for 85 million euro in 2007 thinking they had bought the futu |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
MeinVZ 📖 2008 - 2022 the third and final VZ network, launched in february 2008 for germans who were done with university and did not fit on studivz anymore. it inherited the same berlin architecture and the same steady decline. after a 2017 sale to momentous entertainment and years of neglect, meinvz shut down on 31 mar |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
wize.life 📖 2012 - 2022 a property group in deggendorf bankrolled a social network for germans over fifty and ran it for nine and a half years on advertising alone. it opened in september 2012 as seniorbook and changed its name in october 2016 because facebook had been litigating over the word book and the company decided |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
bobiler.org 📖 2006 - 2022 bobiler.org was the turkish humor site that taught a country to make montes, which is what turkish internet culture called a photoshopped image with a joke welded into it. ozan tüzün started it in 2006, tens of thousands of people uploaded under handles, and at its peak about a million people a mont |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Wanmen University 📖 2012 - 2022 at around four in the morning on 22 march 2022 somebody went through the vip groups on wechat and dissolved them one at a time. by the time students woke up the app would not log in and it was gone from the apple store. tong zhe, the physics prodigy who had started the whole thing as a renren page i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Switter 📖 2018 - 2022 assembly four spun up a mastodon instance in melbourne three days before fosta-sesta passed in the us. for four years switter held the largest online directory of sex workers anywhere outside of the regulated countries. on march 14 2022 the cumulative legal compliance load from australia's online sa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Facebook Campus 📖 2020 - 2022 in 2004 thefacebook would not let you in without a harvard email. in september 2020 facebook built that wall again on purpose, as a section inside the app where only an .edu address got you a feed of your own campus. it opened at about thirty schools, reached two hundred and four, and was still addi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Tiexue 📖 2001 - 2022 on 20 december 2021 a chinese forum with more than ten million registered users turned off the reply button, then spent ten weeks saying goodbye before closing for good on 1 march 2022. tiexue had been running since 2001 as the address for junmi, the country's military enthusiasts, and its operator |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Lurkmore 📖 2007 - 2022 lurkmore was the russian internet explaining itself to itself, a mediawiki encyclopedia of memes and imageboard slang written in the sarcastic voice of the thing it was documenting. roskomnadzor blacklisted it in 2012 over two articles about marijuana, and after years of pressure the founder put the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
bash.im 📖 2004 - 2022 bash.im was the russian internet's quote book, a wall of one-line exchanges lifted out of irc and messenger windows by readers and voted into place by other readers, running from january 2004 under the name bash.org.ru. for most of the 2000s it was the shared joke supply of the russian-speaking web, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Dubsmash 📖 2014 - 2022 dubsmash was a berlin-built lip-sync video app that hit number one in germany within a week of its november 2014 launch and passed fifty million downloads by mid-2015. it was early to the short-video format that later defined tiktok, but it could not hold the lead once bytedance's app arrived with a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Tivoli Cloud VR 📖 2019 - 2022 caitlyn meeks and maki deprez both came out of high fidelity, and when high fidelity pulled the plug on its own vr platform in january 2020 they cloned the apache-licensed code three days later and ran it themselves. it lasted two years. the engine could hold 500 avatars in one non-instanced space a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Pinger.pl 📖 2007 - 2022 on the morning of 2 february 2022 pinger.pl began forwarding to pudelek, the gossip site of its owner wirtualna polska. o2.pl had launched it in november 2007 as a polish answer to twitter, with 400 characters to a post. megapanel counted 1.7 million users in may 2011, most of them teenagers. the cl |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
FoodTribe 📖 2019 - 2022 a car-shaped social network with serious money behind it decided in 2019 that the same software could hold recipes, and launched foodtribe as the sister site. the automotive ad market dried up in the pandemic and the chip shortage took the rest. on 10 january 2022 both addresses got three weeks' not |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
NotebookReview 📖 1999 - 2022 charles jefferies posted the notice on 22 january 2022, on behalf of what he called a small but dedicated volunteer staff. nine days later notebookreview went offline along with brighthand and tabletpcreview, the whole network that techtarget had bought for fifteen million dollars in 2007. what went |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Keenspot 📖 2000 - 2022 keenspot was the invite-only premium webcomic network chris and teri crosby launched in march 2000 with darren bleuel and nathan stone. it ran a curated set of independent strips that shared an ad network and a reader audience, peaked around 50 million page views per month in 2002, and ran a free op |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
DowneLink 📖 2001 - 2022 downelink was an american social network for lgbtq people, mostly young and mostly of color, that ran from the early 2000s. mtv networks' logo channel bought it in 2007 when it had around 400,000 members. as facebook and then the dating apps took over the ground it stood on, a small identity-specifi |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
RedditGifts 📖 2009 - 2022 bill gates did it five years running, under the username thisisbillgates. that is the detail everybody remembers about redditgifts, which began in 2009 as a side project by a reddit user posting as kickme444 and grew into the largest gift exchange on earth. reddit bought it in 2011 and ran it for a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
SpaceCollective 📖 2007 - 2022 rene daalder died on the last day of 2019 in ventura county, california, and the website he had started with folkert gorter at the end of 2007 kept running without him for two more years. spacecollective was a place for people who wanted to argue about the future of the human species in long posts, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Sarahah 📖 2016 - 2021 sarahah was the anonymous-feedback app that went vertical in july 2017 and crashed back down inside a year. saudi founder zain-alabdin tawfiq built a question box, snapchat shared it for him, and 300 million accounts piled in before moderation existed. apple and google pulled it in february 2018 aft |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Channel 9 📖 2004 - 2021 in 2004 microsoft was a company developers did not like and did not trust. channel 9 was the answer somebody inside came up with: point a handheld camera at the engineers, let them talk for as long as they want, publish it unedited. it ran for seventeen years and became the place you went to hear ho |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Twinity 📖 2008 - 2021 twinity was a berlin-built 3d virtual world that started by cloning real cities at scale. you walked a low-poly berlin in 2008, then a low-poly singapore, london, miami, new york. metaversum gmbh ran out of growth in 2012 and exitreality picked up the pieces. in november 2021 a server migration brok |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Ruqqus 📖 2019 - 2021 ruqqus was an open-source reddit clone that launched in late 2019 with a free-speech pitch and a familiar layout. it caught a brief wave in june 2020 when reddit banned about 2,000 subreddits at once and a chunk of that traffic looked for somewhere to land. the founders posted as kek and captainmeta |
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| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
LinkedIn Stories 📖 2020 - 2021 nineteen months is the whole life of linkedin stories. a brazil pilot in february 2020 grew into a global rollout with the september redesign, and linkedin announced the end on 31 august 2021. the company's own explanation was that it had guessed wrong about what people wanted from casual video on a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Lonely Planet Thorn Tree 📖 1996 - 2021 the thorn tree opened on lonelyplanet.com in 1996 and took its name from a tree in a nairobi hotel courtyard that travelers had been pinning notes to since 1902. for twenty-five years it was where you asked whether the border crossing was actually open, and got an answer from somebody who had crosse |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Nearby Live 📖 2010 - 2021 nearby was a live list of whoever happened to be standing near you, written by one developer named brian hamachek and launched in june 2010 on windows mobile 6, a platform that was already dying when he shipped on it. the app insisted it was not for dating and dating is what everyone used it for. a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Zynn 📖 2020 - 2021 two million downloads in a single month, most of them bought with cash. zynn paid you a dollar to sign up and points to keep watching, and it rode that straight to the top of the us app store in may 2020. both stores pulled it within six weeks over stolen video. kuaishou switched the service off on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
pya! 📖 2003 - 2021 the first post went up on 15 april 2003 and it was a happy tree friends flash. eighteen years later the same person was still paying for the hosting out of pocket, as he had been since the site moved off his home server in 2012, and when the contract came up in august 2021 he let it lapse. pya! is w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Spectrum.chat 📖 2017 - 2021 github bought spectrum in november 2018 and ran it for almost three more years before switching the whole site to read only. the product was threaded chat for developer communities, built so that a good answer stayed public and turned up in a search result instead of scrolling out of a slack history |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Cloob 📖 2004 - 2021 cloob.com launched on december 21, 2004 as a persian-language social network operated by sabaidea. it arrived just after iran blocked orkut and absorbed much of that traffic, growing to around a million members. the platform spent its life negotiating with iranian state censorship and competing agai |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Twitter Fleets 📖 2020 - 2021 Fleets were Twitter's Stories clone. they appeared as circular avatars above the home timeline, vanished after 24 hours, and were meant to make casual posting less intimidating for users who never tweeted. instead they were used by the same accounts that already tweeted constantly. Twitter announced |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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.yell plus 📖 2015 - 2021 you bought points with real money, turned them into something called yell, and spent the yell pressing a button under a photograph an idol had taken of herself. she got a number out of it and no money. what you got was a position on the list of fans who had cheered hardest for her, printed on her pa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Nasza-Klasa 📖 2006 - 2021 nasza-klasa launched on november 11, 2006 from wrocław. four computer-science students at the university of wrocław built a "find your old classmates" social network specifically for the polish school system. by 2009 it had 13.5 million accounts in a country of around 38 million people, with over ha |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Mitkuschelzentrale 📖 2015 - 2021 leipzig, 2015. a man named sebastian nichele wallenstein started a platform for people who wanted to be held by somebody and had nobody to be held by, and wrote the sexual and romantic part out of it in the first line of the rules. it ran online and in local groups for six years, staffed by voluntee |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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GREE (PC) 📖 2004 - 2021 gree started in february 2004 as a small friends-of-friends social network built by yoshikazu tanaka on the side while he worked at rakuten. it was one of the two japanese sns that peaked before facebook reached japan, alongside mixi. gree pivoted into feature-phone social gaming and later into smar |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
MeriStation Zonaforo 📖 2000 - 2021 forty-five million posts went out with two days of warning. zonaforo had been meristation's forum since 2000, and the closing notice posted on 3 may 2021 gave its 628,594 registered members until 5 may. there was no read-only mode and no archive, because the operators said the forum could not be lef |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Maopu 📖 1997 - 2021 maopu, mop.com, started in october 1997 as a hunan-based game community run by a netizen with the handle "mop". it became a general forum at the end of 2004 and stayed there for the next decade and a half as one of the canonical chinese bbs sites. independent monthly users were measured at 28.6 mill |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Mop.com 📖 1997 - 2021 october 1997, changsha. a young man signing himself mop put up a board about game cheats, and within a decade it was the place chinese internet slang was manufactured. chen yizhou's group took it over in 2004 and later ran it alongside renren. in april 2007 it counted 28.7 million users and sat seco |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
MEETin.org 📖 2003 - 2021 a volunteer in washington started it as a yahoo group on 14 march 2003, and by the end it covered around ninety cities and ninety thousand members with no joining fee and no dues. hosting came out of donations and nothing else. the donations followed the activity down, and in march 2021 the people r |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Demi.fi 📖 1998 - 2021 a-lehdet announced on 2 february 2021 that it was closing demi, the finnish teen magazine it had published since 1998, and the forum at demi.fi went with it. you could not start a new thread after 8 february. the site closed on 29 march and the final printed issue came out on 8 april. for twenty-thr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Gapyear.com 📖 1998 - 2021 gapyear.com was a message board with an industry built around it. peter pedrick and tom griffiths put it online in july 1998 to answer the same questions over and over about where to go and how not to die there, and by the time flight centre bought it in 2010 it had two million users and a hundred t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Byte 📖 2020 - 2021 byte was vine, tried a second time, by one of the people who built vine. it launched in january 2020 to a huge first week and a wave of goodwill from everyone who missed the old six-second loops. the goodwill did not convert into a habit. a year later it was sold to a rival app called clash, the nam |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Galaxiki 📖 2007 - 2021 jos kirps, working out of luxembourg, built a fictional galaxy in 2007 and then gave the stars away. something over a million solar systems turning in real time, and any member could claim one and write science fiction about whoever lived there. it took web awards and held a decade's worth of hobby |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Smack Jeeves 📖 2005 - 2020 smack jeeves launched in may 2005 in chadds ford, pennsylvania as a free webcomic host built and run single-handedly by daniel liebner. it hosted more than 47000 comics over fifteen years, the second-tier peer of drunkduck and comicfury and keenspace. nhn global, the us branch of the korean entertai |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Voat 📖 2014 - 2020 voat launched in april 2014 as whoaverse, a hobby project by a swiss developer who thought reddit needed a freer alternative. it became known each time reddit banned a subreddit, since the displaced communities migrated there in waves: fatpeoplehate in 2015, the_donald-adjacent subs through 2017, qa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
CNET Forums 📖 1998 - 2020 red ventures bought cnet from viacomcbs for 484 million dollars and closed the deal on 30 october 2020. a month later the forums went read-only, and in early 2021 they came down. what was removed ran to more than 530,000 topics, most of them one person describing a computer that would not boot and a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Chirpstory 📖 2010 - 2020 toshiaki yoshida had a hit in japan and wanted one in english. chirpstory went live on 8 december 2010 as togetter's anglophone edition, three months after storify opened its beta to do the same job for americans. storify was bought twice and shut by adobe in 2018. chirpstory was still answering in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Fitlads 📖 2003 - 2020 grindr took the traffic in 2009 and this thing kept running for another eleven years anyway, which is roughly how long a british forum habit can outlive its reason. fitlads opened in april 2003 for gay and bisexual men in the uk and added video in 2008. the login page stopped being archived in febru |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Best Gore 📖 2008 - 2020 best gore was one of the post-rotten shock sites. mark marek ran it out of edmonton from april 2008. in june 2012 he posted the luka magnotta murder video, which set off the criminal case that ended with a plea deal in january 2016. the site kept going for another four years on shrinking ad revenue |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Facebook Notes 📖 2006 - 2020 facebook notes was the long-form text slot inside facebook. it shipped on august 22 2006 as a mini blogging platform with photo embeds, html-ish formatting, and the option to import an external rss feed into your facebook profile. its single biggest moment was february 2009, when the "25 random thin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Wanelo 📖 2012 - 2020 a san francisco social shopping app named after want-need-love. affiliate links, no ads, no acquisition, no dramatic exit. instagram and pinterest put a shop tab in their own app and the reason to open a separate feed quietly went away. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
The Fancy 📖 2009 - 2020 the fancy was a social shopping site where people collected pictures of objects they liked and could buy them without leaving the page. joseph einhorn built it in new york around 2009, and it drew a startup-famous crowd, with jack dorsey on the board and money from marc andreessen and others. in 201 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
NAVER Matome 📖 2009 - 2020 naver matome was japan's curation layer, a site where ordinary readers gathered links and pictures about a topic into one page and took a cut of the ad money based on how many people read it. it opened on 1 july 2009 and for most of the 2010s its pages sat at the top of japanese search results for a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Tencent Weibo 📖 2010 - 2020 tencent weibo launched april 2010 as tencent's microblogging answer to sina weibo, plugged directly into the qq messenger account base. by the second quarter of 2012 it claimed 469 million registered accounts on paper, the largest registered userbase of any chinese microblog at the time. that number |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Krovatka.Ru 📖 1997 - 2020 кроватка began as a chat artyom podstreshny wrote in 1996 and went up under its own name on 29 september 1997, on servers borrowed from radio moscow state university. for years after that it was the biggest chat in the russian-speaking internet, twenty-five rooms deep, with a profanity filter and mo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Yandex.Aura 📖 2019 - 2020 german tsarev, who had run big data ad products inside yandex, built the company a social network that introduced strangers by machine and then would not let them be unpleasant to each other. aura opened in march 2019 on phones only, was spun out into its own company that december, and got from 50,0 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Trover 📖 2011 - 2020 trover was a travel-photo discovery app launched in 2011 by rich barton and jason karas out of seattle. the pitch was a map full of geo-tagged photos from other travelers, used to find what to do at a destination before you got there. expedia bought trover in june 2016. on 1 july 2020 expedia announ |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Soup.io 📖 2007 - 2020 soup.io launched in april 2007 from vienna as a tumblelog where one stream pulled in your posts plus everything you reblogged. it had a moment in the german, austrian and dutch scenes between 2009 and 2014 with a black-and-pink aesthetic that ran parallel to tumblr's american one. founder christophe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
UrbanBaby 📖 1999 - 2020 a married couple in new york started it in august 1999 as a guide for city parents, and the message boards took the site over. every post was unsigned, so the same thread could hold a genuine medical answer and a stranger telling you your stroller was a mistake. cnet bought it in july 2006 and it sp |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
mozdev.org 📖 2000 - 2020 free project hosting for anyone building on top of mozilla, started in september 2000 by two people who thought the browser should be a platform and noticed nobody was running the infrastructure for that. cvs, bugzilla accounts and a subdomain, on the condition that your license was osi approved. it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
r/The_Donald 📖 2015 - 2020 a reddit forum created on 27 june 2015, eleven days after donald trump announced his campaign, which grew past 790,000 subscribers and spent five years in an argument with the platform hosting it. the moderators pinned the entire visible page and the votes carried it onto r/all, so reddit rewrote ho |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
TikTok India 📖 2017 - 2020 india was tiktok's largest market outside china, around two hundred million users, and a lot of them were the first people in their family to be on the internet at all. on 29 june 2020 the ministry of electronics and it blocked tiktok along with fifty-eight other chinese apps, citing national securi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Virb 📖 2007 - 2020 one of the would-be myspace successors of 2007 that never built a user base, pivoted into a paid website builder under media temple, got carried along when godaddy bought the parent company, and finally got switched off in the middle of june 2020 without an email, an export window, or a warning. the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Heroes Wiki 📖 2006 - 2020 nbc did something in 2008 that television networks almost never did. instead of building its own wiki or sending lawyers, it funded the fan one and pointed viewers at it. heroes wiki had opened two years earlier, two weeks after the pilot aired, and by mid-2010 it carried more than 5,500 articles ag |
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|2018-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Google Neighbourly 📖 2018 - 2020 neighbourly let people in indian cities ask the folks nearby the small questions maps could not answer, like which chemist stays open past midnight. google ran it from 2018 as part of the next billion users program and got over a million answers out of it. it never grew the way google wanted, so in |
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| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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WoWWiki 📖 2004 - 2020 it started the day after world of warcraft shipped and grew into the biggest thing wikia hosted, four to five million readers a month. then wikia changed the page template, the tooltips broke, and the entire volunteer staff copied the database to a competitor and left. wowwiki kept getting traffic f |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Idka 📖 2016 - 2020 twenty million kronor and about ten swedish investors paid for a social network that sold privacy instead of advertising, and on 21 april 2020 the board told members to download their files because the service could stop at any time. göran wågström and bjørn stormorken had been building it quietly s |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Daum T!P 📖 2014 - 2020 naver's knowledge-iN won, and the side that lost had spent years paying cash to try to catch up. daum ran a question and answer service that handed its most active answerers a monthly scholarship, one million won at the top tier, funded out of the advertising the answers themselves earned. the schol |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Chappy 📖 2017 - 2020 ollie locke launched chappy in 2017 with jack rogers as a gay dating app positioned against grindr's hookup default. bumble backed it from the start and folded it into the main bumble app in early 2020. matches went away on 17 february and the account data was deleted on 28 february. |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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VampireFreaks 📖 1999 - 2020 vampirefreaks was the goth and industrial subculture's online home for two decades. jet berelson started it in 1999 out of new york as a message board, then grew it into a full social network with profiles, user groups called "cults," event listings, music interviews and a clothing line. the social- |
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|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Huggle 📖 2015 - 2020 valerie stark moved from moscow to london and used instagram's location tags to find people who went where she went, which turned into an app she and stina sanders built in six months. huggle matched you on shared check-ins instead of photographs, logged more than forty-five million places in its fi |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Zing Me 📖 2009 - 2020 zing me was the vietnamese social network vng built and launched in august 2009 off the back of its zing music and zing news portal traffic. on 23 september 2009 it recorded 945 thousand active users against facebook's 918 thousand and led the vietnamese market by a thin margin. it held the lead unt |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Grou.ps 📖 2005 - 2020 the biggest name to come out of the turkish web 2.0 scene, a build-your-own social network you could point at any community you wanted. it peaked in 2008 at eight million people a month, then turned itself into a paid product to survive the recession and traded its growth for a balance sheet. it hun |
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| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Zorpia 📖 2003 - 2020 hong kong social network from december 2003 that claimed 26 million accounts and built a large share of them out of address books belonging to people who had never signed up. its real market was india, not china and not the west. by early 2020 it had been folded into twoo and zorpia.com simply redir |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Yookos 📖 2011 - 2020 dormant yookos was the christ embassy social network. it started inside the church in 2011 and opened to the public soon after. nigeria was the traffic core with zimbabwe, south africa, the uk, and the us in the long tail. the social-network function faded over the late 2010s and the domain runs today as a |
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| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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The Witches' Voice 📖 1997 - 2019 witchvox was a directory before it was anything else. two people in florida built a place where a pagan in a small town could post a listing and be found by somebody within driving distance, which in 1997 was a problem the phone book did not solve and nobody else was solving either. it carried aroun |
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| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Craftster 📖 2003 - 2019 leah kramer wrote craftster herself in 2003 because the craft web she could find was aimed at a different kind of crafter than the one she was. it became the place where a generation of diy people learned to post the method rather than the result, failures included, and it went past 190,000 members |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Ameba Pigg 📖 2009 - 2019 ameba pigg was japan's biggest virtual community that nobody outside japan knew about. it ran on flash. ten million people made an avatar there and furnished a virtual room in pastel rgb. when adobe announced the end of flash, cyberagent put the pc version on a december 2019 sunset clock. the smartp |
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|2008-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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drawr 📖 2008 - 2019 flash is what killed this one, and the closure notice says so directly. drawr ran from october 2008 to 13:00 on 2 december 2019, eleven years of a browser drawing tool where what you posted was not only a picture but a recording of the strokes that made it. adobe's announced end of flash player mean |
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| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
freeml 📖 1997 - 2019 japan kept running mailing lists for twenty years after everywhere else moved to forums and then to feeds, and freeml was where most of them lived. gmo media ran it from 1997, free, with a photo album and a schedule tool bolted onto each list, and at its 2006 high it claimed 3.05 million registered |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Moikrug 📖 2005 - 2019 moikrug, "my circle", was russia's professional network, a place to map your work contacts by degrees the way linkedin did, connections of connections. it went live on 18 november 2005 and yandex bought it in march 2007, running it as its own corner of the russian social web. ownership passed to the |
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| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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OUTeverywhere 📖 1995 - 2019 twenty four years is a long run for any website and an absurd one for a social network. outeverywhere started in 1995 as outintheuk, took the wider name in may 2005, and spent most of its life doing something the apps that replaced it never tried: getting people into the same room on purpose, for bo |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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NHK Net Club (NHKネットクラブ) 📖 2009 - 2019 buy a bs capable television in japan and nhk puts a message across the screen until you tell the broadcaster you own one. clearing that message online was one of the things nhk net club did for you, and the ballot for studio audience tickets was another. it opened on 27 october 2009 out of two older |
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| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Weatherzone Forums 📖 2001 - 2019 on 3 july 2019 a weatherzone staffer named todd baker posted that the forum would close, thanked the moderators, and gave two dates: read-only on 29 july, gone on 1 november. eighteen years of australian weather argument came to 1,529,248 posts across 24,194 threads, and the site that ran it is stil |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Nat Geo Your Shot 📖 2013 - 2019 disney inherited national geographic in the fox deal and decided a photo community with its own website was redundant next to an instagram account. your shot had started in 2006 as a reader-submission slot in the magazine, came back in may 2013 as a real community with member profiles and editor-run |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Facebook Spaces 📖 2017 - 2019 facebook spaces was facebook's first social-vr product. it launched in beta at f8 on april 18 2017 for the oculus rift and htc vive. you built an avatar from one of your facebook photos and hung out with up to three friends in a virtual room. facebook killed it on october 25 2019 to clear the runway |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Oculus Rooms 📖 2016 - 2019 oculus rooms was a free social-vr hangout that let four people sit together in a virtual apartment. it shipped on gear vr in december 2016, expanded to rift in 2017, and became the flagship app on the oculus go when that headset launched in may 2018. facebook killed it on october 25 2019 to clear th |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Pottermore 📖 2011 - 2019 a million accounts got in early through the magical quill challenge in august 2011, and the site that opened to everyone the following april was the only place that could tell you your house and your wand. the interactive half was switched off on 22 september 2015 and replaced with articles. the nam |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Kwick! 📖 1999 - 2019 a south-german social network for teenagers. launched 1 december 1999 in stuttgart, ran for two decades, peaked around 1.5 million registered accounts. the operators announced a shutdown at the end of august 2019 and walked it back the same evening, then transferred ownership offshore in september a |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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PHOLAR (폴라) 📖 2015 - 2019 naver opened this one twice: a closed beta in february 2015, then a public android beta on 25 march. the pitch was that you subscribed to a hashtag rather than to a human being, and five posts under the same tag would assemble themselves into an album nobody had to curate. by the 2.0 release eleven |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Qingwen 📖 2015 - 2019 zhu zhouyi ran acfun, china's first danmaku video site, then left in 2015 with some of the old staff to build a place where people wrote light novels. three funding rounds in three years, the last of them led by iqiyi in april 2018, and on 23 september 2019 the site announced that the money had run |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Kiwibox 📖 1999 - 2019 three carnegie mellon graduates built a site in 1999 so that american teenagers would have somewhere to write, and it was still running twenty years later. along the way it got absorbed into a shell company trading on the bulletin board under its own ticker and spent a decade buying small european c |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Jeremy Renner Official 📖 2017 - 2019 jeremy renner official was one of a long production line of single-celebrity apps built by a company called escapex, which ran the same software under a different famous name each time. fans posted, and bought a currency called stars that was supposed to improve their odds of being noticed by him. u |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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GPSies.com 📖 2006 - 2019 alltrails announced on 30 july 2019 that it had bought gpsies, and inside three weeks the german site was gone and its members were logging in somewhere else. what got sold was one man's side project. klaus bechtold started it in august 2006 so that people could upload a gps track and get it back as |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Minpos (みんぽす) 📖 2007 - 2019 the gadget always had to go back. that was the arrangement at みんぽす, where willvii lent new cameras and laptops to bloggers it had interviewed in person, for anything from one month to six, with a review due inside thirty days and the loan disclosed inside the review. nobody was paid a yen. the servi |
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|2004-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Dogster & Catster 📖 2004 - 2019 dogster launched in january 2004 as a social network for dogs, or really for the people who wanted a profile page for them. ted rheingold built it in san francisco and added catster months later for the cats. at its height they held millions of pet profiles and busy forums. the brands changed hands |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Paye ta shnek 📖 2012 - 2019 dormant anaïs bourdet was a graphic designer in marseille who opened a tumblr in 2012 and started posting, word for word and with nothing added, what men said to women in the street. more than fifteen thousand accounts came in over seven years, and a whole family of french sites copied the format for hospit |
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| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Facepunch Forums 📖 2004 - 2019 garry newman started a forum in 2004, around the time he started the mod that made his name, and he spent the last year of its life saying out loud that he was not sure small forums were needed anymore. an azure outage in october 2018 took the database down and revealed that nobody had been taking b |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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MyLifeIsAverage 📖 2009 - 2019 two million stories went into mylifeisaverage and not one of them was about anything. that was the entire specification. guru khalsa and enrico mills were undergraduates at ucla when they built it in may 2009 as the calm reply to fmylife, and for about three years it was one of the sites a bored tee |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Hater 📖 2017 - 2019 brendan alper left goldman sachs to write comedy and hater started as one of the bits. the app showed you a card with something on it, you swiped in one of four directions to place it between love and hate, and it matched you with people whose dislikes lined up with yours. it launched for valentine' |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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PaigeeWorld 📖 2012 - 2019 $3,500 a month was the number it could not reach. a million registered users, twenty million drawings, 150,000 people still logging in monthly, and a goodbye page that names the shortfall to the dollar: three and a half thousand to keep the lights on, fifteen thousand to actually improve anything, n |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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MiGente.com 📖 2000 - 2019 migente sat in the community connect portfolio next to blackplanet and asianavenue, three ethnically-focused social networks built before the facebook era flattened the niche-sn category. radio one bought the whole bundle in 2008. the brand kept running for another decade and then folded into blackp |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Brigade 📖 2014 - 2019 san francisco spent five years and about nine million dollars of sean parker's money on an app for arguing about politics with strangers who could be matched against a voter registration file. brigade swallowed causes, which had once claimed two hundred million facebook users, and never got further |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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99.se 📖 2002 - 2019 three editors ran scandinavia's oldest apple forum, and in the spring of 2019 the parent company looked at the numbers and decided it had never once paid for itself. 99.se closed on the first of may with 150,000 threads and 1.44 million posts behind it, the oldest from april 2002. the farewell admit |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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friends.nico 📖 2017 - 2019 japan had three large mastodon servers by the end of april 2017 and dwango's was the last of them to open, on the 19th. it peaked at 66,405 accounts and then lost roughly twenty thousand of them inside a single month, dying with 48,238 users and 24.3 million posts on it. the other two were sold on a |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Sola 📖 2014 - 2019 the app had three names in five years and the first one was the good one. launched in november 2014 as plague, where a post you made spread to the four nearest phones running it and every upvote sent it to four more, it was renamed plag in march 2015 after the makers of plague inc. objected, then re |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Google+ 📖 2011 - 2019 Google's serious attempt at a Facebook competitor. circles were the new feature. hangouts was bundled in. it had 500 million accounts on paper, and almost nobody used any of them. a security incident in 2018 gave Google the cover story to shut it down. it ended in april 2019. |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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PlayDota 📖 2009 - 2019 a server error that nobody came back to fix. playdota opened in may 2009 when icefrog moved the official dota community off a domain that had ended up with riot games, and on 24 december 2011 it had 35,352 people online at once. volunteers rebuilt the forum in october 2016. from 29 april 2019 it ans |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Hatena Haiku 📖 2007 - 2019 microblogging had a fork in it around 2007 and almost nobody remembers there was a choice. twitter said a post belongs to a person and you follow people. hatena haiku said a post belongs to a subject and you follow keywords, which meant a running joke could outlive everybody who started it. eleven y |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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dailymile 📖 2008 - 2019 the homepage is still up, and it still says the same four lines: dailymile has shutdown, thanks to all who were a part of our global community of athletes, 2008 to 2019, and an email address. underneath the numbers it was a training log with a comment thread attached, and the comment thread was what |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Pararea 📖 2017 - 2019 the parent company was called metaverse four years before facebook changed its name. 超元域 (beijing) technology built pararea, a free social vr platform that shipped on steam in september 2017 and stopped getting patches eight months later. in march 2019 alibaba cloud replaced the website with a compl |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Facebook Moments 📖 2015 - 2019 facebook moments was the standalone photo app facebook shipped on june 15 2015. it ran facial recognition on your camera roll, grouped photos by which facebook friend was in them, then nudged you to send the grouped pile to that friend. it was a private-photo distribution channel meant to live outsi |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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RockYou 📖 2005 - 2019 rockyou made the widgets that covered myspace and then facebook, super wall and glitter text among them, and for a while in 2007 it was the biggest application developer on facebook's brand new platform. in december 2009 somebody came in through a sql injection flaw that was already ten years old an |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
BharatStudent 📖 2007 - 2019 a company in hyderabad called northgate technologies built a social network for indian students in 2007 and it worked for a while: bharatstudent was routinely described as the third biggest in the country. it had study sections and forums and an audience that reached into the diaspora. then facebook |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Google+ Comments on Blogger 📖 2013 - 2019 switching your blogspot comments to google+ in 2013 looked like a free upgrade. five days of notice in january 2019 ended it, the widget came out of blogger pages from 4 february, and the comment threads inside it stopped being part of the blog that published them. the data stayed reachable at a bar |
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| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Japan Bulletin Board 📖 1998 - 2019 twenty years of japanese web argument ended on a monday in january 2019, and the only part kept alive was the part about money. yahoo! japan opened the board in july 1998 in tree format, with a yahoo! japan id required before you could post anything. that id requirement is the reason it was never 2c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Daum Agora 📖 2004 - 2019 in the summer of 2008 the candlelight crowds in seoul carried a flag naming agora as the holy ground of debate. that was a discussion board on the daum portal, opened in december 2004 and named after the square where athenians did their politics in public. across fifteen years about ten million peop |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
UOL Forums 📖 2001 - 2019 the notice went up at the end of october 2018 and carried two dates. on 3 december the boards went read-only, and on 7 january 2019 around 18:00 utc the dns records changed and they stopped resolving. uol's explanation was a long and gradual loss of users on a product that had been very successful i |
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| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Comic Genesis (Keenspace) 📖 2000 - 2019 comic genesis was the free webcomic hosting platform keenspot launched in june 2000 as keenspace. it ran as the open-hosting layer under the invite-only keenspot premium network, taking any comic that wanted a server and a sub-archive. it was renamed comic genesis around 2005 to drop the keenspot as |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Tea Party Community 📖 2013 - 2019 ken crow founded tea party community in november 2012 with the selaty father-son team. the public site launched on february 2, 2013 as a facebook-styled platform for the tea party movement, marketed to conservatives who believed facebook was censoring their content. the site got hit by a denial of s |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Tout 📖 2010 - 2019 michael downing launched tout in april 2010 around two patents he had developed at sri international. the pitch was a video-only twitter where every post had to be 15 seconds or less. tout's biggest cultural moment was shaquille o'neal announcing his nba retirement on the platform in june 2011, and |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Digital Universe 📖 2006 - 2019 december 2005 was when the press release went out, and the phrase in it was the pbs of the web. joe firmage had made a fortune at usweb and lost the job over a story about an alien encounter, and he spent some of the money on an encyclopedia that would do what wikipedia would not: real names on ever |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Dialogus 📖 1999 - 2019 in 1999 sinclair dumontais and paul laurendeau put up a french-language site where you could write a letter to somebody who could not receive one: a dead writer, or a character out of fiction. unpaid volunteers across five francophone countries answered in character, speaking from a fixed moment in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Hi5 📖 2003 - 2018 the social network that was massive in turkey from 2005 to 2009. before Facebook localized to turkish and took the audience, Hi5 was where every turkish high school and university student kept their profile. profile songs auto-played. friend rankings were a real thing. it pivoted to gaming in 2010 a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Kaixin001 📖 2008 - 2018 kaixin001.com launched march 2008 in beijing, targeting the chinese urban white-collar 20-something demographic that renren did not own. it ran on social games like friends for sale and parking wars integrated with the feed. peak claimed user count crossed 80 million in 2009-2010. tencent invested i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Tilllate 📖 2000 - 2018 tamedia announced on 1 november 2018 that the name tilllate would disappear completely, and at the end of that year it did. for eighteen years the swiss site had been sending its own photographers into nightclubs and posting the results overnight, which is how a generation found out what it had look |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Topix 📖 2002 - 2018 topix was the comment section for every american small town. rich skrenta and his open-directory-project veterans launched it in 2002 as a news aggregator and pivoted it into a local-forum machine when the comments outgrew the articles. the platform turned off its forums on december 20, 2018. publis |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Ampergram 📖 2013 - 2018 ampergram turned instagram's hashtag firehose into a typographer's parts bin. you tagged a photo of a letter you found in the world with #ampergram and the actual letter (#a, #b), the app indexed it, and the next person who typed that letter saw your photo land into their composition. type a word, g |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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inthemix 📖 1999 - 2018 two people in sydney started putting up photographs from club nights in 1999 and the forum that grew around the photographs became the place australian dance music organized itself. promoters posted lineups there and djs argued about gear there, and the site kept event listings for six capital citie |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Gurl.com 📖 1996 - 2018 three graduate students at nyu built it in 1996 as a thesis project and it turned into the place american teenage girls went to read the things print magazines would not print. by 2001 roughly four in ten american girls who used the internet had been on it. it then spent seventeen years being sold f |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Path 📖 2010 - 2018 the social network with a 50-friend cap. founded by an early facebook employee. the pitch was that big networks are exhausting and small networks are real. the cap was raised to 150 in 2011, then to 500. each raise reduced the original premise. sold to daum kakao in 2015. shut down for good in 2018. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Space Soldiers 📖 2014 - 2018 five players published a statement on 13 october 2018 saying their long term plans no longer matched the organization's, and by the end of that day there was no organization. space soldiers was founded in istanbul in 2014 by bünyamin aydın, and its counter-strike team became the best squad turkey ha |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Curators of Sweden 📖 2011 - 2018 in december 2011 the swedish institute and visitsweden handed the @sweden account to an ordinary person for a week, then to another one the week after, and kept doing it for nearly seven years. it took a cannes lions grand prix in 2012 and it produced exactly the mess an open account produces, inclu |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Thunderclap 📖 2012 - 2018 thunderclap sold a single trick. you lent it your twitter or facebook account, it collected pledges until a campaign hit its target, and at the appointed minute the same message went out from every account at once. the white house used it and so did the united nations. twitter cut its api access six |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Spolužáci.cz 📖 1999 - 2018 a school-only social network that existed for 19 years on a single premise: find the people you sat next to in primary school. czech-speakers used it as a parallel-track address book through the facebook era. when GDPR landed in 2018, seznam.cz did the math on a full ground-up rewrite for a shrinkin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
MixBit 📖 2013 - 2018 the two people who built youtube tried to build it again, smaller and stranger, and this time almost nobody showed up. mixbit was a good idea about remixing video that arrived in the same summer everyone was already busy with vine and instagram. it lasted five years mostly by going quiet and turning |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Mobage West 📖 2011 - 2018 mobage west was DeNA's attempt to take its japanese mobile-social gaming playbook to iphone and android in the west. the platform ran on the plus+ network that dena had bought when it acquired ngmoco in october 2010 for four hundred million dollars. the mobage west brand launched in 2011, never work |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Musical.ly 📖 2014 - 2018 musical.ly launched in shanghai in 2014 as a fifteen-second lip-sync video app aimed at us teenagers. it hit two hundred million registered users by may 2017 on the back of organic growth in the american middle-school audience. bytedance acquired the company for around one billion dollars in novembe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Chit Chat City 📖 2010 - 2018 a sole proprietorship on rue saint-hubert in montreal ran a 3d city for eight years, where you drew your own avatar instead of picking one off a rack. it reached fifty thousand accounts by 2012 and lasted long enough to get ported to phones. the developer closed it on 1 august 2018, citing income th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
tbh 📖 2017 - 2018 tbh was an iphone-only compliments app that asked you to pick which of four schoolmates was kindest, smartest, prettiest. it shipped in georgia in august 2017, hit number one in the us app store within weeks, and got bought by facebook in october 2017 for an estimated 100 million dollars. nine month |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Peperonity 📖 2002 - 2018 peperonity was one of the first and largest places you could build your own mobile page from the phone itself, no computer needed. it ran out of berlin, a company called peperoni mobile and internet software gmbh, and its real audience was never germany. the crowd was in india and indonesia and the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
戒赌吧 (Jiedu Ba) 📖 2010 - 2018 fourteen million people followed a baidu forum whose stated purpose was helping each other stop gambling, and ninety million posts in, xinhua published an investigation on 28 june 2018 saying the place was doing the reverse. baidu closed it the next day for putting out bad values and harmful content |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Favstar 📖 2009 - 2018 favstar took twitter's favorite counter and turned it into a scoreboard. it launched in july 2009 and became the home page of english-language joke twitter, the place you checked to see which of your tweets had landed and where thirty dollars for six months of pro bought you the right to give somebo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Facebook Trending Topics 📖 2014 - 2018 facebook trending topics was the right-rail headline list that lived on the facebook web home page from january 2014 to june 1 of 2018. the feature was geofenced to five english-speaking markets, ran into a 2016 bias controversy that pushed facebook off human editors and onto pure algorithm, then qu |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Flipnote Hatena 📖 2008 - 2018 the nintendo DSi animation app. you drew flipbook-style animations on the touchscreen, frame by frame, then uploaded them to the flipnote hatena network. kids made millions of them. the service ran on japanese hatena servers. nintendo retired it in 2013, hatena ran a paid version a few more years, t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Mercari Atte 📖 2016 - 2018 souzoh, the subsidiary mercari used for new ideas, put out atte on 17 march 2016: a free app that showed you only what was happening within a short walk, so the sofa too expensive to post could be handed over in person and the thing you wanted to give away could go to a neighbor. it needed no addres |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Klout 📖 2008 - 2018 the influence score that turned every twitter and facebook account into a number between 1 and 100. joe fernandez and binh tran launched klout in late 2008 and rode it to lithium technologies' $200 million acquisition in march 2014. the score got cited in marketing pitch decks and dating profiles, p |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Foodspotting 📖 2009 - 2018 foodspotting launched in late 2009 in san francisco, founded by alexa andrzejewski, soraya darabi, and ted grubb as a dish-level discovery app where users posted photos of specific menu items rather than restaurants. opentable acquired the company for around 10 million in january 2013. after a stagn |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Gulli.com 📖 1998 - 2018 gulli started in 1998 as a german scene site and turned into the country's main news portal for file sharing and computer security, with a forum that passed a million registered accounts. randolf jorberg sold it in 2008, the games company gamigo ended up owning it by 2013, and on the morning the gdp |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Miitomo 📖 2016 - 2018 miitomo was nintendo's first real smartphone app, built with dena, launched in japan on march 17 2016 and worldwide two weeks later. it used mii avatars to run a question-and-answer social loop where your cartoon self relayed your answers to your friends' cartoons. it hit ten million users inside a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
InvisionFree 📖 2002 - 2018 invisionfree spent over fifteen years handing anyone a free message board with a few clicks. it ran on invision power's forum software and hosted more than six hundred thousand of them, fan sites and private hobby corners dating back to 2002. its owner opened zetaboards in 2011 and pushed people to |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
WikiAnswers 📖 2002 - 2018 it started as faq farm in 2002 and ran on one argument: a question should have a single answer that everybody edits, not fifty answers that everybody votes on. answers.com bought it in 2006 and rode it to thirteenth most visited site in america. the questions turned out to be homework and the editor |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Vine Camera 📖 2017 - 2018 vine camera was the bone twitter threw at vine users after killing the social side of vine on january 17, 2017. the app that the original vine icon updated into was a camera and nothing else. you could record a 6.5 second loop and either save it to your camera roll or post it to twitter. the comment |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
TravBuddy 📖 2005 - 2018 travbuddy was a social network for travelers, built by two brothers in 2005. you found someone heading where you were heading, and you kept a blog of your trips with photos and hostel reviews piling up behind you. by 2013 it had nearly 470,000 members and millions of photos. it died the dull way mos |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Neihan Duanzi 📖 2012 - 2018 neihan duanzi was a chinese joke and short video app, launched in march 2012 as one of bytedance's first products. its users called themselves duanyou, put stickers on their cars and greeted each other with a horn pattern in traffic, which is a rare thing for an app to produce. on 10 april 2018 chin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Polyvore 📖 2007 - 2018 polyvore was the place a generation of women learned to think in mood boards before instagram and pinterest were the only places left. you clipped a dress off any open-web retail page, you arranged it on a virtual canvas with a pair of shoes from someone else's clip, you posted the set, and stranger |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Flipagram 📖 2013 - 2018 flipagram turned a set of photos into a short video set to music, and it hit number one in the us app store within a week of its november 2013 relaunch. bytedance bought it in february 2017 for the music-synced short-video mechanic and the cleared audio rights. by april 2018 the app had been rebrand |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
StreetLend 📖 2013 - 2018 a ladder gets used twice a decade and costs real money, and that is the entire argument for borrowing one. chris beach built streetlend in 2013 as a london side project, free on both sides, paid for by his day job and a small cut of amazon referrals. it closed in april 2018, weeks before gdpr came i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Hyde Park (hydepark.co.il) 📖 2000 - 2018 a london park gave it the name and the argument: anyone can stand up, anyone gets to talk. two israelis in their twenties put that on the web in may 2000 and it grew into the third largest forum destination in the country, behind tapuz and nana, reaching around fourteen percent of israeli internet u |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Ciao 📖 1999 - 2018 ciao launched out of munich in november 1999 and grew into the shopping review network of western europe, seven country sites where members wrote about the things they owned and got paid a few cents every time somebody read it. greenfield online bought the company in 2005 and microsoft bought greenf |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
dooyoo 📖 1999 - 2018 dooyoo went online out of berlin in december 1999 and paid people, in points, to write about the things they already owned. at its height it ran in six countries with around 850,000 members and two million reviews covering a million and a half products, having burned more than thirty million euros o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
LINE Q 📖 2013 - 2018 the points you earned for a good answer on line q converted into money, and from june 2014 the money reached you inside a month instead of six weeks. line opened the service on 5 december 2013 and the answers came in fast: a million in the first month, fifty million by the end of september 2014. the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Peeple 📖 2015 - 2018 peeple was pitched in 2015 as a yelp for human beings, a place to leave star reviews on people whether they consented or not. the internet reacted the way you would expect, with petitions and threats, and the founders spent months walking it back. by the time it actually launched in march 2016 it wa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Biip.no 📖 2005 - 2018 biip was norway's biggest online hangout for teenagers, a community that at its height signed up more than four hundred and fifty thousand of them, close to a tenth of the entire country. its real trick was free text messages, you logged in to send sms to your friends for nothing, and the socializin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Catahya 📖 2002 - 2018 a stockholm association affiliated with sverok ran the largest fantasy site on the swedish internet for most of the 2000s, then kept running it for another decade after the traffic had gone. the website came first, in 2002, and the formal association followed in 2003, which is a very swedish order o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Hevre (חבר'ה) 📖 2001 - 2018 1.2 million registered users in a country of seven million, found by asking people one question: which year did you finish school, and which unit were you in. two israeli founders copied classmates.com in 2001 and beat facebook into the country by five years. global networks paid fifteen million she |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
LinkExpats 📖 2007 - 2018 four thousand members in february 2011, eight hundred of them in the united arab emirates, which is why an abu dhabi newspaper ended up writing about a site run out of virginia. rali kettani built linkexpats in october 2007 so that people who had moved somewhere could find other people who had moved |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
HowAboutWe 📖 2010 - 2017 howaboutwe tried to make online dating less about the profile and more about the date itself. you would post a sentence beginning with how about we, and people would respond to the idea rather than to your bio. iac bought it in 2014, broke it apart over the next three years, and quietly folded the r |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Naymz 📖 2006 - 2017 naymz built a public credibility score it called repscore and asked the english-speaking internet to care. about 1.8 million people did. burak, twenty-two and finishing university in 2006 with no professional life to manage yet, was not in the bracket that signed up for a competitor to linkedin to l |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Queer Lala Times 📖 2013 - 2017 queer lala times was a chinese-language queer magazine published by the chinese lala alliance from 2013, and it never had a website: it lived on douban and wechat inside the mainland and on facebook for readers outside it. two volumes came out, in 2014 and 2015, written by contributors in the mainla |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Uclue 📖 2007 - 2017 google answers stopped taking new questions on 30 november 2006 and put a few hundred paid researchers out of work overnight. roger browne, one of them, had a replacement in beta three months later. uclue worked the same way: you named a price between ten and four hundred dollars. a researcher claim |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
CompuServe Forums 📖 1981 - 2017 thirty-six years is a long run for anything with a login on it. the forums opened in 1981 as special interest groups, eight of them, and grew into thousands of moderated rooms run by volunteer sysops who were paid out of the traffic they attracted. the service that carried them was bought by aol in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Facebook Ticker 📖 2011 - 2017 facebook switched the ticker on for everyone on 20 september 2011, a strip down the right side of the page that showed friends' activity as it happened instead of as an algorithm ranked it. people called it the creeper feed almost immediately, because a like on a stranger's photo at 2am is not somet |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Miiverse 📖 2012 - 2017 miiverse was a social network where the main form of expression was a doodle drawn on a wii u gamepad. it had heavy moderation and a per-game community structure that produced a culture of absurd drawings, which then got screenshotted and reposted everywhere else on the internet. it died with the wi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Ameba Now 📖 2009 - 2017 ameba now was cyberagent's twitter clone for japan, built around the celebrity accounts that already lived on the ameba blog side. it launched in december 2009 with 140-character posts plus image support on top of a follow graph. the mobile version went live on 8 december, the pc version two days la |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Anarchopedia 📖 2004 - 2017 dormant a serbian anarchist named miloš rančić started anarchopedia on 30 september 2004 as a wiki that refused the neutral point of view on purpose. it ran in a dozen languages off one machine and became a shelter for articles wikipedia had deleted. real editing dried up around february 2016 and the last e |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
FatWallet 📖 1999 - 2017 a deals forum with a rebate engine bolted on, where american bargain hunters posted every price mistake and coupon code they could find. it was sold up a chain of owners until it landed inside rakuten, and rakuten had ebates for the same job. on a monday afternoon in 2017 the site went dark and star |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Affinity Labs 📖 2006 - 2017 christopher michel sold military.com to monster in 2004 for forty million dollars, then started a company in 2006 to do the same trick about twenty more times. affinity labs ran separate social networks for cops and nurses and a dozen other trades, passed a million registered members, and monster bo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Snapster 📖 2015 - 2017 in the summer of 2015 vkontakte started blocking instagram links inside its own network, to push people toward a photo app it had shipped in july. the app was snapster. two years later the team called it a bold experiment, opened an export page and switched the social half off. by then the people st |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Friends Note 📖 2011 - 2017 one thousand contacts was the ceiling, and inside that book kddi ran a feed. friends note pulled your contacts' posts from other networks into the address book itself, and kept a per-person history of your phone calls alongside the messages those people had sent you elsewhere. it also pushed your ne |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Whedonesque 📖 2002 - 2017 a link blog about the work of joss whedon, started in 2002 by two people in the netherlands, which grew into the place his announcements landed first. whedon posted there himself from 2005 and entertainment weekly put it on a list of the hundred best sites on the web. on 21 august 2017, one day afte |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Tinder Social 📖 2016 - 2017 tinder social let you create a group with up to three of your facebook friends and swipe on other groups to plan a real-world hangout. it launched in the us, uk, canada, australia, and india on july 21, 2016 after a soft australian test that exposed every closeted facebook-friend tinder user to thei |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Pengyou 📖 2008 - 2017 pengyou was tencent's facebook-shaped attempt to compete with renren in the chinese real-name social-network market. it launched in august 2008 as qq xiaoyou (qq alumni), got renamed pengyou in mid-2010, and reached 248 million monthly active users in the second quarter of 2012. the same quarter qzo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Facebook Lifestage 📖 2016 - 2017 lifestage was facebook's video app aimed only at high school students, built by a teenager it employed. michael sayman was nineteen and already a product manager when he made it, and the app replaced the old text profile with short videos, so your happy face and the way you danced became clips inste |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Bilddagboken 📖 2004 - 2017 bilddagboken was the swedish photo-diary community founded in may 2004 by sebastian björkelid and joakim grönvall in gothenburg. it grew into the first big picture-first virtual community in sweden and hit more than 100,000 simultaneously logged-in users on 12 october 2008. wyatt media group took a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Gay.com 📖 1994 - 2017 gay.com was a chat and personals site that for about a decade was the default place gay men in america met each other online. mark elderkin registered the domain in 1994 and put a java chat room behind it in 1996, back when a room with a door was most of what the product needed to be. planetout boug |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
StockPickr 📖 2006 - 2017 james altucher wrote it for himself, to generate trade ideas out of what the best hedge funds were holding, and opened it up to everybody else in september 2006 on the grounds that the more the merrier. thestreet took half the company that january and the other half on 25 april 2007, for 1.5 million |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
ENSOKU 📖 2014 - 2017 eleven languages, run out of one japanese office by a company with one product. that is the whole reason this site is remembered at all. shiftone opened ensoku in july 2014 to sell japanese pop culture to everybody at once and found out that its readers were in south america. the site closed on 30 j |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
DMMブログ 📖 2005 - 2017 nobody could sign up. for twelve years dmm ran a blog service whose writers were cast rather than registered, av performers plus the women working its pay-by-the-minute chat rooms, and everybody else got a reader's seat and a comment box underneath. the closing notice went up on the age gate, direct |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Sidewire 📖 2015 - 2017 the founders wrote that they did not see enough usage to justify continuing to support the site, which is a blunter thing to publish than most companies manage. sidewire had credentialed close to a thousand experts and got senators to post on it through the 2016 election, on $4.85 million of seed mo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Imzy 📖 2016 - 2017 imzy was a community platform launched in april 2016 by dan mccomas, who had been reddit's product chief until july 2015. the pitch was a kinder alternative to reddit with no advertising, community-specific usernames, posting limited to existing subscribers in each group, and a user-to-user tipping |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Phhhoto 📖 2014 - 2017 phhhoto was a brooklyn app that let you hold the shutter and get a five-frame loop, a little back-and-forth animation before instagram had one. it grew fast, around 10 million users, and then instagram cut off its access to the social graph and launched boomerang, which did the same loop. phhhoto sh |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Megalia 📖 2015 - 2017 megalia grew out of the mers gallery on dc inside in 2015, when women answering a wave of abuse started copying the insults back with the genders swapped. the site opened as megalian.com that august, and inside a year the word megal had become an accusation in korean internet culture that could cost |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
WeeWorld 📖 2000 - 2017 weeworld was a glasgow company that made cartoon avatars called weemees. mike kinsella and john mcguire founded it on march 20 2000. the actual reach moment came in '03 when microsoft licensed weemees as the avatar set for msn messenger and hotmail in europe. by closure the company claimed 180 milli |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
MLKSHK 📖 2010 - 2017 pronounced milkshake. you dragged an image into your browser and dropped it into a "shake", which was a topic group, and you commented with reaction images. it was small on purpose. it ran for six years on subscription dollars without ever taking vc, then shut down voluntarily when the math stopped |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Yik Yak 📖 2013 - 2017 the anonymous location-based message board. you opened the app, you saw posts from users physically near you (within 1.5 miles). it was huge on US college campuses for about 18 months. it had a serious harassment problem. they tried to add real names in 2016 to fix it. the existing user base rejecte |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
AllExperts 📖 1998 - 2017 allexperts ran for over nineteen years on volunteers who answered strangers for free because they wanted to. you posted a question in a category and a real person who knew the topic replied. it collected millions of answers and predated yahoo answers by years. then owner about.com rebranded into dot |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Google Spaces 📖 2016 - 2017 google spaces was an app for small group sharing built around chrome and youtube embeds. it launched on 16 may '16. google announced the shutdown on 16 february '17 and pulled the app on 17 april '17. the brand later got revived inside google chat for a different product entirely. eleven months from |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Tribe.net 📖 2003 - 2017 tribe was a 2003 social network out of san francisco, founded by paul martino and mark pincus alongside co-founder valerie syme as a hybrid between friendster and craigslist. you joined interest-based "tribes" and posted classifieds and event listings within them. the peak audience was the bay area |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
App.net 📖 2012 - 2017 app.net launched on august 8, 2012 from dalton caldwell's mixed media labs, pitched as a paid twitter alternative with no ads. it crowdfunded $750,000 from over 11,000 backers in five days. messages were 256 characters instead of 140. the developer story was strong, the user story never showed up. b |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
So.cl 📖 2011 - 2017 microsoft made a social network. that sentence is most of the reason nobody remembers it. so.cl came out of a research lab, aimed at students, built around sharing search results and building study communities rather than talking. it even signed you in with a Facebook account, which tells you how th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Jelly 📖 2014 - 2017 biz stone left twitter and built jelly with ben finkel as a photo-based question-and-answer app for your social graph. it launched on 7 january 2014, paused that november, came back as a curated-search product in 2016, then was acquired by pinterest on 8 march 2017 for the team and the visual-search |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Streetlife 📖 2011 - 2017 matt boyes launched streetlife in march 2011 as a neighborhood-keyed social network for the uk, built after a 2008 london burglary made him want a way to message his immediate street. by 2015 the platform claimed around a million members across roughly 4,000 communities. by acquisition it claimed 1. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
VirtualTourist 📖 2000 - 2017 virtualtourist was a travel community that peaked in the late 2000s with 1.3 million members and 3.7 million photos. two karlsruhe students registered the domain in 1996 and launched the site in january 2000. expedia's tripadvisor bought it in july 2008 for eighty-five million dollars and kept it ru |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
AOL Lifestream 📖 2010 - 2017 aol lifestream was a feed aggregator that lived inside aol desktop after bebo had stopped being interesting. it pulled in updates from twitter and youtube and pushed them onto one page. nobody noticed when it went away in 2017. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
IMDb message boards 📖 2001 - 2017 the imdb message boards were the comment forums attached to every title and person page on imdb. they ran from the early 2000s through february 20, 2017, when imdb switched them off citing trolling and the small share of total site traffic the boards produced relative to the moderation cost. amazon |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Epuls.pl 📖 2002 - 2017 epuls was where polish teenagers lived online before facebook arrived, a social network built on public diaries and clubs, with a points currency called pulsary. a swedish studio started it in 2002 and it swelled past two and a half million users by 2008. then it froze in place, no phone app and an |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Beme 📖 2015 - 2017 matt hackett and casey neistat shipped beme in july 2015. the app made unedited four-second video clips that uploaded to your followers immediately, with no preview screen and no redo. the gimmick wore off fast. cnn acquired beme for a reported $25 million in november 2016 to build a youth-news bran |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Vine 📖 2013 - 2017 six seconds. looping video. you opened the app, watched a clip, it played again, you watched it again, you laughed, you swiped. it produced an entire generation of comedy talent that twitter killed in 2017 because they could not figure out how to monetize a 6-second video. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Czat.onet.pl 📖 1999 - 2017 onet closed its chat on 4 january 2017 and never said why. the warning went out in december, the tab came off the portal homepage, and the address started bouncing visitors to onet.pl. eighteen years of it. more than three thousand rooms and up to 800,000 people a month, including one room where str |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
iloveschool 📖 1999 - 2017 iloveschool was korea's school-reunion craze, a site that let you type in your school and the years you went and instantly find everyone else who did the same. it went from nothing to ten million members in under three years around the turn of the century. it never figured out how to make money off |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Makeoutclub 📖 1999 - 2017 makeoutclub was arguably the first real social network, a 1999 site for the emo and hardcore kids who wanted profile pages with their photo and their record collection on them. it did the customizable-profile idea years before friendster or myspace made it famous. it stayed a niche scene forever, a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Taltopia 📖 2008 - 2017 los angeles, february 2008: two recent graduates took 800,000 dollars from an angel investor and renamed their site from famesource to taltopia. the idea was a digg for aspiring performers, with a fame and shame vote on every upload and a currency called famebucks you could earn or buy through paypa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
51.com 📖 2005 - 2016 51.com ran as china's second-tier-city social network out of hangzhou from 2005, founded by pang shengdong on a photos and blogs stack with a games layer on top. peak claims passed 178 million registered users around 2010, then wechat and qzone took the smartphone era. by 2016 the active user base w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Boredat 📖 2006 - 2016 butler library at columbia is where it started, in 2006, as a board you could only reach from a columbia.edu address and named after the building people were procrastinating inside while they used it. jonathan pappas wrote it and ran it alone for ten years, adding one board per school under the name |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
中国穆斯林网 (China Muslim Net) 📖 2003 - 2016 on 10 december 2016 somebody reposted an open letter to xi jinping, written by chinese students abroad, into the current affairs board of the largest chinese-language muslim forum on the internet. a user claiming to be a professor screenshotted it and reported the site publicly for promoting religio |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Sugarscape.com 📖 2007 - 2016 sugar was a british magazine for teenage girls that started in october 1994 and did not survive its readers moving online. the website it left behind opened in 2007 and turned out to be the better business for a while: under hearst it went from a hundred and twenty thousand people a month to more th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Viadeo 📖 2004 - 2016 viadeo was the professional network france built before deciding linkedin would do fine. it grew to sixty-five million members and spent a fortune trying to go global, only to learn that a business network works only if the businesses you want are already on it. china was supposed to be the prize an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Kaneva 📖 2004 - 2016 kaneva was a free 3d virtual world that ran in the shadow of second life for ten years. you got an avatar, a 3d apartment, a 2d profile page, and embedded media playback for youtube and the rest of the web inside the world. a july 2016 breach leaked 3.9 million user records, and four months later th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Shots 📖 2013 - 2016 shots was a selfie app for teenagers who followed justin bieber, and for a while eight million of them showed up. it stripped out comments and like counts on purpose, a real idea about stopping online bullying years before the big platforms cared. it could not out-run snapchat or instagram, so in 20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Grouper 📖 2011 - 2016 michael waxman and tom brown built it in 2011 out of new york. two strangers each brought two friends, grouper picked the bar and comped the first round, six people showed up at the same table. it ran in about twenty-five us cities plus toronto and london, then folded on 1 october 2016 as tinder and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Matchmaker.com 📖 1986 - 2016 matchmaker began in 1986 as a matching feature on a texas bulletin board running off an apple ii+, spread city by city as licensed local systems, and reached the web before almost anything else in its category. lycos paid $44.5 million for it in 2000, when it had four million users. avalanche bought |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Lokalisten 📖 2005 - 2016 bavaria had its own social network for eleven years. lokalisten was the version of facebook that prosiebensat.1 spent twenty-five million euros on, watched grow to two million users, and then watched bleed out. by june 2016 it was at fifty thousand and the broadcaster pulled the plug. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Zenryaku Profile 📖 2002 - 2016 six point three million people had a page on it in 2010, most of them japanese schoolgirls answering a questionnaire on a flip phone. zenryaku profile opened in 2002 and invented the prof site, a genre that had no real equivalent outside japan and mattered enormously inside it for about six years. r |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
koebu 📖 2007 - 2016 947,287 accounts and 4,382,379 recorded voice clips, counted seven months before the plug came out. koebu was japanese and it was audio only, and it ran for nine years through two owners without ever finding the money in it. kayac built it in 2007 and sold it to cyberagent in 2014. the announcement |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
NUfoto 📖 2007 - 2016 laurens verhagen, then editor in chief of nu.nl, told the dutch trade press in august 2007 that the reader photographs arriving at the news desk were too good to show properly on the news site, so the company built them a site of their own. nufoto ran nine years on amateur pictures of fires and road |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
WAYN 📖 2002 - 2016 wayn stood for "where are you now", a travel and lifestyle social network built in london around 2002. the idea was to pin every place you had been and find other people who had been there or were headed there next. it grew to a claimed 22 million registered members by 2013, but never turned that in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Zwinky 📖 2006 - 2016 zwinky let teenagers build a cartoon big-head avatar and then, in 2007, walk it around a virtual world called zwinktopia. the real business was the toolbar you installed to use it, which pulled in the mywebsearch bar and its search-ad revenue. it was owned by iac and ran for about ten years on that |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
EveryTrail 📖 2006 - 2016 on 17 august 2016 everytrail.com was still serving pages. by the following morning it answered every request with a redirect to alltrails.com, and the acquisition was announced that day. ten years of gps tracks, photographs pinned to coordinates and hand-built walking tours went into somebody else's |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Szánalmas.hu 📖 2002 - 2016 an anonymous administrator posting as bateman opened a link and picture blog in the autumn of 2002, and by 2005 an econet and medián audit called it the largest community blog in hungary. the readers were mostly men between eighteen and thirty five, and the house word for anything posted twice was v |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Tsū 📖 2014 - 2016 sebastian sobczak launched tsu in october 2014 with a 90-percent-revenue-share-to-users pitch that read more like an mlm than a social product. users got paid for engagement on what they posted and for every new sign-up they referred, so within three months they had spammed enough referral links to |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Togethera 📖 2013 - 2016 sixty-five thousand people is a respectable number of users and a terrible number of customers. togethera opened in london in 2013 as a private place for a family to put its photos, raised a quarter of a million pounds in seed money, then could not raise again. the founders said plainly that revenue |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Fling 📖 2014 - 2016 fling let you take a photo and send it to fifty random people anywhere on earth, and the fifty could write back. that got it four million users and, inside a year, a removal from the app store for being a sexting channel with a map attached. the team rewrote the whole thing in nineteen days as a sna |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Bildirgeç 📖 1999 - 2016 on 30 january 2002 the front page counted 2,109 posts from 342 members, each one a link somebody had found and wanted to show in turkish. bildirgeç was the link blog of the pilli network, online since 1999, and from 2006 it handed 70 percent of its ad revenue back to the people who wrote it. the new |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Facebook Paper 📖 2014 - 2016 facebook's first creative labs app, a magazine-style news reader laid over the feed. you tilted the phone to load photos and subscribed to sections one at a time. iphone-only and us-store-only at launch. facebook killed it on july 29 2016 and creative labs itself was wound down at the same time. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
WooYun 📖 2010 - 2016 wooyun ran from may 2010 as the place chinese security researchers posted the holes they found, in the open, where the company that owned the hole read about it alongside everybody else. by 2016 it had thousands of registered white hats on it and had published tens of thousands of verified vulnerabi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Bitstrips 📖 2007 - 2016 bitstrips was the 2013 facebook viral moment where everyone built a cartoon version of themselves and posted it as a comic strip. it lasted about ten weeks at peak attention. the spinoff app bitmoji absorbed the avatar idea, snap bought the whole company for around a hundred million dollars in march |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Highlight 📖 2012 - 2016 highlight was an ios and android app that ran in the background, watched your gps, and pinged you when a facebook friend or a friend-of-a-friend was within around one hundred and fifty meters. it launched in february 2012, was the loudest app at sxsw a month later, ran out of an answer for what to d |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
DontStayIn 📖 2003 - 2016 tim aylott and the brophy brothers launched a uk clubbing site in april 2003 under the name yougotspotted.com and rebranded as dontstayin in 2004. through the late 2000s it became the recognized hub for british nightlife photography, event listings, and clubber profile pages, peaking at over five mi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Arto 📖 1998 - 2016 morten borg put a page of jokes online in february 1998, and by 2007 it was the largest website in denmark, with eighty thousand danes logged in simultaneously and a hundred million page views a month. arto is where a whole generation of danish teenagers kept their profile and their guestbook, which |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Mobli 📖 2010 - 2016 israeli photo and video app founded 2010 by the hogeg brothers. leonardo dicaprio was the announced marquee investor, followed by serena williams, lance armstrong, and tobey maguire. the actual capital came from kazakh businessman kenges rakishev in 2012 and mexican telco américa móvil in 2013. peak |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
SF Signal 📖 2003 - 2016 sf signal spent thirteen years as a science fiction blog with a podcast operation bolted to it, and it got good enough to win the hugo for best fanzine twice and best fancast once. the mind meld feature, where a dozen working writers answered the same question in one post, was the thing people linke |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Kuro5hin 📖 1999 - 2016 kuro5hin (pronounced corrosion) was a collaborative-edited news and discussion site founded in december 1999 by rusty foster as a slashdot alternative. members submitted stories into a queue and other members voted them up to the front page or down into the trash. the diaries section was where the u |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Pheed 📖 2012 - 2016 pheed was a paid social network founded in los angeles in november 2012 by o.d. kobo, tony deniro, and phil haus. it sold itself as a creator-monetization layer with paywalled posts, pay-per-view live streams, and a built-in copyright marker. it reached eight million registered users. an america mov |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Experience Project 📖 2007 - 2016 a place built for people who needed to say something they could not say under their own name. it started as a support board for one illness and grew into millions of confessions filed under bare one-letter handles. it died the way anonymous sites tend to die: the founders decided they could no longe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
AbsolutePunk 📖 2000 - 2016 jason tate started absolutepunk.net in june 2000, at fifteen, as a fan page for blink-182 and mxpx. it turned into the place an entire pop-punk and emo scene checked every morning to see which record had leaked and which band had broken up. buzznet bought it in 2008 and the parent company spent the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Soranet 📖 1999 - 2016 soranet began in 1999 as a personal link page and became the largest korean-language pornography site on the internet, with more than a million registered accounts. korean authorities blocked the domain in 2004 and the operators answered by moving the servers offshore and then moving them again ever |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Tuenti 📖 2006 - 2016 tuenti was spain's facebook between 2009 and 2012, with fifteen million registered users at peak and an estimated fifteen percent of all spanish web traffic running through its pages. telefónica bought 85 percent of the company in 2010 and finished the buyout in 2013. in early 2016 the social featur |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
DMM恋活 (DMM Koikatsu) 📖 2014 - 2016 dmm ran a dating service for about two years and switched it off at 15:00 on a thursday in march 2016. by its own count it had passed 370,000 members and 400,000 matches ten months earlier. what replaced the service at its own address was a legal notice rather than a goodbye. japan's payment service |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Shelfari 📖 2006 - 2016 shelfari launched on 11 october 2006 in seattle, founded by josh hug and kevin beukelman as a virtual-bookshelf social network where readers tagged the books they owned and followed each other's shelves. amazon bought it in august 2008 and ran it as an independent property for seven more years. on 1 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Friends Reunited 📖 2000 - 2016 the UK's first big social network. you registered, you picked your old school from a directory of british schools, you saw the list of classmates who had also registered. you paid a subscription to send them a message. peak around 2005 with maybe 19 million UK adults reconnecting with people from se |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Convrge 📖 2015 - 2016 convrge was a social vr hangout for the oculus rift dk1 and dk2, built by shawn whiting and hayden lee out of a nashville apartment after they met at virginia tech. it launched in january 2015 with a fireside chat area and a mountaintop dance floor that synced lighting and music for multi-user dance |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Fotolog 📖 2002 - 2016 the photo blog. one photo a day. comments and a guestbook. peak in argentina, chile, and spain around 2007. i never used it in turkey because it was not really a thing here. but for a generation of latin american and spanish teenagers it was the social network of their adolescence. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Kakao Album (카카오앨범) 📖 2013 - 2016 a thousand photos to an album and two hundred friends on the invite list: those were the ceilings kakao put on its photo-sharing app when it shipped in february 2013. the feature nobody else had was the guest list, assembled out of location data, so the app could read where a photo had been taken an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Frankly.me 📖 2014 - 2016 frankly.me was an indian app built on a simple hook, you asked a celebrity a question and they answered you back in a short selfie video. it launched in 2014 out of delhi and got real early attention, backed by matrix partners, riding the same short-video wave that was lifting vine and dubsmash. the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Lulu 📖 2011 - 2016 lulu let women review men behind their backs and called it dating intelligence. you looked up a guy by his facebook profile and saw what other women had scored him, hashtags and all. it was loud and controversial, and for a couple of years it was everywhere on american campuses. badoo bought it in 2 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Elfwood 📖 1996 - 2016 the largest sci-fi and fantasy art gallery on the early web. hosted out of linköping university in sweden by thomas abrahamsson. ran twenty years, eaten by deviantart, closed in 2016. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Milblogging.com 📖 2005 - 2016 milblogging.com was the central directory for the wave of first-person deployment blogs that came out of the iraq and afghanistan wars. jean-paul borda started it in october 2005 while running his own guard blog. by 2007 it was indexing more than 1,800 milblogs across 30 countries. by early 2016 the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Advogato 📖 1999 - 2016 advogato was the free software world's reputation lab, built by raph levien in 1999. instead of every account counting the same, members certified each other at ranks like apprentice or master, and an attack-resistant piece of math decided whose word actually carried. stallman had an account, and so |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Jiepang 📖 2010 - 2016 foursquare was blocked in china, so somebody built the same thing locally and for about three years it worked. jiepang had five million registered accounts and a real business selling location campaigns and branded photo filters to starbucks and companies like it. what it did not have was a reason t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Manjam 📖 2004 - 2016 two million registered accounts and twenty-eight languages, and it went without a notice or a buyer. manjam ran out of london from october 2004 and was aimed at users in countries where being on it was a criminal matter, which is why it was a browser tab and never an app you had to install. sometime |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
La Frikipedia 📖 2005 - 2016 the spanish collecting society sued a joke encyclopedia in early 2006 over one satirical article and asked for up to twelve thousand euros. la frikipedia survived that and kept going until 1 january 2016, when its editors shut it for good and wrote that they had been taking threats and complaints pr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Tunepics 📖 2014 - 2016 justin cooke came out of topshop and burberry marketing and built an app that put a thirty second itunes clip behind your photograph, then asked everyone else to spin a wheel of sixteen emotions at it. apple named it one of the best apps of 2014 and adele and the beckhams were on it inside a year. t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Faceparty 📖 2000 - 2015 faceparty was the british answer to the youth social network, four years before myspace. it claimed about six million accounts at peak. in may 2008 it deleted everyone over 36 on a sex-offender risk theory it could not actually defend, told critics to f off in a homepage rant a few weeks later, and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
iBibo 📖 2007 - 2015 ibibo launched in january 2007 in gurgaon as an indian social network funded by naspers, the south african media group. ashish kashyap built it as the local answer to orkut, with profile pages, games, and a points system. it never broke past orkut in india's social-graph race, and once facebook arri |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
CyberFight.ru 📖 2001 - 2015 asus walked away in july 2012, and it took with it the one thing cyberfight.ru had that no competitor could copy: a quarterly tournament with a real sponsor behind it, running since 2003. the forum stayed open another three years on momentum. dmitry kuznetsov, who had founded the site in april 2001 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Tianji 📖 2005 - 2015 derek ling started tianji in 2005 to be the place chinese professionals kept their careers, and for a while the numbers said it was working. hundreds of thousands of new accounts a month, then millions of them in total. the french network viadeo bought in during 2008 and made china the growth story |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Facebook Rooms 📖 2014 - 2015 facebook rooms launched in october 2014 out of the creative labs incubator. it let anyone start a topic room with a pseudonym, invite via qr code, and moderate with old-forum rules. it was pitched as the early web reborn on mobile. facebook killed the whole creative labs experiment fourteen months l |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Answerbag 📖 2003 - 2015 answerbag was one of the first english-language q&a sites, founded 2003 by joel downs. demand media bought it for three million dollars in 2006 as part of a content-farm portfolio and let it decay. on 15 december 2015 the site went dark with no warning and no export path. it later came back online a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Facebook Riff 📖 2015 - 2015 eight months, start to finish, and no update in between. riff shipped on 1 april 2015 as a facebook app for making one video out of many people: you shot twenty seconds, gave it a title that worked like a dare, and anybody who added to it could pass it on to their own friends. the ice bucket challen |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Pixable 📖 2009 - 2015 new york, 2009. three mit students built an app that read your facebook photos and worked out which ones you actually wanted to see. singtel paid 26.5 million dollars for it in 2012, turned it into a listicle site for people under 35, and then could not find anyone to sell it on to. the last day was |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
MOLOME 📖 2011 - 2015 an instagram clone that chose symbian first, which tells you both how ambitious and how stranded it was. one thai computer-engineering graduate built it and shipped it to the phones instagram would not touch, pulling 1.5 million downloads from platforms the rest of the industry had already written o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
SingldOut 📖 2014 - 2015 forty percent of the chemistry of attraction, allegedly, legible from a cheek swab. singldout launched in july 2014 out of california, mailed dna kits to its members and logged them in through linkedin. it ran up a national press campaign worth more than the company had raised, then shut down in nov |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
PerfectMatch.com 📖 2003 - 2015 pepper schwartz spent thirty years studying how couples actually work and then turned it into a questionnaire, and for about five years that questionnaire was a real competitor to eharmony. perfectmatch also matched same-sex couples at a time when its biggest rival flatly refused to. it was sold to |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Mobile My Life 📖 2002 - 2015 1,174,811 registered members and 1,902,832 posts, which is what the counter at the bottom of the front page said in january 2010, by which point the forum had already been shrinking for four years. in september 2012 the staff announced that the taiwanese phone and hardware board everyone had joined |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Socialcam 📖 2011 - 2015 socialcam was a short mobile video app spun out of the justin.tv ecosystem in 2011, built by michael seibel and two co-founders. it made shooting and sharing a phone clip nearly frictionless and grew fast on aggressive facebook sharing, passing sixteen million downloads by mid-2012. autodesk bought |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Gather.com 📖 2005 - 2015 gather was a boston community for grown-up conversation about news and culture, founded by tom gerace in 2005. its twist was reward points, small credits you earned for writing that you could cash toward gift cards, one of the first sites to treat member writing as something worth paying for. seriou |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Cyworld 📖 1999 - 2015 the south korean social network that nearly every twenty-something in the country used at peak. you got a minihompy, a personal page with a decoratable mini-room rendered in isometric pixel art. you bought wallpaper and furniture with a virtual currency called dotori, the korean word for acorn. by 2 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
This Is My Jam 📖 2011 - 2015 one song. that was the gimmick. you picked one song from soundcloud or youtube, posted it as your jam, it stayed up for seven days. the founders were ex-last.fm. it ran four years on the strength of that one constraint and shut down voluntarily in late 2015 when copyright friction and founder bandwi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Frontback 📖 2013 - 2015 a photo-sharing gimmick that arrived a year before the front-and-back camera became a native ios feature everyone shared without an app. frontback launched august 2013 out of belgium, took $3.5 million from alexis ohanian and charlie cheever and jack dorsey and ashton kutcher, and burnt through it t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
glbtq.com 📖 2003 - 2015 a publisher named wik wikholm started the project in 2000 on the theory that the largest encyclopedia of queer culture and history did not exist and should. it took more than two years of commissioning before anything went online. the site launched in march 2003 already holding over a million words, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Darkode 📖 2007 - 2015 darkode was a password-protected english-language forum where malware and stolen card numbers changed hands, and europol called it the most prolific of its kind. it never had more than about three hundred members, because getting in required an existing member to vouch for you and a written account |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Metroflog 📖 2006 - 2015 kohali, a small buenos aires operation, launched metroflog in 2006 as a fotolog clone tailored to the spanish-speaking web. one image per day with a guestbook below it. the site rode the latin-american scene-emo wave through the late 2000s, peaked as the most-visited social network in spain through |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Urturn 📖 2011 - 2015 $13.4 million went into a lausanne startup in may 2013 to build templates that teenagers could drop their own photos into. urturn had already spent two years as webdoc before the rename, and at its peak it had one direction campaigns running on it and 25 staff on two continents. development stopped |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
PledgeBank 📖 2005 - 2015 "i'll do it, but only if you'll help" was the entire product, printed under the logo in italics so nobody could miss it. mysociety put it online on 13 june 2005, four years before kickstarter and three before groupon, and it worked on the same mechanism both of those would later sell: a promise that |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Loctouch 📖 2010 - 2015 line closed loctouch at noon on 30 june 2015, fifteen days short of its fifth birthday. livedoor had launched it in 2010 as japan's answer to the check-in boom, with a sticker metaphor instead of a mayorship and a map of japanese places nobody else had indexed properly. the reason line published was |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
DMMコミュニティ (DMM Community) 📖 2012 - 2015 built on openpne, the open source japanese social network software, and wired straight into a shop. dmm ran a members' sns beside its adult video catalog from september 2012, with real profiles and diaries on it, and with the like button relabeled to match the merchandise. the most followed people o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Friendster 📖 2002 - 2015 the first social network most americans signed up for. peak around 2003. by 2005 myspace had eaten its lunch. it pivoted to a gaming portal aimed at southeast asia. that worked for a few years, then collapsed. the original friendster brand was retired in 2015. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Branch 📖 2012 - 2015 small new york conversation tool. you started a thread, invited a handful of people you actually wanted to hear from, the rest could read but not post. it was an attempt to make the public-but-curated discussion that twitter never quite supported. branch and the sister recipe site potluck sold to fa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
SodaHead 📖 2007 - 2015 jason feffer, who had been vp of operations at myspace in the early years, and his childhood friend michael glazer launched sodahead in 2007 as a poll-driven social network. you logged in, you posted a question, you watched strangers vote. the platform spent its peak years powering polls for espn, f |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Gazo-ch 📖 2002 - 2015 on 23 may 2007 the police arrested the man who ran the servers rather than the people who had uploaded to them, and japanese image boards began closing themselves within a day. 画像ちゃんねる opened in december 2002 and was one of the biggest of them, somewhere around seventy three million page views a yea |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Baidu Space 📖 2006 - 2015 baidu space (百度空间) was the search company's answer to the profile-network category that renren and qzone were dominating in mid-2000s china. it launched on 13 july 2006. by 2008 it reported around 40 million unique visitors and sat around the eleventh spot on the global social-media chart of the tim |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Secret 📖 2014 - 2015 secret launched on january 30, 2014 from san francisco. david byttow and chrys bader-wechseler raised $34.6 million in fifteen months and shipped an anonymous social network for your phone contacts. the network filled with cyberbullying within months of launch. the brazilian supreme court ordered it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Terra Nova 📖 2003 - 2015 edward castronova, julian dibbell, dan hunter and greg lastowka started a blog about virtual worlds on 11 september 2003, back when the serious open question was what a virtual sword was worth in real money. terra nova ran that argument for a decade, and castronova closed it on 25 september 2014 by |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
FriendFeed 📖 2007 - 2015 the social aggregator that pulled together your activity from twenty other services (twitter, flickr, last.fm, delicious, blog rss) into one feed. small but loyal audience of programmers and power users. facebook bought it in august 2009 for the team. the actual product limped along until april 2015 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Tech Support Comedy 📖 2000 - 2015 a denial of service attack took techcomedy.com down in april 2015 and it never came back up. fifteen years of helpdesk workers writing down what customers actually said to them, sixty thousand submissions deep, ended because somebody pointed traffic at a hobby server. hawk built it in march 2000 as |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Poupéegirl 📖 2007 - 2015 poupéegirl was a japanese fashion community where you photographed real clothes you owned, uploaded them, and earned currency to dress up a little cartoon doll. it launched in 2007 out of cyberagent, drew over half a million users, and ran brand tie-ins with names like louis vuitton and shiseido. it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
EduCities (亞卓市) 📖 2000 - 2015 taiwan built a city on the web for its schoolchildren and kept it running for fifteen years. 亞卓市 opened on 5 january 2000 out of a learning technology lab at national central university, with ministry of education money behind it and a nobel chemist as its first honorary mayor. by 2012 it had 2.6 mi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
SkillPages 📖 2009 - 2015 skillpages was a dublin social network for finding people by what they could do, a plumber or a photographer, matched to whoever needed them. it started life as weedle in 2009, took the skillpages name in 2011, and grew fast enough to pass twenty million registered users across more than a hundred a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Inkblazers 📖 2011 - 2015 two founders working out of boston and bangkok raised a million dollars in 2011 and built a place where you could host a webcomic for free, keep every right to it, and get paid out of subscriptions and merchandise sales. it started as mangamagazine.net and became inkblazers. the audience was devoted |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
AsianAvenue 📖 1997 - 2015 asianavenue launched july 21, 1997 as one of the first identity-keyed social networks on the open web. it was the asian-american property inside community connect, the holding company that also ran blackplanet for african-american users and migente for the latino diaspora. at peak in the early 2000s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
43 Things 📖 2005 - 2015 43 things was the goal-list social network the robot co-op shipped out of seattle in january 2005. you wrote down up to forty-three things you wanted to do in your life and the site tagged them together with everyone else's lists. for ten years a few million strangers chased "learn french" and "see |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Netlog 📖 1999 - 2015 netlog was the belgian social network that scaled across continental europe in the late 2000s and folded into a dating app on the way out. lorenz bogaert and toon coppens launched it in ghent in 1999 as asl.to, renamed it redbox in 2002, then settled on netlog around 2006. by 2010 it had roughly 94 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Kaboodle 📖 2005 - 2015 kaboodle was one of the first working social shopping sites: a place where users clipped product links from anywhere on the open web, built themed collections of things they liked, and shared those with friends and followers. manish chandra started it in 2005. hearst bought it in august 2007 for aro |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Motribe 📖 2010 - 2015 motribe was a cape town mobile-community platform founded in august 2010 by nic haralambous and vincent maher. it let brands and organizations spin up their own mobile social networks that ran well on feature phones, which was the majority of internet-capable hardware across africa and south asia at |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Cinemagram 📖 2011 - 2015 cinemagram taught a phone to make a cinemagraph, a photo with one small part still moving, and for a while in 2012 that was the most novel thing in an app store. then vine arrived with six-second loops and cinemagram tried to become vine instead. it was not vine. the money followed the winner and th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Fropper 📖 2003 - 2015 fropper was india's first real social network, a product from the mumbai people who also built shaadi.com. it launched in 2003 and had its moment before orkut and then facebook arrived and took the whole market. by 2015 it had been folded into a dating app called thrill, and the standalone site was |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
kahkaha.com 📖 1999 - 2015 kahkaha.com was one of the first turkish-language entertainment sites and it lasted sixteen years by never deciding what it was. it opened in 1999 as a frameset promising jokes and chat, spent the early 2000s selling polyphonic ringtones and wallpapers to nokia owners, and ended up running penny auc |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
JournalFen 📖 2003 - 2015 fandom wank was founded on livejournal in october 2002 and deleted for harassment complaints in january 2003. it went to blurty and was deleted again in march. six days later a user posting as zorrorojo, who had just stood up a livejournal clone of his own for people over eighteen, offered it a perm |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Passagen 📖 1995 - 2015 in january 1999 the second most visited website in sweden was not a newspaper or a broadcaster, it was passagen, with 1.46 million visitors and 400,000 members. three men at telia had started building it in 1994 and launched it in september 1995, and by mid-1996 it had chat, shopping and pages you c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Bloggy 📖 2008 - 2015 jonas lejon, a swedish programmer, watched google buy jaiku and park it, so in september 2008 he put up a replacement close enough that the leavers would recognize the shape of it. it worked for a while: schibsted came asking about a purchase, and the swedish national encyclopedia eventually gave th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
MacTalk Australia 📖 2004 - 2015 two strangers met on an overclocking forum and started an australian apple forum on new year's day 2004, and inside two years it was a top ten australian tech site. apple's lawyers made them drop the name, a magazine publisher bought them for a reported $150,000 in 2011, and by 2015 the volunteer mo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Wetpaint 📖 2005 - 2014 wetpaint launched in october 2005 in seattle as a wiki anyone could spin up without learning markup syntax. it became the default home for fan wikis about tv shows and video games before fandom / wikia consolidated that traffic. viggle bought it in 2012 and pivoted it into an entertainment news blog |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Gfranq 📖 2012 - 2014 on 2 march 2012 a married couple in russia shipped a browser photo editor with forty-eight film filters and a page to keep the results on. by december that year gfranq had passed a million registered users and eight million uploaded photos and the russian press was calling it the local instagram. th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Taiwan Railway Net 📖 2003 - 2014 eleven years of taiwanese railfan photography sat on trc.net.tw, and in november 2014 the site said facebook had taken its readers. it began in march 2001 as a yahoo kimo group for people who collected commemorative train tickets. by 2008 it was a limited company funded out of railway gift shop reve |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Animal Crossing Plaza 📖 2013 - 2014 animal crossing plaza was a free wii u app that existed to be a lobby. you pulled screenshots off your new leaf cartridge through an sd card and posted them into a miiverse community, while a crowd of series characters stood around in a square doing nothing in particular. nintendo said from the anno |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
GetGlue / tvtag 📖 2007 - 2014 getglue was the foursquare of television. you opened the app while watching a show and checked in to that episode. the app handed you a sticker plus a feed of strangers watching the same thing in real time. between 2010 and 2013 it had four million users and most us networks running integration deal |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Viddy 📖 2011 - 2014 viddy was a mobile app for shooting short video clips and sharing them with a filter on top, pitched in 2012 as the instagram for video. it raised thirty million dollars and claimed fifty million users at its peak, riding facebook's open-graph auto-sharing. when facebook changed how that sharing wor |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Privet.ru 📖 2006 - 2014 privet.ru was a russian social network that launched as comby.ru in spring 2006 and rebranded under the new name on 10 june 2007. it crossed two million registered users in 2010 and sat inside the top ten russian social networks through 2012. some time in 2014 the site administration stopped respond |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
NetEase Weibo 📖 2010 - 2014 netease weibo was the fourth of china's four microblog services, behind sina, tencent and sohu. it launched in the spring of 2010 as t.163.com, hosted off netease's dominant portal. by may 2012 the company was claiming 120 million registered accounts. real engagement stayed thin, the news cycle sat |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Sohu Weibo 📖 2010 - 2014 sohu weibo was the fourth entry in china's short-lived four-portal microblog race. sina, tencent, netease and sohu each launched a weibo in 2009-2010. only sina survived. sohu weibo entered beta in april 2010 and got suspended by regulators within three months. it then quietly withered as sina absor |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
BranchOut 📖 2010 - 2014 branchout was a professional network built on top of facebook, back when building on top of facebook looked like a business plan. it grew by mailing your friends on your behalf, which got it to tens of millions of users in a hurry and got it hated just as fast. once facebook tightened its notificati |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Netropolitan Club 📖 2014 - 2014 a composer and conductor in minnesota launched a social network on 15 september 2014 that cost nine thousand dollars to join and three thousand a year after that, on the theory that wealthy people wanted somewhere to talk without an audience underneath them. no advertising anywhere on it, and nothin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Haivl 📖 2012 - 2014 vietnam's ministry of information and communications fined haivl 205 million dong on 24 october 2014 and withdrew its license for good, citing content that distorted history and insulted national heroes. the meme site, started by an fpt university student as a facebook page, had 4.4 million fans the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Miso TV 📖 2010 - 2014 the television check-in was a real idea for about two years. miso launched it at sxsw in march 2010, raised money from google ventures and hearst and then khosla, and got past a hundred thousand registered users by the end of that first year. dijit bought the company in february 2013, viggle bought |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
CyberMentors 📖 2009 - 2014 gordon brown opened it in march 2009 and a million and a half british children eventually walked through it, most of them looking for someone to talk to about being bullied. the person who answered was usually another teenager, trained and supervised, with a real counselor one click behind them. it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Orkut 📖 2004 - 2014 google's social network from 2004 to 2014. small in the US. enormous in brazil. then enormous in india. the most popular social network in two countries that google did not anticipate. when google launched google+ in 2011 they decided orkut had to die. the brazilian internet still has not forgiven t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Airtime 📖 2012 - 2014 Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning relaunched their friendship at the Airtime press event in june 2012, with Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart on the same stage. the product was a chatroulette clone matched through your facebook graph. by late 2014 it had almost no users left, and the original brand was effe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
PetitionOnline 📖 1999 - 2014 a 3d modeling software house in oregon ran the web's first well-known petition service for twelve years as a sideline. more than fifty thousand petitions and ninety-three million signatures went through it. change.org acquired the thing in 2011 and switched it off on 30 september 2014, citing hostin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
MyFamily.com 📖 1998 - 2014 ancestry announced in the summer of 2014 that it was retiring myfamily, the private family-website service it had once renamed the entire company after. the site went dark on 5 september. an export tool was offered, plenty of people found it would not get their photos out, and fifteen years of famil |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
WorldsAway 📖 1995 - 2014 worldsaway was a 2d avatar city you paid by the hour to walk around in. fujitsu launched it on compuserve in 1995 and the dreamscape world became one of compuserve's top forums for about a year. fujitsu cut the project loose, successors carried it under the vzones brand, and the worlds finally went |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Svpply 📖 2010 - 2014 svpply was a place to save the things you wanted to own, a quiet feed of products picked by people whose taste you trusted. ebay bought it in 2012, took the ideas into its own feed and collections, and left the original running on low power. two years later it turned the site off. the founder had a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Heello 📖 2011 - 2014 heello was twitpic founder noah everett's attempt to hedge twitpic against twitter by building a small twitter clone of his own. it launched on august 10 2011, the day after twitter rolled out native photo upload and quietly cut twitpic's reason for existing in half. it hit a million posts in 48 hou |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Facebook Gifts 📖 2012 - 2014 on may 18, 2012, the day facebook went public, it bought a sixteen-person gifting app called karma. four months later that purchase reappeared as facebook gifts, a store attached to the birthday notification that would post a friend an actual box of chocolate for actual money. the physical goods wer |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Sonico 📖 2007 - 2014 argentina built a social network for the whole spanish-speaking world. sonico peaked above fifty million registrations across mexico, brazil, colombia, and the rest of latin america, then lost the same fight every regional social lost. fnbox unbundled it, match bought it, and the brand was extinguis |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Mixx 📖 2007 - 2014 the digg clone that pitched personalized content blending instead of pure popularity ranking. chris mcgill launched it in private beta on september 20 2007, partly as a refuge for digg users who had been banned for vote brigading. ubermedia bought the assets on january 24 2011 and rebranded the soci |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
IWiW 📖 2002 - 2014 iwiw started in budapest in april 2002 as "wiw," was renamed "iwiw" in october 2005, was acquired by magyar telekom in april 2006 for about a billion forints, and hit a peak of around 4.5 million registered members in 2010. that was more than two thirds of hungarian internet users at the time. once |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Lockerz 📖 2009 - 2014 lockerz was a points economy with a social network bolted onto it. you logged in daily, watched videos, answered polls, invited friends, and earned PTZ that you spent on discounted electronics or clothing. kathy savitt founded it in 2009 with kleiner perkins money. it grew to 19 million members by j |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
me2day 📖 2007 - 2014 me2day launched in february 2007 in seoul as an independent korean microblogging service. nhn corporation, which would later rename itself naver, acquired it and ran the product as a korean answer to twitter. the audience leaned heavily teenage and twenty-something, with k-pop groups like big bang a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Wer-Kennt-Wen 📖 2006 - 2014 wer-kennt-wen was the koblenz-built german-language facebook clone that hit 9.4 million registered users in late 2011, got bought by rtl interactive for the broadcaster's digital portfolio, and then watched its active base evaporate as facebook localized into german. rtl tried to sell it in march 20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Groups (Japan) 📖 2004 - 2014 the reason given was that the system had aged past the point where keeping it running was practical, which is an unusually honest thing for a portal to put in writing. it began on 9 february 2004 as yahoo! egroups, inherited from a company called egroups k.k., and yahoo! japan took over running it f |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Mekusharim 📖 2004 - 2014 three party promoters in tel aviv put about forty thousand shekels into a website and opened it in july 2004 with six registered users. by 2007 mekusharim was the second largest social network in israel behind hevre, with 240,000 unique visitors a month and a user-written newspaper on the front page |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Facebook Poke 📖 2012 - 2014 poke was facebook's first snapchat clone. ios only, shipped on december 21 2012 about a week after snapchat rejected facebook's reported $3 billion buyout. you sent a photo or a 10-second video to a friend, it disappeared after one viewing. facebook pulled it from the app store on may 9 2014. intern |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Itsmy 📖 2006 - 2014 a munich company built a social network for the phone browser in 2006, when that meant a two inch screen and a data plan billed by the kilobyte. it reached more than two and a half million users without a carrier deal, which was the hard way to do it. in 2010 the founders noticed that almost all of |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Starmatic 📖 2012 - 2014 a paris company put starmatic on the app store on 5 september 2012, an iphone-only photo app built around a plastic kodak camera from 1959, down to the icon and the two filter sets named after the film that camera took. fifty thousand people registered in the first month and it reached apple's new a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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まほうつかいの箱 📖 2009 - 2014 315 yen a month got you into a cafe that does not exist. type-moon built its official phone site in 2009 as アーネンエルベ, the coffee shop that turns up inside kara no kyoukai and tsukihime, and staffed it with two waitresses invented for the job. they got a four panel strip in comptiq and a drama cd seri |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Wiser.org 📖 2007 - 2014 wiser.org launched on earth day 2007 as wiserearth, an open directory of the hundred thousand odd groups paul hawken had cataloged while writing blessed unrest. anyone could add an organization, edit an entry or start a group, and by september 2012 it held over 114,000 organizations and around 72,00 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
WiserEarth 📖 2007 - 2014 paul hawken spent years collecting business cards from environmental and social justice groups, could not find a list of them anywhere, and decided the list should exist. wiserearth opened on earth day 2007 as an editable directory of the organizations behind his book blessed unrest, more than a hun |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Forrst 📖 2010 - 2014 forrst was the invite-only room where designers and developers showed unfinished work and asked to be told the truth about it. kyle bragger started it as a side project in 2010, and within three years it had grown to around fifty thousand members and a small monthly revenue. then it was sold, first |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Find Your FaceMate 📖 2011 - 2014 a launch party at stk in the meatpacking district, july 2012, samantha ronson on the decks and celebrity faces run through the matcher for the cameras. the site had already been open sixteen months by then and had close to fifty thousand free signups. christina bloom built it on something she had no |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Epinions 📖 1999 - 2018 epinions launched in september 1999 in mountain view, founded by nirav tolia and four cofounders with eight million dollars from benchmark and august capital. the site paid members a share of advertising revenue for writing product reviews and used a reputation graph so that trusted contributors sur |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Lost Zombies 📖 2008 - 2014 lost zombies was a social network with exactly one story in it. you signed up, and everything you posted had to fit a fictional timeline where a flu mutated in 2007 and three quarters of the world ended up dead or walking around dead. the plan was to cut all that member footage into a single documen |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Streamzoo 📖 2011 - 2014 streamzoo was instagram with badges. you shared a photo into a "stream" (a themed community), earned badges for contributions, leveled up. launched april 2011, funded by tim draper, servers off on 21 march 2014 with everything deleted. the model that lost to plain feed ranking. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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My Opera 📖 2001 - 2014 opera software ran a side-community for opera users that started in 2001 as a forum and grew into a blog platform with a free webmail service attached. it lived for thirteen years on opera's own infrastructure and on the loyalty of the opera holdouts. on march 3 2014 opera closed the whole thing and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Flirtomatic 📖 2005 - 2014 nokia asked a design agency for five mobile ideas, somebody in the room noticed that what they had been describing all afternoon was flirting, and that is the entire origin of flirtomatic. it ran on premium sms and carrier billing rather than subscriptions, and it was selling virtual gifts for real |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Shomei TV 📖 2008 - 2014 five thousand yen was the floor, ten thousand the ceiling, and that price tag arrived on a petition site that had launched in march 2008 letting anyone start a campaign for nothing. shomei tv was run by united people, a small tokyo outfit whose other product was a click-to-donate site. it solved the |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Cloud Party 📖 2012 - 2014 a browser tab was the entire installation, which in 2012 was the whole argument. cloud party put a user-built 3d world on webgl at a moment when the obvious comparison still wanted an installed desktop client, and for about twenty months people built islands in it. yahoo bought the four founders on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
2channel (2ch.net) 📖 1999 - 2014 2channel was japan's canonical anonymous textboard, launched may 30 1999 by hiroyuki nishimura from a college apartment in arkansas. it ran threaded boards with default anonymity. by 2007 it was the most popular online community in japan with around 10 million monthly visitors and 2.5 million daily |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Google Schemer 📖 2011 - 2014 a google side project from the post-buzz post-wave era that tried to turn bucket lists into a social graph. invite-only at launch in december 2011, last android update october 2012, formal shutdown announced january 10 2014 with data deletion on february 7. between 100k and 500k downloads on android |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Sketchfu 📖 2007 - 2014 the goodbye was written in the first person and it thanked the volunteer moderators by their shared account name. sketchfu ran about seven years as a place to draw in the browser and then watch anybody else's drawing redraw itself in front of you. the money ran out in 2012 and new signups were switc |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Canvas Networks 📖 2010 - 2014 canvas was christopher poole's serious startup after 4chan. an image-remix community built with proper accounts and moderation on top of a real business plan. it opened in private beta may 2010 and hit fifty thousand registered users by late 2011. by 2013 poole had pivoted the team to drawquest, an |
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| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Letternet 📖 1997 - 2014 a national post office ran a pen-pal club for sixteen years and it worked. letternet matched strangers by language and country, then posted you the address so you could write an actual letter, and at its height more than 1.4 million people in over 170 countries were registered with it. by january 20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Ptch 📖 2012 - 2014 a mobile video remix app spun out of dreamworks animation's cto office, launched november 2012, acquired by yahoo december 2013 in an acqui-hire and shut down thirty days after the announcement. one of the shorter arcs between a marissa mayer acquisition headline and the product going dark. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
SocialGO 📖 2007 - 2014 socialgo was a london company's answer to ning, a hosted builder that let you make your own social network without writing any code. it listed on the aim market and pitched itself as the free option when ning killed its own free tier in 2010. the money never caught up with the ambition. the parent c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
True.com 📖 2003 - 2014 forty-three million member records were the most valuable thing left when true beginnings went into chapter 11 in 2013, and they turned out to be the one asset the court would not let anybody buy. plentyoffish had agreed to pay seven hundred thousand dollars for them. the texas attorney general obje |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
MyDaughter 📖 2009 - 2014 the girls' schools association surveyed a thousand british parents in the late 2000s, got back a list of the things that frightened them about raising daughters, and built a website to answer it one question at a time. the advice came from headteachers at its own member schools. it ran from january |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Metaverse Books 📖 2008 - 2013 eighty minutes is the whole death certificate. a storefront image served fine at 00:34 utc on the last day of 2013 and the same server was throwing 503 by 01:53, with a maintenance notice nobody ever took down. one second life resident had spent five years selling real paper books out of a virtual b |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Wretch.cc 📖 1999 - 2013 wretch began in 1999 as a campus bbs at national chiao tung university in hsinchu, run by a computer science undergrad named chien chih-yu. by 2003 it had grown blog and photo album features that would not stop attracting taiwanese users. wretch co. ltd. incorporated in 2005. by the time yahoo taiwa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Yahoo! Decoration 📖 2008 - 2013 for its first eighty-two days this was a softbank-only website. yahoo! japan opened it on 31 july as a place to upload and take free decoration material for keitai mail, added docomo and au handsets on 21 october, and by that point was holding thirty-five thousand user-submitted items. the homepage |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Uboot.com 📖 2000 - 2013 uboot started as a free sms machine attached to a profile page, which in 2000 was enough to make it one of the fastest growing youth communities in the german-speaking web. it claimed six million registered accounts at its height. the free sms went away in 2002 and the paid version went away later, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Hyves 📖 2004 - 2013 hyves was the social network of the netherlands. founded in october 2004 by three dutch students, it grew through the late 2000s until more than 10 million people had accounts on it, in a country of about 16.5 million. for roughly six years it was the default place dutch teenagers and adults kept th |
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| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Memepool 📖 1998 - 2013 memepool was the multiple-author link weblog joshua schachter started in 1998 with jeff smith. the format was one short post per item, with a link out to something obscure and a sentence or two of commentary attached. that pattern was the prototype schachter later reworked into del.icio.us. memepool |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Where I've Been 📖 2007 - 2013 a facebook application that turned your travel history into a colored-in world map, written by one freelance developer in 2007 and large enough within months for the acquisition rumors to start early. ten million people made a map on it and pinned close to half a billion places. facebook then delete |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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OpenLife Grid 📖 2007 - 2013 fifty thousand accounts were created on a virtual world run by one australian out of a company called 3dx, and for a couple of years around 2008 that made openlife one of the serious alternatives to second life. it ran on opensim with a windlight sky and its own server engine, and its banner promise |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Albumatic 📖 2013 - 2013 adam ludwin was a venture investor at rre who had put the firm into vine, and in february 2013 he left to build a photo app in the most crowded category the app store had. albumatic used your location to pull nearby friends into a shared album of whatever was happening. a hundred thousand people tri |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Dopplr 📖 2007 - 2013 a london travel-plans social network for the tech-press conference circuit. nokia bought it in 2009, stopped updating the blog two days later, and finally turned it off in 2013. peak monthly users in the low five figures. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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FriendBinder 📖 2007 - 2013 the goodbye went up on the project blog at 23:22 on 9 october 2013, three years after the previous post. richard cunningham gave his users seventeen days. friendbinder would close on 26 october, every stored authentication key and cached personal record would be destroyed, and the reason was that a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Worth1000 📖 2002 - 2013 worth1000 was the early-2000s english-language photoshop scene given a competitive structure. for almost twelve years avi muchnick and israel derdik ran themed contests where thousands of contributors built rejected transformers and invisible-world tableaus and a long roster of one-line prompts besi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Utatomo 📖 2006 - 2013 in osaka the chart read differently from the chart in sendai, and that was the whole product. utatomo took the play log off your au handset's music player and made a social network out of it, seven years before anybody called that a feed. it ranked songs by how often they were actually played rather |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Urtak 📖 2008 - 2013 a polling widget that publishers dropped underneath their articles, built in new york by aaron gibralter and marc lizoain. every question took one of three answers and the third one was don't care, which is the option that made the numbers honest. the part the founders kept pointing at was that read |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Chime.in 📖 2011 - 2013 chime.in was bill gross trying to organize a social network around subjects rather than friends. ubermedia opened the public beta on 18 october 2011 with posts of up to five thousand characters, streams you followed by topic instead of by person, and a revenue share that paid members a cut of the ad |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Blip.pl 📖 2007 - 2013 blip was the polish microblog, started in warsaw in may 2007 and sold to gadu-gadu a month later. what carried it was not the character limit, it was the gateway: you could post to it from inside the messenger that was already open on every polish desktop. by 2013 the same owner held blip and wykop, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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The Oil Drum 📖 2005 - 2013 two professors started an energy blog in 2005 and accidentally built the last comment section that was better than the articles above it. during the deepwater horizon blowout, petroleum engineers sat in those threads reading the same live seafloor video the rest of the world was watching and explain |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Daum Yozm 📖 2010 - 2013 twitter reached korea first and never let go of it. daum's answer opened in february 2010 with a 150 character ceiling and social games bolted onto the side, collected around three million registrations, and was switched off on 30 august 2013 so the company could concentrate on the services people w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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みなくる 📖 2005 - 2013 shizuoka is not where japanese social networks came from, and big tokai built one anyway. みなくる ran avatars and my-rooms out of a regional cable and telephone company, then added a video sharing site and an indie music host, then a microblog. it had 125,000 members by early 2007. an attack on the mem |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Groklaw 📖 2003 - 2013 groklaw was one paralegal and her readership doing the work the technology press could not be bothered with, which was reading every filing in sco against ibm and publishing it as plain text with an explanation attached. it ran for ten years and collected awards from the free software foundation and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Yozm 📖 2010 - 2013 yozm was daum's microblog, launched in february 2010 with a 150-character box and some social gaming bolted onto it. it reached around three million users in korea, roughly half of what twitter had there, and that was not enough. daum pulled the app in april 2013 and ended the service in august, cit |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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PerfSpot 📖 2006 - 2013 in august 2007 nielsen made a phoenix startup the fastest growing social network in britain, up 756 percent in four months, running past facebook's own curve. by late 2008 perfspot was claiming twenty four million members in fifty languages while its actual uk share was falling. the front page carri |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Bebo 📖 2005 - 2014 the social network that owned UK, Ireland, New Zealand, and a few other english-speaking markets from 2005 to 2010. AOL bought it in 2008 for 850 million dollars. AOL ran it badly. they sold it in 2010 for under 10 million. the whitewall feature was specifically british teenage culture. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Xanga 📖 1998 - 2013 dormant the US blog platform that was huge in american high schools from 2002 to 2007. eprops, subscriptions to your friends' blogs, weekly themes, questrings. it ran out of money in 2013 and tried to relaunch as a paid service called xanga 2.0. the relaunch never really worked. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Identi.ca 📖 2008 - 2013 identi.ca was the canadian developer evan prodromou's flagship instance of statusnet, the open-source microblogging server software he originally called laconica. it launched july 2, 2008 and got eight thousand registrations in its first day. it ran the ostatus federation protocol that let any other |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Neighbors 📖 2007 - 2013 sacramento and san carlos got it first, in november 2007, out of a hack day project by a product manager on the yahoo local team. the idea was a discussion board for every town in the united states, bolted onto local search, and yahoo spent a couple of years giving away iphones to seed it one zip co |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
ABC Pool 📖 2008 - 2013 abc pool opened as a public beta in august 2008 inside abc radio national, and asked australians to upload their own audio and photographs under creative commons licenses. the good material was cut into hour-long documentaries and broadcast on 360documentaries, which meant an amateur contribution co |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Weplay 📖 2008 - 2013 weplay was a social network for youth sports, launched in march 2008 by a joint venture of creative artists agency and mlb advanced media with a hedge fund's venture arm putting up the money, and with derek jeter and peyton manning among the athletes backing it. it raised about thirteen million doll |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Upcoming.org 📖 2003 - 2013 upcoming was andy baio's social events calendar from october 2003. you posted an event with a date and a location, your friends could mark themselves as watching or attending. yahoo bought it in october 2005 for about $2m and rebranded it as upcoming.yahoo.com. baio left at the end of his contract i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
schülerVZ 📖 2007 - 2013 schülerVZ was the under-18 social network for the german-speaking world, launched in february 2007 as a sister site to studiVZ. holtzbrinck had bought the studivz network for 85 million euro a few weeks earlier, the high-school spinoff was the next move. it hit 5.4 million members by 2009, almost ev |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Streetfiles 📖 2008 - 2013 a 44,000 euro debt left over from an earlier version of the same project is what closed streetfiles. three berlin developers took the graffiti archive over in 2007, relaunched it in 2008 and grew it to 800,630 photos from 89,476 users at roughly 18,000 visitors a day. the end was announced on 13 mar |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
r/FindBostonBombers 📖 2013 - 2013 opened on 16 april 2013, the day after the boston marathon bombing, by people who thought a few thousand readers looking at the same crowd photographs would get somewhere the fbi had not. it reached 7,240 subscribers and its own sidebar asked everyone to proceed dispassionately. what it produced was |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Formspring 📖 2009 - 2013 formspring was the anonymous question box of the early 2010s. you posted a profile, anyone could ask you anything without showing their name, and the answer stayed pinned to your page. by 2011 it had 25 million users, almost all of them teenagers. the bullying coverage was constant, the company neve |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Is Anybody Down? 📖 2011 - 2013 the federal trade commission is not usually who ends a website, and here it was not the photographs that gave the agency its opening. is anybody down published nude images beside full names and phone numbers, and a removal service run by the same operator charged between two hundred and five hundred |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Avatars 📖 2004 - 2013 yahoo avatars was the cartoon character creator that launched in may 2004 alongside yahoo messenger 6. you built a stylised version of yourself out of preset hair and clothing options, and that avatar showed up on your messenger profile and later your yahoo answers account. marissa mayer announced t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Webcomics Nation 📖 2005 - 2013 webcomics nation was joey manley's webcomic hosting service that launched on 29 july 2005 as a turnkey alternative for cartoonists who did not want to run their own ftp and html templates. it charged seven dollars a month for paid accounts on top of a free ad-supported tier, hit the most-profitable |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
ZUG.com 📖 1995 - 2013 shortly after midnight on 1 april 2013, a comedy site that had been publishing since 1995 took every article and every forum thread offline in one go. zug was john hargrave's, built on pranks he ran himself and on a message board where readers handed each other points for being funny. the closing da |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Message Boards 📖 1997 - 2013 on 1 march 2013 a yahoo corporate blog post listed the products marissa mayer was retiring that spring, and the message boards were on the list. by then almost nobody went there. but for about five years around 2000 the yahoo finance boards were where american retail investors argued about individua |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Loopt 📖 2005 - 2013 loopt was a geosocial network founded by sam altman in 2005 out of y combinator's first batch. it shipped through us carrier partnerships starting with boost mobile in 2006 before moving to sprint and the iphone in 2008. green dot bought it in march 2012 for $43.4 million and shut the consumer app d |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Multiply 📖 2004 - 2013 multiply launched in march 2004 as a US social network for family blogs and photo albums, found a much bigger audience in the philippines and indonesia, and moved its headquarters to jakarta in 2012. that summer the company pivoted away from social entirely to focus on e-commerce. the social feature |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Plixi 📖 2009 - 2013 twitter's updated developer rules are what lockerz pointed at on 15 march 2013 when it closed the plixi photo api, though the product had been dying since june 2011, which is the month twitter started hosting pictures itself. plixi began in san diego in 2009 under the name tweetphoto, back when a tw |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
The Web Standards Project 📖 1998 - 2013 in 1998 a page could render so differently in netscape 4 and internet explorer 4 that professionals shipped two copies of the same site and a script to guess which one you needed. a volunteer coalition formed that august to make it stop, and spent fifteen years leaning on browser vendors and writing |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Ancestry24 📖 2004 - 2013 ancestry24 was the first commercial african genealogy site, launched by media24 in 2004 and built around a researcher in cape town who knew where the paper actually was. it held more than three hundred searchable databases running from parish registers to the slave records at the cape, plus forums a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Freechal 📖 1999 - 2013 freechal launched in 1999 in seoul, founded by jeon wan, a former samsung c&t employee. the name was a portmanteau of "freedom" and "challenge", and the platform's main product was free online communities, the korean equivalent of yahoo groups or msn groups. by the early 2000s the site had grown pas |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Hipster 📖 2011 - 2013 hipster launched in january 2011 as a cryptic teaser site that collected 10000 email signups in two days without telling anyone what it actually did. the team eventually shipped a mobile photo app that turned iphone photos into virtual postcards stamped with the location they were taken. aol acquire |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Menshn 📖 2012 - 2013 louise mensch was a sitting conservative mp when she launched a rival to twitter, which is a sentence that could only have been written in 2012. menshn locked every conversation to one topic and capped posts at 180 characters, on the theory that twitter's problem was drift rather than volume. it rea |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
LinkedIn Answers 📖 2007 - 2013 for six years linkedin had a working question board attached to it. you asked your network something about your industry, strangers holding the same job title answered under their real names, and the asker picked a best answer that added a line of visible expertise to whoever wrote it. the whole thi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Nownuri 📖 1994 - 2013 nownuri was the third of korea's big pc communication services, launched by nowcom in october 1994 and running behind chollian and hitel for its whole life. it was the first korean service to sell a 14,400 bps connection and it carried 1.51 million members in 2000, a generation of students arguing o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Chowk.com 📖 1997 - 2013 a chowk is the square where the roads meet, and the site took the name literally. it launched in 1997 for the fiftieth independence day of india and of pakistan, and for fifteen years it ran essays and forum threads by writers from both countries who were reading each other directly instead of throu |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Proust 📖 2011 - 2013 tom cortese built a place that asked you more than a thousand questions about your own life and filed the answers as chapters of it, and barry diller's iac paid the bills. in january 2012 every user got an email saying the site would close on the 31st. then it did not. proust ran another nineteen mo |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Dipdive 📖 2007 - 2013 a social network built by a musician that had the single biggest video of the 2008 election on it before anybody knew the site existed. four million views landed on dipdive and twenty-two million landed everywhere else, which is the whole story of the place in one ratio. it stayed up for five more y |
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|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Color 📖 2011 - 2012 color was a proximity-based photo-sharing app from bill nguyen and peter pham, launched on march 24, 2011 with $41 million in pre-launch funding from sequoia and bain. the app was built on the assumption that strangers near you would naturally want to share photos, which the actual user behavior did |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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DailyBooth 📖 2009 - 2012 dailybooth was a photoblogging platform built around a single format. one self-portrait per day, with a caption underneath. it launched in february 2009 out of y combinator and pulled three million unique monthly visitors by august of that year. the user base skewed teen and english-speaking. airbnb |
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| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Mixi 📖 2004 - 2012 the japanese social network where almost everyone in the country in their twenties had an account at peak. invitation-only entry, a personal diary page, and ashiato (foot-marks) showing who had visited you. by july 2010 it had over 30 million users in a country of 127 million. smartphones happened, |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Futubra 📖 2012 - 2012 mail.ru built a russian twitter with a two hundred character limit and pictures attached to everything, opened it in january 2012 and closed it in december of the same year. seventeen thousand people signed up on the first day and the number stopped at eighty thousand. halfway through, the team bann |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Ameba Pico 📖 2010 - 2012 ameba pico was the english-language port of cyberagent's ameba pigg virtual world, launched on facebook on 11 march 2010 as the first product of cyberagent's newly opened US subsidiary. it hit one million users inside three months and drew about 1.7 million monthly active users on facebook by mid-20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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PiXA (ピクサ) 📖 2009 - 2012 in july 2011 a row over a contemporary art group's use of pictures posted to pixiv sent japanese illustrators looking for somewhere else to post, and pixa was one of two sites they went to. three days after they arrived it was running emergency maintenance to add servers. sixteen months later its ow |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Zoopy 📖 2006 - 2012 cape town built a south african youtube in 2006 and vodacom liked it enough to buy all of it, in three steps, across two years. in february 2011 the site stopped accepting user uploads and became a place to watch ninety-second clips produced in-house for phones. the founders walked in july 2012 once |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Taiwan Forum 📖 2004 - 2012 over a million taiwanese accounts, and a music section that kept getting the site raided. 台灣論壇 opened in march 2004 and spent eight years as the largest web forum on the island, built to look like the telnet bulletin boards taiwanese students had grown up on. prosecutors seized its servers in decemb |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
MojaGeneracja.pl 📖 2007 - 2012 mojageneracja was the social network the gadu-gadu company built on top of the messenger half of poland already left running all day. it opened in february 2007, you logged in with your gadu-gadu account, and it started life with a built-in country. it grew fast, past five million accounts by the en |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Piczo 📖 2003 - 2012 piczo was the personal-website builder for british 13-16 year olds in the bebo years. jim conning launched it from san francisco in 2003, but the user base ended up almost entirely uk-teen with smaller pockets in france and germany. ten million uniques a month at peak. stardoll bought it in march 20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Sugababes.nl 📖 2001 - 2012 on 3 october 2012 the front page of sugababes.nl reported nine babes and seventeen dudes online. eleven years earlier the same site had been the place dutch teenagers kept their profile, their kudos score and their friend list, and by january 2008 it and its brother site superdudes.nl held more than |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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CubeDuel 📖 2011 - 2012 fifty thousand votes went in on the first day. adam doppelt and tony wright had built hot or not for your own colleagues, with the faces coming straight out of linkedin, and in january 2011 it crossed the american tech industry in about forty-eight hours. the api limits cut it off mid-climb, linkedi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Facebook Questions 📖 2010 - 2012 quora opened to the public in june 2010 and facebook shipped a reply within weeks. questions launched that july as a real question-and-answer product, buckled under its own rollout in august, came back in march 2011 rebuilt as a poll box, and was retired on 19 october 2012 with a line about wanting |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Zune Social 📖 2007 - 2012 microsoft launched zune social in november 2007 as the community layer on top of the zune ecosystem. the zune card, the wireless song passes between devices that let a track play three times over three days before it locked. it ran until 15 october 2012 when the whole zune brand was folded into xbox |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Qaiku 📖 2010 - 2012 a microblog built to save the one it grew up on. when google bought jaiku and let it go stale, a finnish shop called rohea made qaiku to carry the same crowd forward, with a multilingual trick where every post was tagged and searchable by language. it launched in 2010 to a small finnish audience and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Apple Ping 📖 2010 - 2012 apple ping was a social network inside itunes 10. you followed artists and you saw what your friends bought. steve jobs introduced it on 1 september 2010 as sort of like facebook and twitter meet itunes. the facebook integration he demoed was pulled within 24 hours of launch when the licensing talks |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
An Fear Rua 📖 2000 - 2012 liam cahill started an fear rua in september 2000 and ran it for twelve years as the place irish gaelic games argued with itself, in english and in irish, under pseudonyms. it had 10,277 registered members at the end and it lost money every single year, averaging about ten thousand euro of advertisi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Seesmic 📖 2008 - 2012 seesmic was three products in four years. it started in 2008 as a video-comment platform, the founder loïc le meur framed it as a cross between youtube and twitter. when video did not stick it became a twitter dashboard client across desktop and mobile. by 2011 it had pivoted again into a salesforce |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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ZunZuneo 📖 2010 - 2012 usaid hired creative associates international and mobile accord to build a sms-only twitter clone for cuba, routed through a cayman islands shell-company bank account, marketed as a music and sports feed with a plan to slip political content in later. it ran from 2010 to 2012 and reached about 60,00 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Parodius Networking 📖 1994 - 2012 eighteen years of free hosting for emulation pages, nes development documentation and shrines to games nobody else would carry. jeremy chadwick ran parodius out of a colocated box and closed it on 31 august 2012, the last day of the contract on that box. the notice he posted offered to mail any user |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Yahoo Koprol 📖 2009 - 2012 koprol was an indonesian location-based social network built by pt skyeight indonesia, launched in jakarta in february 2009 by satya witoelar with three co-founders. you posted a 200-character status from your phone and saw nearby members on the same block. yahoo acquired the company on may 25 2010 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Diaspora 📖 2010 - 2012 diaspora was the federated alternative to facebook that arrived three years too early. four nyu students kickstarted it in 2010 with a ten thousand dollar goal that cleared two hundred thousand. they never finished it. one of them, ilya zhitomirskiy, died at twenty two during the alpha. the other th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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HiPiHi 📖 2006 - 2012 hipihi was china's second life, founded in beijing in april 2006 by xu hui and rao xuewei, and for about two years it was the project foreign reporters flew in to look at. residents built the world themselves and owned what they built, which was the entire pitch. the beta reached something like fort |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Twick.it 📖 2009 - 2012 twitter's character limit pointed at wikipedia's job. markus möller and sean andrew kollak opened it in november 2009 and asked people to explain anything at all in 140 characters or fewer, then let readers vote the explanations up and down so the best-rated one showed first. it reached more than tw |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
CyberNet Worlds 📖 2000 - 2012 a download counter is the closest thing this place has to a last will. on 19 july 2012 at 11:03:30 somebody pulled cybernet982.exe off the server, the 16,131st copy in the client's lifetime, and within six weeks every file on the host was returning 404. nobody wrote a goodbye. the homepage had alrea |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Free Game Town 📖 2008 - 2012 the oldest thing in the archive is a question with three question marks on it. 정말요금이 안나가나요??? , does it really not cost anything??? the operator's answer, in december 2007, was that both the content fee and the per-packet charge were zero-rated at the network, for as long as you wanted to stay. ktf |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Hashable 📖 2010 - 2012 you met someone, you typed #justmet and their name, and the app remembered the introduction for you. do enough of it and you climbed a leaderboard for your city. michael yavonditte had sold quigo to aol for a reported $340 million three years earlier, so hashable raised about $4 million and spent sx |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Ping.fm 📖 2008 - 2012 ping.fm was the one status update, posted everywhere, before hootsuite and buffer made it a product category. seesmic bought it in january 2010, rebranded it seesmic ping, and closed the original site on 5 july 2012. hootsuite bought seesmic two months later. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Picplz 📖 2010 - 2012 picplz launched in november 2010 out of mixed media labs, the san francisco company run by dalton caldwell after imeem. it was a filtered mobile photo network in the exact slot instagram was filling at the same time. by spring 2011 instagram was already pulling ahead, by april 2012 facebook bought i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Grono.net 📖 2004 - 2012 poland had a social network before nasza-klasa took the country. grono.net was invite-only, the invites traded on auction sites, and for a couple of years before facebook arrived in polish it was the closed garden that everyone wanted in. it ran for eight years on a freemium model, then one day in j |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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aka-aki 📖 2008 - 2012 aka-aki was a berlin startup with an almost romantic idea, that your phone should notice other members standing near you over bluetooth and tell you what you had in common. it ran as a java app on the feature phones of the late 2000s, before the iphone swallowed everything, and over 700,000 people s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Wakoopa 📖 2007 - 2012 wakoopa was a small amsterdam tracker plus social layer. a background agent watched which desktop apps you used and posted the activity to a friend feed. the social product shut down on 30 june 2012 as the company pivoted to market-research clients. it was later bought by netquest in 2014. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Lightbox.com 📖 2011 - 2012 lightbox was an android photo app in the short window when android had almost none. it turned your uploads into a running photo blog, and by late 2011 it was near a million downloads, which for an android-first app back then was real. facebook did not want the app, it wanted the people. in may 2012, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Quepasa 📖 1997 - 2012 quepasa started as a hispanic-targeted web portal in phoenix in 1997, ipo'd on nyse in 1999, crashed with the rest of the dot-com cohort, was revived in the late 2000s as a social network, and reached about 32 million users at peak. in july 2011 it acquired myyearbook for $100 million. in april 2012 |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Eons.com 📖 2006 - 2012 eons.com was jeff taylor's second act after monster.com. it launched in july 2006 as a social network for people over fifty, ran into a wall trying to recreate the early-facebook flow for an older demographic, and got handed to crew media in 2011. by june 2012 the back-end provider walked away from |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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myYearbook 📖 2005 - 2012 three new jersey siblings built it in 2005 during spring break of their sophomore and junior years of high school. it grew into a teen social network with millions of registered users in the us. in june 2012 it was merged with quepasa and rebranded as meetme, and the myyearbook name was retired. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Wikipedia Review 📖 2005 - 2012 wikipedia outlasted its own watchdog by more than a decade. the review opened on proboards in november 2005 and moved to its own domain on 19 february 2006, and for about five years it was where you went to read what wikipedia's administrators were doing to each other. the register credited it with |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Twango 📖 2004 - 2012 twango was a media-sharing site launched in 2004 in redmond, washington by jim laurel with four co-founders out of the local ex-microsoft circle. it supported photos plus video plus audio clips plus pdf documents in a single library, which was unusual for the photo-sharing wave it landed inside. nok |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Yahoo! Meme 📖 2009 - 2012 yahoo meme was a microblogging service launched out of yahoo's brazil office in august 2009 as a hybrid of twitter and tumblr. it started in portuguese, then localized into four other languages over the next two years. it ran as a side bet inside yahoo for almost three years before the company shut |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Plazes 📖 2004 - 2012 a berlin location-aware social before foursquare existed. it sniffed the router's mac address to guess which cafe you were in, then offered to tell twitter and flickr. nokia bought it in 2008 and put it in the maps division. the standalone service ended in may 2012. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Is Anyone Up? 📖 2010 - 2012 is anyone up ran for about eighteen months on one cruel format. somebody submitted a naked photograph of a person they knew, and the site published it next to that person's name and a screenshot of their social media profile. hunter moore took the traffic and told reporters that none of it was his r |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Girls Around Me 📖 2011 - 2012 girls around me was a russian ios app that pulled foursquare check-ins and facebook profiles into a live map of women in your immediate area. it did nothing the public apis of those platforms did not already permit, and that was the whole point of the controversy. cult of mac ran a piece calling it |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Brightkite 📖 2007 - 2012 brightkite was the second wave of check-in apps, the one that came after dodgeball and before foursquare won. you texted your location, the app showed you nearby strangers, and there was a real-time wall of everyone in your area pinging in. by late 2011 the tagline on the homepage was "this is not g |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Brizzly 📖 2009 - 2012 brizzly was the web-based twitter client built by the google reader team after they left google. AOL bought the parent company thing labs in 2010 for around eighteen million dollars and let the product wind down two years later. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Togetherville 📖 2008 - 2012 togetherville was a social network for kids under 13 with the parent acting as gatekeeper. disney bought it in february 2011 and shelved it about a year later. the public beta had run for nine months before the acquisition. almost no public usage data ever surfaced. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Gowalla 📖 2007 - 2012 gowalla was the foursquare alternative for people who cared about how their check-in app looked. illustrated passport pages with custom badges drawn by a real designer in austin, virtual items you collected at landmarks like a national park souvenir book. it was the apps showcase darling at sxsw 201 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Slide.com 📖 2005 - 2012 slide built slideshow widgets and superpoke for myspace and facebook profiles. google bought it in 2010 for $182m and closed it a year later. the widgets had no afterlife and no successor at google. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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iLike 📖 2006 - 2012 hadi and ali partovi launch a music recommendation app in october 2006 with an itunes sidebar that suggests songs based on what you played. they port it to facebook in may 2007 the day facebook opens its platform to outside developers, and within weeks ilike is the largest app on the platform. steve |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Cybertown 📖 1995 - 2012 cybertown was the 3d web before the 3d web stopped being a serious idea. you installed a vrml plugin, you logged into colony city, and a chunky 3d avatar walked you through a 1995 vision of how online life would feel. the plugin industry collapsed. blaxxun sold the property in 2002. integrated virtu |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Muxlim 📖 2006 - 2012 muxlim was a muslim lifestyle social network built in helsinki, aimed mostly at muslims living as a minority in the west. it claimed users across around 190 countries and called itself the most popular muslim lifestyle site online. when the network did not grow the way its backers wanted, it pivoted |
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| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Neogen.ro 📖 2000 - 2012 romania got a home-grown social network and kept it for a decade. neogen ran out of târgu mureș, absorbed the country's school-reunion site and its dating site, took six million euros from tiger global in 2007 and stretched into moldova and bulgaria. then hi5 arrived, then facebook, and in february |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Plancast 📖 2009 - 2012 a social network pointed at the future instead of the past: you posted plans you meant to keep and friends said they were in. a small tech-early-adopter crowd loved it and never grew into a bigger one. in january 2012 the founder wrote a clear-eyed post-mortem and the service was folded into an even |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Jaiku 📖 2006 - 2012 jaiku launched a month before twitter, did the same thing with more features, sold to google in october 2007, then sat inside google for four years not getting any updates. on january 15, 2012 google switched it off. by that point twitter had won and jaiku had been frozen since the acquisition. the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Imbee 📖 2007 - 2012 imbee was the chaperoned-sn experiment for kids 8 to 14, built so parents could approve every connection. january 2008 it settled a 130,000 dollar federal trade commission penalty for taking personal data from 10,500 plus underage users without parental notice. a 2011 relaunch tried to reset the bra |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Ecademy 📖 1998 - 2012 the uk's first social network for business, built by penny and thomas power in 1998, four years ahead of linkedin. it ran as a paid membership club and grew a large claimed headcount on a small base of people who actually paid. when broadcasting beat conversation and linkedin took the category world |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Myartspace 📖 2006 - 2012 an online gallery and social network for working artists, incorporated by catherine mccormack-skiba in 2005 and opened to the public in may 2006. it gave an artist a portfolio page and a way to sell direct to a buyer without a gallery standing in the middle, and it paid out a real scholarship to art |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
ScientificMatch.com 📖 2007 - 2012 nineteen hundred and ninety five dollars, and a cotton swab in the post. eric holzle was a mechanical engineer who had read the immune-gene attraction literature and decided a laboratory could do the choosing better than a bar could, so scientificmatch launched in december 2007, scanned six immunity |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Vodafone 360 📖 2009 - 2011 in 2009 vodafone decided the phone book should belong to the network. 360 pulled your contacts out of facebook and windows live into a single list on the handset and wrapped an app store around it. it launched on two samsung phones running limo, of which about three hundred thousand were sold, and b |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
PostSecret App 📖 2011 - 2011 two million secrets came through it in under four months, and roughly one in a hundred of them was something a volunteer moderator had to delete at four in the morning. frank warren pulled the app from the app store on 28 december 2011, four days later said it was not coming back, and kept the blog |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Google Buzz 📖 2010 - 2011 google's first attempt at a social network. launched inside gmail in february 2010. it auto-followed the people you emailed most, and made that follow list public by default. the privacy backlash was immediate. the lawsuit settlement was 8.5 million. google killed it in october 2011 to make room for |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Anonplus 📖 2011 - 2012 anonplus was the social network that anonymous announced after google+ banned their accounts. it lasted about three weeks as a public site before two separate hacker crews defaced it back to back. the last official update was november 2011 and the domain quietly went away after that. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
WooMe 📖 2007 - 2011 woome launched on stage at the first techcrunch40 in september 2007 with a clean idea: speed dating, but the sessions run in your browser over webcam. european venture money liked it enough to put in around twenty million dollars. by 2011 techcrunch had published a piece calling its own former final |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
MySpace China 📖 2007 - 2011 myspace china, known locally as 聚友网, was news corp's attempt to plant myspace in the one market it most wanted and least understood. it launched in april 2007 as a separately owned chinese company, but it was tied so tightly to the global template that it could never build the localized site the mar |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Weardrobe 📖 2008 - 2011 suzanne xie and rich tong worked out in 2004 that there was no software for organizing your own clothes, and four years later they had a community of fashion bloggers tagging every garment in every photo they posted. like.com bought it in november 2009 for the tagged data, google bought like.com nin |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Days 📖 2006 - 2011 february 2006: yahoo japan launched the american yahoo 360 under its own roof, then ran a public contest to give it a japanese name and came out of it with yahoo days. diaries at the center, small communities around the edge, invitations only until 2008. it closed on 3 october 2011, more than two ye |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Facebook Deals 📖 2011 - 2011 facebook announced a local-coupons pilot at its palo alto office on 3 november 2010 and launched a full groupon competitor on 25 april 2011 in five american cities. it had reached eight by the end of june. on 26 august the company closed it and called the whole thing a test, which is the word you re |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
OpenTory (오픈토리) 📖 2008 - 2011 joongang ilbo poured its own encyclopedias into a modified mediawiki in 2008 and invited the country to maintain them. it ended up the third largest korean-language wiki by article count, at 135,205, with 1,695 registered accounts and eleven administrators doing most of the writing. editing required |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Facebook Places 📖 2010 - 2011 august 2010 was the month facebook decided check-ins were a product. places shipped in the united states with its own tab and a here now list showing who else was standing in the same bar, and the privacy complaints started inside a week. one year later facebook pulled the tab and turned location in |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Baidu Shuoba 📖 2010 - 2011 you could not write a word on it without handing baidu a mobile number and a national id that had to match the public security ministry's database. the verification wall was the entire product: a real-name social platform, launched in september 2010 while sina weibo was busy taking china. mai tian, |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Jumo 📖 2010 - 2011 30 november 2010 to 17 august 2011, which is 260 days, and the most famous thing about jumo is who built it rather than anything it did. chris hughes had co-founded facebook and then run barack obama's online organizing, and what he wanted next was a social network for nonprofits: follow the causes |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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eCRUSH 📖 1999 - 2011 you registered and typed in the name of somebody you could not say it to in person, and ecrush emailed that person to tell them somebody had listed them, without saying who. if they came back and typed your name, the site put you both in what it called the match lounge. if they never did, you stayed |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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BIGADDA 📖 2007 - 2011 bigadda was reliance anil dhirubhai ambani group's attempt at building an indian-language orkut competitor. it launched in august 2007 from mumbai under rajesh sawhney, claimed three million users by november 2008, hosted amitabh bachchan's daily blog as anchor content, and was shut down as a social |
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| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Apberget 📖 2003 - 2011 seven kronor bought a picture of a ski slope, fifteen bought a sports car, and the bill arrived on somebody's parents' phone account. that was the business model of a youth community started in umeå in the autumn of 2003, and it worked well enough that västerbottens-kuriren paid ten million kronor f |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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ai sp@ce 📖 2008 - 2011 three islands and an akihabara you could walk around, and somewhere on them a room shared with a heroine rented from a visual novel. dwango opened ai sp@ce on 15 october 2008, put a niconico account in front of the entrance, capped it at 53,000 people at once and closed it on 30 june 2011. the chara |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Watwet 📖 2007 - 2011 the last thing watwet ever served was a goodbye written twice, once in arabic and once in english, with a jordanian phone number under it. amman had built the arab world an arabic-first twitter and run it for three years, right to left, with a dialect picker where other services put a language menu. |
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| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Salon Table Talk 📖 1995 - 2011 one of the oldest conversation spaces on the web, born the same day salon.com was and modeled on the well. it ran threaded discussion for sixteen years, which on the internet is close to geological time. an aging codebase and a paywall slowly boxed it in, and its loyal crowd was always too small to |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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StarWars.com Forums 📖 2001 - 2011 444,520 messages sat in the cantina alone, and the cantina was one board out of roughly 193. lucasfilm opened the official star wars message boards on 9 october 2001, between the first two prequels, ran them on jive software for the better part of a decade, stopped accepting new posts at the end of |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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MySpace (the real one) 📖 2003 - 2011 the real myspace, before justin timberlake bought it and turned it into a music site. peak 2005 to 2008. your top 8 friends list was a public love letter and a public knife fight. profile songs auto-played at 3am. tom is still your friend. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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MyBlogLog 📖 2005 - 2011 mybloglog was the widget that showed tiny avatars of the last people who had visited your blog, sitting in the sidebar of half the wordpress and typepad sites of 2007. eric marcoullier and todd sampson founded it in january 2005. yahoo acquired the company in january 2007 for around ten million doll |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Blippy 📖 2009 - 2011 a palo alto startup pitched a social feed for purchases, you link a credit card, it posts what you buy for your followers to see. the investors were the usual valley names, the users never got past 100k, and in april 2010 four full card numbers leaked into google's index because someone had put them |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Lulu Poetry 📖 2009 - 2011 fourteen million poems were deleted on 4 may 2011, three weeks after the people holding them said they would be. lulu.com had bought poetry.com in 2009 from the vanity anthology operation that spent the nineties charging amateur poets to see their own work in hardback. archive team got maybe a few p |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Whrrl 📖 2007 - 2011 whrrl was pelago's location-based check-in app built out of seattle by ex-amazon engineers jeff holden and darren vengroff. it launched in october 2007 as a geosocial discovery product and pushed three major versions through 2010 before pelago rebranded it as a story-and-society-rewards experience. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Yahoo Buzz 📖 2008 - 2011 yahoo buzz launched in february 2008 as a community-curated news front page where users could vote stories up and down, with a buzz button that publishers could embed on articles to feed the queue. it was a digg clone with the yahoo front page as a megaphone. for a while a buzz spike could send a fe |
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| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Encyclopedia Dramatica 📖 2004 - 2011 on 14 april 2011 sherrod degrippo pointed encyclopediadramatica.com at a clean new site called oh internet and said shock for shock's sake was old. the wiki she had started in december 2004, as a home for livejournal drama, had become the reference book of early 4chan culture. fans rebuilt it from g |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Blink 📖 2002 - 2011 oslo, 1 february 2002: a norwegian newspaper opened a social network before english had settled on a word for one. blink was built inside db medialab, dagbladet's development arm, and it grew to 300,000 registered users across more than 44,000 groups. the developer who wrote it left in 2006 and buil |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Plastic.com 📖 2001 - 2011 plastic was a community link aggregator launched in january 2001 by automatic media, the umbrella that briefly held feed and suck.com after both webzines folded into one company. four-person editorial team, joey anuff in chief. it lost its parent six months in and kept going for another decade on vo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Portal of Evil 📖 1999 - 2011 portal of evil was a catalog of the weirdest personal websites on the internet, built in cleveland in late 1999 by k. thor jensen and chet faliszek, with a forum attached that took each entry apart. the one rule that held for eleven years was that you never contacted the person you were laughing at. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Drunk Duck 📖 2002 - 2011 drunk duck was a free webcomic hosting platform dylan squires launched in 2002. the name came from a friend's drawing of squires' dead pet duck. by the mid 2000s it was one of the larger free hosts on the english webcomic web, sitting next to keenspace and webcomics nation. platinum studios acquired |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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GLEE.com 📖 2007 - 2011 glee.com launched in february 2007 as community connect's lgbt social network. it was the last addition to the same portfolio that already ran blackplanet for black users and asianavenue for the asian-american college diaspora. radio one bought community connect in april 2008 for thirty-eight millio |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Yahoo Pulse 📖 2010 - 2011 yahoo pulse was a june 6 2010 rename of yahoo profiles, launched as part of yahoo's facebook integration push under carol bartz. it offered a single dashboard for managing linked social accounts, posting status updates across yahoo properties. viewing the facebook newsfeed inside yahoo mail. the int |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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ChinaRen 📖 1999 - 2011 a stanford-alumni founder trio built china's first mainstream campus community in 1999. sohu bought them in september 2000 for around thirty million dollars in stock and then never really invested. by the time renren arrived to eat the same market, chinaren had already been quietly folded into a soh |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Mynet Sohbet 📖 1999 - 2011 mynet sohbet was where turkish people talked to strangers before facebook arrived and made everyone use their real name. rooms sorted by city and by age, moderators with actual titles, all of it running in a browser window so it worked on any machine in any internet cafe. mynet was the country's fir |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Teen Second Life 📖 2005 - 2010 linden lab ran two worlds for almost six years, one for adults and one for anybody aged thirteen to seventeen, and the teenagers got the smaller one with the stricter rules. it had schools on it, roughly fifty thousand registered residents by 2009, and a standing ban on any adult who had not passed |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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BookArmy 📖 2009 - 2010 a publisher's attempt to own the place where readers talk about books. harpercollins uk built it with a partner in february 2009 and filled it with pages for around six million titles and authors, running on nielsen data, with a video channel for author interviews bolted on a month later. it lasted |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Nettby 📖 2006 - 2010 nettby was the norwegian social network that schibsted's vg multimedia opened september 14 2006 as a community layer next to the vg.no tabloid. members used pseudonyms not real names, profiles were sorted by city. peak membership crossed 980,000 in january 2009 making it norway's second-largest onli |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Kashless.org 📖 2008 - 2010 martin tobias could not give away a weight bench. three people said they wanted it and none of them turned up, and the company he built out of that annoyance spent two years trying to make free stuff work like a proper marketplace, with reputation scores and a receipt for your taxes. it counted half |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Rakuten Links 📖 2006 - 2010 it was labeled beta on the day it opened and it was still labeled beta four and a half years later when rakuten turned it off. 楽天広場リンクス started on 27 march 2006, a social network bolted onto the side of rakuten's blog host, with user-made communities and a thirty-question compatibility quiz that sco |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Cliqset 📖 2009 - 2010 darren bounds and charlie cauthen built cliqset in jacksonville, florida, and pointed it at a problem everybody agreed was real: your posts were scattered across eighty services and nothing collected them. it was one of the first products anywhere to ship pubsubhubbub and salmon in production, which |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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BrightFuse 📖 2009 - 2010 careerbuilder made its money selling job listings and access to resumes. in august 2009 it launched a free professional network where none of that was for sale, ran it for fifteen months, and switched it off in november 2010 with no announcement at all. a hundred thousand people had signed up. the l |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Revolution Muslim 📖 2007 - 2010 a handful of people in new york ran a website for three years that american law enforcement repeatedly described as protected speech, and then a hosting company ended it in an afternoon. the site went off in november 2010, days after a user posted a list of british members of parliament, when the ho |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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12seconds.tv 📖 2008 - 2010 12seconds.tv was a video status service built around one rule, a clip of twelve seconds or less. it launched in 2008 and leaned hard on twitter, posting your video out to your followers the way twitter posted your text. the idea was early and mostly right, but the phones of 2008 were not ready to sh |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Avatars United 📖 2008 - 2010 a group of swedish friends who played games together built a social network for the characters rather than the people behind them. your profile was an avatar tied to whichever of about ninety virtual worlds it lived in, and it could pull real data from the world of warcraft armory or the eve online |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Hot Potato 📖 2009 - 2010 justin shaffer left major league baseball's website in 2008 and built an app that asked what you were doing instead of where you were standing. hot potato went live from brooklyn in november 2009 on $1.42 million and was gone ten months later. the eight of them went to facebook for a reported ten mi |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Kuvalauta 📖 2007 - 2010 finland's imageboard for three years, run by somebody calling himself gabo whose real name has never been published. it sat inside the country's two hundred most visited sites and produced the kind of news that makes a hosting provider nervous, ending with a hundred and twenty thousand stolen passwo |
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| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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LunarStorm 📖 2000 - 2010 swedish teenagers had their own pre-facebook social network for a decade. lunarstorm opened on the first of january 2000, peaked at 1.2 million members with seventy percent of them under eighteen, and got eaten by the same global wave that ate every other regional teen platform. the concurrent onlin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Amebata Kaigi 📖 2008 - 2010 dating-site and adult operators killed it, and cyberagent said so in the shutdown notice rather than reaching for the usual line about low usage. amebata kaigi opened on 11 march 2008 as a message board inside ameba that used ajax to feel more like a chat room than a forum, with thirteen categories |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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DontDateHimGirl.com 📖 2005 - 2010 in february 2006 the new york times called it a dating credit report, which was the founder's own phrase and the entire pitch. tasha joseph ran a miami site where any woman could post a man's photograph and an accusation, with no verification and no workable way for him to get it taken down. the law |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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JournoList 📖 2007 - 2010 ezra klein started a private google group in february 2007 so that a few hundred american political writers could argue with each other off the record. he vetted every member and kept conservatives out on the grounds that the thread would otherwise turn into a permanent fight. it grew to about 400 p |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Hatena World 📖 2007 - 2010 one hundred beta invitations went out on 13 december 2007 and were gone in sixty-seven minutes. what they bought you was a paper-thin avatar you had drawn yourself, standing on a google map of the actual planet, with a blue circle on the ground around your feet that you could make bigger or smaller. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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(Lil) Green Patch 📖 2008 - 2010 a garden that lived on your facebook profile, watered by clicking, growing faster when your friends clicked too. in september 2008 it was the single most used application on the platform, ahead of texas hold'em poker, and by december 6.3 million people a month were tending one. the clicking was conv |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Snyggast.se 📖 2001 - 2010 upload your face, get a number between one and ten back from strangers. swedish teenagers did that from january 2001, and 318,000 of them passed through in a single month of 2003. a modem dialer scandal came first, then in 2009 both a grooming panic and a premium sms subscription nobody had been tol |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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FitFinder 📖 2010 - 2010 a computer science undergraduate at ucl put up a page in april 2010 where you could post, anonymously, the location and description of someone you had noticed on campus. it had two thousand users within hours and covered fifty-two universities inside a month. the london school of economics warned it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Radar.net 📖 2006 - 2010 radar was mobile photo sharing in 2006, built for phones that took bad pictures and moved them by mms. you shared to a small circle instead of to the public, and people talked about the picture inside the app rather than under it on a web page. tiny pictures raised eleven point two million dollars f |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Essembly 📖 2005 - 2010 17,000 registered users in july 2006 was the high-water mark, reported by newsweek, and it tells you how small this stayed. joe green built it in 2005 around resolves: one-line ideological statements that everyone voted on four ways, with the votes adding up to a number measuring how close you sat t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Facebook Lite (2009) 📖 2009 - 2010 eight months and three countries. facebook shipped a stripped down version of itself in 2009 for people whose connections could not carry the real one, then folded it back into the main site on 20 april 2010 with almost no explanation and no published numbers. the idea was not wrong. the name came b |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Vivaty 📖 2008 - 2010 vivaty grew out of media machines, the company built around flux, an x3d and vrml viewer that ran as a browser plugin, and it renamed itself in may 2008 to sell something friendlier than a standards implementation. the product was a 3d room you decorated and stood in as an avatar, and its one real i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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The Daily Jolt 📖 2000 - 2010 between 2000 and 2010 the daily jolt ran a separate website for each of more than a hundred colleges in the united states and canada. one page carried the weather and the movie listings for that campus, plus a ride board and an anonymous forum where the actual traffic was. it was kept up by student |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Snapvine 📖 2005 - 2010 snapvine put a phone line on a profile page. you called a number and punched in a code, and your voice landed on somebody's myspace page as a player that anybody could press. neither side ever saw the other's number, which was the whole trick. it reached about five million installs by late 2007 and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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CURURU 📖 2005 - 2010 nhn japan arrived in japan with three products and by the summer of 2005 the search engine and the portal were both already closed. what was left got rebuilt as cururu, a blog stapled to a social network, carrying four hundred thousand inherited accounts. it never made money. the company announced t |
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| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Playahead 📖 1998 - 2010 playahead was sweden's teenage internet. originally hångelguiden in 1998, rebranded playahead in 2000, profile pages and interest-based teams for swedish high schoolers across the 2000s. peak claim was 2.9 million members. shut march 1 2010 when facebook had already absorbed the teen audience. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Frappr 📖 2005 - 2010 one of the first google maps mashups, a widget your group embedded to pin everyone on a shared map. kun gao built it in 2005 and platial bought it in 2007. google maps slowly made the whole category pointless, and platial closed frappr in march 2010, going to the deadpool the same year. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Spymac 📖 2001 - 2010 in april 2004 a mac rumor board started handing out one gigabyte mailboxes while gmail was still invite-only, and six hundred thousand people showed up for it. then it redesigned, and redesigned again, until the front page was a video contest nobody had asked for. the page went empty in march 2010 a |
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| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Macteens 📖 1998 - 2010 on 3 january 2010 the site went offline so that it could be rebuilt. the status blog set up to chronicle the rebuild managed four posts, the last of them in april, written on a brand new ipad. after that the address served one line of text for five years, "returning soon. seriously.", until the doma |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Yonja 📖 2003 - 2010 yonja was the first dominant turkish-language social network. founded by kerim baran in san francisco on 1 february 2003, it ran with an english-only ui for the first two years and still became the most- trafficked website in turkey by 2005. by 2008 it had taken a $12.5m series a from greywolf and t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Disaboom 📖 2006 - 2010 disaboom was the us social network for people with disabilities. founded in september 2006 in lone tree, colorado by dr. j. glen house with co-founder j.w. roth. peaked at around 90,000 registered accounts with 21,000 daily visits by july 2008. the publicly traded otc shell ran on advertising revenu |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Quechup 📖 2007 - 2010s idate corporation, a las vegas web shop, launched quechup as a small social network with a "check for contacts" button that read the whole address book and shipped invites to every address inside without a second confirmation. by september 2007 the platform had spam-bombed enough professional inboxe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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yfly 📖 2006 - 2010 a social network for american teenagers, launched by nick lachey in 2006 with a wall of celebrity accounts and a heavy layer of safety features. it wanted to be the wholesome place kids went instead of myspace, watched over by parents and safety consultants. teenagers did not want to be watched, and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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1ch.tv 📖 2001 - 2010 kazuhiko nishi looked at 2channel in 2001 and said in public that no board that rude should be allowed to exist. its users told him to go and build a better one, so he did. 1ch.tv opened on 5 october 2001 with an editor on every board and a plan to charge five to ten yen a read. the posting scripts |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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Sezam 📖 1989 - 2009 one phone line in belgrade, answering at all hours from november 1989, and the two men who built it decided it would be about conferences rather than file downloads. that choice is why sezam mattered: tens of thousands of people in yugoslavia talked to each other on it through the wars and the sanct |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! World of Star Wars 📖 2007 - 2009 yahoo spent the last quarter of 2009 deleting things. geocities went in october, and seven weeks later the star wars site went the same way, with thirty days of notice and a redirect to starwars.com waiting at the other end. archive team pulled 99.9% of the user pages out before the switch-off by ro |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Favrd 📖 2008 - 2009 dean allen pulled it offline on a sunday in december 2009 and left a note saying stars on twitter had become take-out menus hung on the doors of other restaurants. favrd had spent nineteen months ranking tweets by how many people had starred them, back when that was the only way to find the funny on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Cyworld US 📖 2006 - 2009 in korea, cyworld had something like nine out of ten people under twenty. sk telecom opened a thirty-person office in san francisco in 2006 and shipped the same product in english, minihomes and acorns and all, and americans looked at it and did not see the point. the fatal decision was structural r |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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Kinugasa 📖 2004 - 2009 kazuma ieiri put a fake signup page for a social network on his own blog in may 2004, as a joke. people tried to join it, and were annoyed to find there was nothing there, so he built the thing. kinugasa opened on 25 june, free and invitation-only, named after a mushroom because the mushroom sounded |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Bombagyár 📖 2007 - 2009 registration required a real name and a home address, which is an odd door policy for a site whose entire pitch was that it would host the people nobody else would host. polgár tamás ran bombagyár from august 2007 on a donated server named after a habsburg cruiser, with a weekly radio show and a tor |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Hell.com 📖 1995 - 2009 kenneth aronson registered hell.com in august 1995 and ran it for fourteen years as a gated online art project involving roughly fifty new media artists across twenty countries. four canonical exhibitions, a members-only tier, a soul-redemption donation ladder, and a front door that told you you wer |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Rupture 📖 2006 - 2009 shawn fanning's second act, built for a game i never played. rupture watched your world of warcraft characters and pushed the profiles out to a social layer around the game. ea bought it for thirty million in 2008, then folded fanning and his whole team into a layoff round a year later. the site red |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
livedoor キーワード 📖 2006 - 2009 eight weeks after prosecutors arrested takafumi horie, and less than four weeks before the tokyo exchange threw his company off the board, livedoor shipped a user-edited keyword encyclopedia. it opened on 20 march 2006, read japanese blogs to work out which words were having a day, and let anybody w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
NewsFutures 📖 2000 - 2009 over 120,000 events were listed as tradable contracts on newsfutures between september 2000 and october 2009, and not one dollar changed hands on any of them. it was a free play-money prediction market that emile servan-schreiber and maurice balick ran in three languages at once, and its most useful |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Ameba Requestion 📖 2008 - 2009 cyberagent spent a year and a half running a market where the thing for sale was an answer. you listed what you knew as a リクミィ, priced in amegold, ameba's own currency, and a buyer paid to open a page that only the two of you could read. ja.wikipedia describes it as the opposite inclination to yahoo |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
S! Town (S!タウン) 📖 2006 - 2009 october 2006 is when softbank put a town inside the handset. the app sat under the communication menu on nearly every 3g phone the carrier sold, you picked one of eleven characters, and you got a room you were free to redecorate. the service itself carried no information charge and the packet traffi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Susning.nu 📖 2001 - 2009 susning.nu was a swedish wiki that lars aronsson started in 2001, back when swedish wikipedia was not yet worth reading, and for three years it was the larger of the two. at its height in april 2004 it held over sixty thousand articles, written in the open by whoever showed up. that same month a van |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Outpost Gallifrey 📖 1995 - 2009 outpost gallifrey was the long-running doctor who fan site shaun lyon launched on 11 december 1995 from los angeles. it ran episode guides and reviews under a daily news column, with a discussion forum that grew to over forty thousand registered members by 2009. the forum closed on 31 july 2009 afte |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Kotaete Net 📖 2002 - 2009 the upgrade was meant to fix the complaint that the site went slow when too many people were on it. microsoft took kotaete net down on 30 june 2006 for five days of migration and it came back 105 days later, in october, as a restricted beta you could reach only on weekdays between nine and seven, wi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! 360° 📖 2005 - 2009 yahoo 360 was yahoo's social network in the years yahoo was supposed to be turning into a portal company. it launched in march 2005 in eight countries and never caught on in any of the western ones. it ended up being where vietnamese internet culture lived for four years instead. yahoo killed it on |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Fanfou 📖 2007 - 2009 fanfou was the first chinese twitter clone. it launched in beijing in may 2007 from the same wang xing team behind xiaonei, and it grew to nearly a million accounts by june 2009. the july 7 2009 censorship kill landed during the ürümqi riots, when one user posted 140 updates from the scene that fanf |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
.Mac Groups 📖 2005 - 2009 the least advertised thing in a .mac subscription was groups. you invited a few people, and apple handed the set of you a private website with a message board that doubled as a mailing list. it ran from 2005 until 7 july 2009, when the features simply stopped working and whatever had been posted was |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
CompuServe CB Simulator 📖 1980 - 2009 cb simulator was the first widely-available public chatroom on a commercial network. sandy trevor wrote it at compuserve and put it live on 21 february 1980. it used citizens-band radio as the metaphor, with channels and squelch and tune commands, because cb was the social network most americans und |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Hainei 📖 2007 - 2009 on 16 november 2007 wang xing opened hainei, a real-name network for people who had outgrown the campus site he had sold the year before. kaixin001 arrived four months later with parking games and took the office crowd. hainei ran on the same servers as fanfou, so when fanfou was switched off in jul |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
PlanetOut 📖 1995 - 2009 planetout started in august 1995 as a forum on the microsoft network, run by tom rielly, and spent the next decade absorbing the rest of american gay media around it: gay.com in 2000, the advocate and out magazine in 2005. in october 2004 it became the first company built for a gay audience to list |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Langmaker 📖 1996 - 2009 jeffrey henning ran a newsletter about invented languages from 1995 and turned it into the website that became the directory of the whole hobby, the place where you listed your conlang and posted your translation of the babel text alongside everybody else's. he opened it to community editing as a wi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Cafesta 📖 2002 - 2009 in december 2008 the operators of cafesta emailed every member to say the site could not continue as it was, and would people consider buying an avatar. it was a japanese avatar portal with about 1.8 million cumulative registrations, most of them young and all of them raised on it being free. the ap |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Trusera 📖 2007 - 2009 trusera was built on the idea that the useful thing is not a diagnosis but somebody who has already been through it. keith schorsch started it in seattle after a friend's phone call caught his lyme disease, and it opened to the public in june 2008 selling a trademarked phrase for what it did, the po |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
4LEAF (포립) 📖 2000 - 2009 the name is the four-leaf clover, and the idea in 2000 was a single address where softmax's boxed-game buyers and its online players would end up in the same room. the closed beta opened on 2 march that year. the downloadable client died in february 2004, the browser version it had turned into carri |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Mugshot 📖 2006 - 2009 red hat's attempt at an open-source social network, a feed that pulled together the music you played and the sites you shared and showed it to people with the same tastes. it never escaped the linux enthusiast crowd while the mainstream feeds were building the same idea for everyone else. red hat le |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
S! Loop (S!ループ) 📖 2006 - 2009 a japanese phone company built a small social network inside its handset browser and then opened it to its two competitors' customers, which almost nobody did before or after. you kept a diary that only registered friends could open, and you ran a board for a circle of them. emoji were passed throug |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Truemors 📖 2007 - 2009 three hours after it opened somebody hacked it, and thirty six hours after that yahoo threw it off small business hosting for using too much bandwidth. guy kawasaki had spent 12,107 dollars and nine cents building a place where anyone could post a rumor, and then published the bill line by line, whi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
MSN Groups 📖 1995 - 2009 msn groups was the bureaucratic floor of the msn building. you got a shared message board, a small file storage area, a member list, and a url under groups.msn.com. it broke out of msn communities around 1998-99 when the make-your-own-group form arrived. microsoft announced the kill in october 2008 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Enjoy Japan 📖 2002 - 2009 naver opened enjoy japan in june 2002 as a bulletin board with japanese and korean machine translation running underneath every post, so that neither side had to learn the other's language to argue with it. the japanese-facing half was called enjoy korea and its regulars nicknamed it enkori. for sev |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Wikitruth 📖 2006 - 2009 jimmy wales called it a hoax and said whoever ran it had almost certainly been banned. the people running it said the opposite, that several of them were sitting administrators, and the evidence was the site itself: pages nobody without admin rights could have read. wikitruth spent three years archi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
JuicyCampus 📖 2007 - 2009 juicycampus was an anonymous college gossip board that ran from 2007 to 2009 and turned american campuses into a comment war. matt ivester, a duke graduate, built it so students could post about each other with no name attached, and predictably it filled with cruelty. schools banned it and two state |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Dodgeball 📖 2000 - 2009 dodgeball was a check-in-by-sms service that ran from 2000 to 2009. dennis crowley and alex rainert built it at nyu and ran it as an indie startup until google bought it in may 2005. they watched google fail to ship a meaningful update for two years and left the company in 2007. google announced the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
STAR-BEACH 📖 1999 - 2009 starbeach was a message board for japanese phones where you posted asking for someone to write to you. no fee, no app, no computer involved, just a handset and a carrier page. at its height it was taking twelve million accesses a day and four hundred and fifty million a month. the amended dating-sit |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
TOTSE 📖 1989 - 2009 jeff hunter and j.c. stanton opened & the temple of the screaming electron as a dial-up bbs in 1989 under the nirvananet umbrella, focused on a growing archive of text files covering drugs, weapons, conspiracy, and the wider gray-area knowledge category that the early bbs scene specialized in. t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Ficlets 📖 2006 - 2009 an aol system architect built a writing site with a byte ceiling on it. you got between 64 and 1,024 bytes, and anybody who read your story could bolt a prequel or a sequel onto either end of it. the archive grew sideways into chains nobody had planned. about 49,000 stories came out of it in two yea |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
JPG Magazine 📖 2004 - 2009 jpg was a photography magazine that let its readers make it. you uploaded photos and the community voted the best ones into a printed issue you could buy on a shelf. it was funded on cnet money in 2006 and looked, for a while, like a new way to run a magazine. the parent company ran out of money in |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Veropedia 📖 2007 - 2009 a free advertising-supported encyclopedia that wrote nothing of its own. a small invited group of wikipedia editors picked articles that already met a standard and posted a frozen copy with the non-free images taken out. by october 2008 it held about 5,800 of them. the content came down that decembe |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Konceptzia 📖 1999 - 2009 israel, 1999: a magazine about how to build websites, written in hebrew for the people building them. konceptzia ran ten years at exego.net and spun off more than it ever published, including a blogging system called reshimot that ended up carrying novelists and academics, and a hand-kept directory |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Duepuntozero 📖 2004 - 2009 two sixteen-year-olds in milan built a social network in 2004 that had public likes on photographs and a one-way follow, years before instagram existed. it reached half a million users and the ninth most visited position in italy. then the founder brought in partners to make it a real company, the s |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Insoshi 📖 2007 - 2009 in december 2007 two former college roommates moved to silicon valley for y combinator's winter batch to build an open source social network in ruby on rails. insoshi was mit licensed and briefly one of the most forked projects on a github that was itself only months old. the round they had nearly c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Guerrilla News Network 📖 2000 - 2009 gnn published by vote. anyone with an account got a blog, anyone could submit an article, and the front page was decided by readers whose ballots weighed more the more they had published. the new york company behind it made short films, two documentaries and music videos between 2000 and 2009, then |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Names Database 📖 2003 - 2008 names database launched in 2003 with an offer stated plainly on the front page: hand over the email addresses of people you know and we will help you find the people looking for you. gabriel weinberg built it, sold the parent company to classmates.com for about ten million dollars in march 2006, and |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
CastleCops 📖 2002 - 2008 paul laudanski took a job at microsoft in june 2008 and nobody took his. six months later the volunteer security community he and robin had run since 2002 posted four sentences on christmas eve and stopped. it had survived years of denial of service attacks from the criminals it was working against. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Flip.com 📖 2007 - 2008 condé nast spent two years trying to build a place where american teenage girls would make digital scrapbooks and show them to each other. flip.com came out of condénet in february 2007 and went into a budget review in november 2008. on 2 december it was told it had two weeks left. the email flip se |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Pownce 📖 2007 - 2008 twitter rival from 2007. made by kevin rose (digg), leah culver, and daniel burka. you could share short messages, files, links, events. cleaner interface than twitter at the time. invite-only. lasted 18 months. sold to six apart in december 2008 and shut down within weeks. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Kickstart 📖 2007 - 2008 yahoo kickstart was yahoo's 2007 attempt at a college alumni professional network. undergraduates got automatically placed into their university's page and could connect with working alumni in their field. yahoo offered a $25,000 bounty to the school that signed up the most alumni before the end of |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Crnogorska Enciklopedija 📖 2006 - 2008 an ngo in podgorica spent two years writing an encyclopedia in montenegrin because the wikimedia foundation had turned the language down twice. the counter on the front page read 3,005 articles on 17 december 2008, up from about a thousand that january, and the banner above it still said 2008 would |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
frepa 📖 2005 - 2008 livedoor built a social network that resembled mixi so closely the resemblance is the first thing anyone wrote about it, and then in november 2005 it did the one thing mixi would not do: it let you sign up without an invitation. that was the entire difference and it was enough, carrying frepa to aro |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
megabbs 📖 2000 - 2008 the man who ran it quit because the police kept calling. megabbs was a 2channel clone that opened on 3 june 2000 and closed without warning eight and a half years later, and the reason its founder gave was that almost every request for investigative cooperation he handled turned out to be about a sc |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
ABBAMAIL 📖 1997 - 2008 two men in sydney who had run the australian abba fan club from 1976 to 1983 started a mailing list on 13 january 1997, because the list that already existed moderated too hard. it grew into a web site with a shop attached and six fan conventions. the audiophiles on it complained about the 1997 rema |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Bolt.com 📖 1996 - 2008 bolt was one of the first sites to hand every teenager a real page of their own. it ran for over a decade as a us teen-and-college community. a 2006 universal music lawsuit over user videos pushed it into bankruptcy, and after two short revival attempts the site died with no successor brand. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
DarkMarket 📖 2005 - 2008 an fbi agent working out of pittsburgh spent two years inside the biggest english-language carding forum in the world as master splyntr, a spammer with moderator rights, and when rival forums attacked the site he offered to host it himself. the servers were the bureau's from late 2006 onward. renuka |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Mash 📖 2007 - 2008 yahoo mash was the social network where your friends could edit your profile unless you blocked them. it was yahoo's fourth swing at the category after 360 and two failed acquisitions, lived about a year, and shut on september 28, 2008. by the time anyone in turkey would have heard about it the invi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
TagWorld 📖 2005 - 2008 tagworld was a 2005 myspace clone built by evan rifkin and fred krueger in los angeles, with a wysiwyg page editor and a widget platform that let users embed third party blocks. draper fisher jurvetson funded the early rounds. viacom came in for forty million dollars of minority investment in early |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Wallop 📖 2003 - 2008 wallop started in 2003 as a microsoft research social-network experiment, spun out as a silicon valley startup on 25 april 2006 with karl jacob as ceo, and ran an invite-only flash-based beta against friendster and the early facebook. the beta closed on 18 september 2008 and the company pivoted to b |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
6nergies.net 📖 2004 - 2008 the first professional social network in france, built by alain lefebvre from 2004 and named after the six degrees of separation. it reached more than 20,000 members by 2007 and declared 10,484 euros of revenue the year before, most of it from about 160 people paying thirty euros a year to belong to |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Consumating 📖 2005 - 2008 consumating threw out the dating profile form and replaced it with tags. you described yourself in words and other people added words to you, and whatever vocabulary you turned out to share with a stranger was the entire matching engine. it came out of a zine personals section run by ben brown and a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Capazoo 📖 2006 - 2008 capazoo raised more than twenty-five million dollars and never got past ten thousand users. the montreal site paid you for posting, in a currency called zoops worth one american cent each, redeemable through a debit card the company mailed out. two brothers ran it, and by early 2008 they were suing |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Talk City 📖 1996 - 2008 talk city launched in july 1996 as a chat service from liveworld productions, a campbell california startup founded by peter friedman and jenna woodul out of the former apple eworld team. the product was moderated kid-safe rooms plus scheduled celebrity events, not the irc free-for-all that aol chat |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
ConnectU 📖 2004 - 2008 the winklevoss twins started designing harvardconnection with their classmate divya narendra in december 2002. they brought mark zuckerberg onto the project in november 2003 and gave him access to the codebase. zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com on february 4, 2004. their own site finally shipped a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
ezboard 📖 1996 - 2008 ezboard was a free hosted-forum platform vanchau nguyen launched in 1996, written in smalltalk visualworks 3.1 with jay o'connor on a flat-file object store. it peaked in 2001 as one of the top fifty most-visited websites on the internet on the back of thousands of fan and hobby forums. the company |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Sconex 📖 2004 - 2008 sconex was a dorm-built high-school sn that timed its 2004 launch correctly, scaled to half a million registered users on word of mouth, and sold to alloy for over six million dollars in march 2006. eighteen months after that, with facebook open to high schoolers and myspace running the music side, |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
eConozco 📖 2003 - 2007 econozco was the spanish professional network from grupo galenicom, running from 2003 to 2007 as one of the earliest linkedin-shaped products in a non-english market. xing bought the parent group in march 2007 with about 150,000 members. by october of the same year the standalone product was gone, w |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
FuckedCompany.com 📖 2000 - 2007 fuckedcompany was a dot-com dead pool launched in may 2000 by philip j kaplan, who posted as pud. the site let users wager on which companies would fail next and aggregated anonymous tips from insiders about layoffs and missed payroll right before the press releases went out. at peak in 2000-2001 it |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Osiolki.net 📖 2003 - 2007 internet explorer losing its majority is what ended osiolki.net, which has to be one of the stranger causes of death on this site. four people out of the polish opera community started it in may 2003 to keep a public blacklist of pages that worked in exactly one browser, and then spent three and a h |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Asoblog 📖 2006 - 2007 the answer nhn japan found to the problem of having nothing to blog about was to make the blog a byproduct. you finished a round of mahjong or a hand of daifugo and your own page opened by itself with the score already written into it. about thirty games sat behind it, aimed at office workers in the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Foetry.com 📖 2004 - 2007 foetry.com spent three years reading the winner lists and the judge lists of american poetry book contests and matching the names against each other. it found judges giving prizes to their own students and to people they were about to marry, published the connections with dates attached, and got cal |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Socialite Rank 📖 2006 - 2007 an anonymous blog that put twenty young manhattan socialites in numbered order every two weeks, from april 2006 to april 2007. the women in the rankings read it, which is the only reason it had any power at all, and it did enough damage that one father put a lawyer on it. it closed on its own schedu |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Hitel 📖 1992 - 2007 hitel was the largest of the four services that were the korean internet before the korean internet, a dial-up world of message boards and clubs you reached by pointing a terminal program at 01410. it began in 1986 as a prestel service run by a newspaper, took the hitel name in july 1992, and is rep |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
livedoor Free BBS 📖 2000 - 2007 new boards stopped on 30 november 2004 and the service went on serving the old ones for another twenty-six months without ever saying it was dying. livedoor had been giving away message boards since late 2000, the pitch being that you got a fast one with no cgi knowledge and no server of your own. t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Emulation Zone 📖 1996 - 2006 dormant started on 28 august 1996 as a bet among friends over who could build the best website, and it won by still being there ten years later. andy wolan, who signed everything NO CARRIER, ran the zone through the ultrahle panic and the legal threats and two attempts at retiring, then posted "all good thi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Hogwarts.nu 📖 2001 - 2006 700,000 accounts, which in a 2004 survey put a harry potter fan site third in all of sweden, behind lunarstorm and playahead and ahead of everything else. hogwarts.nu was a full social network wearing a school uniform, policed by around a hundred volunteers with titles lifted straight out of the boo |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Wonder Ocean (ワンダーオーシャン) 📖 2004 - 2006 eight islands floating in an imaginary sea, one per interest, and if you joined you became a resident with an avatar and a house. namco opened it on 15 september 2004 on top of a cooking community that had been running since the december before. on 24 march 2006 namco handed the whole site to gaiax, |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Madchat.org 📖 1997 - 2006 a dark apache directory index with a cheshire cat quote pinned above it, and under that, nine years of everything the francophone underground had bothered to write down. phreaking text sat beside timothy leary audio and bootleg saez recordings. in 2001 two teenagers in versailles were arrested for h |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Diversity University 📖 1993 - 2006 jeanne mcwhorter built it in the summer of 1993 while she was a sociology graduate student, and it was the first moo made specifically for education. you telnetted in and landed in the student union, then walked to class by typing compass directions. teachers held real university sessions in it from |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Internacia Televido 📖 2005 - 2006 the first television channel in esperanto went live on 5 november 2005, streaming around the clock over the internet from sao paulo. it was built by flavio rebelo of the esperanto news site ĝangalo and paid for by donations from esperanto speakers scattered across every continent. the target was 35, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Century China 📖 2000 - 2006 century china opened on 19 july 2000 as a place for chinese academics and writers to publish essays and argue about them in public, run by a beijing research institute with an institute of the chinese university of hong kong alongside it. for six years it was the most influential intellectual websit |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Democracy and Freedom Web 📖 2001 - 2006 democracy and freedom web was a mainland chinese political discussion site founded on 12 june 2001 by wu wei, a guangzhou writer who publishes as ye du. it argued about political reform and human rights, was properly filed with the authorities in several mainland cities, and was taken offline or oth |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Keijibanteki Kotoba Uchu (掲示板的コトバ宇宙) 📖 1999 - 2006 three waseda students lost a school festival to a cancellation in 1998 and decided to build something ugly on purpose before they graduated. what came out in april 1999 handed every registered user a private universe full of message boards, invented its own calendar, and put a rude bot in the corner |
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| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2006|
|_____|
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nowthatsfuckedup.com 📖 2004 - 2006 chris wilson ran an amateur pornography site out of lakeland, florida. soldiers in iraq and afghanistan could not get their cards through his payment processor, so in 2004 he started giving them free membership in exchange for photographs from where they were. what came back stopped being scenery. p |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2006|
|_____|
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China Worker Net 📖 2005 - 2006 china worker net, at zggr.org, was a left-wing chinese site founded on may day 2005 in beijing by a group who called themselves socialists, edited by yan yuanzhang. it argued for state-enterprise workers and against the labor policies of the reform era, from inside mao zedong thought rather than aga |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2006|
|_____|
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Communist Party People Net 📖 2005 - 2006 communist party people net ran at gcdr.com.cn, a maoist site put up by a group who described themselves as believers in communism, with a worker-peasant-soldier bbs attached to it. on 22 february 2006 the network propaganda management office of the beijing municipal information office told it to clo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
ImaHima 📖 1999 - 2006 imahima was a mobile-phone-only social service in japan, launched in 1999 by neeraj jhanji and a small team in tokyo. the name meant 'are you free now', and the product was a way to broadcast your current status, your location and what you were doing, to a list of friends who would see it on their h |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Ehoron.com 📖 2004 - 2005 ehoron.com was a mongolian-language online forum for ethnic mongolian students in inner mongolia. it ran for exactly one year before chinese state authorities closed it on 26 september 2005, citing separatist content as the reason. the name ehoron translates to homeland. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2004|
|_____|
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Nutuge.com 📖 2002 - 2004 nutuge.com was a mongolian-language site about the history and present of the mongols, run from inner mongolia by govruud huuchinhuu. nutag is the mongolian word for homeland, and the site described itself in chinese as an online homeland for the mongol people. it carried its own script as pre-rende |
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| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2004|
|_____|
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The Hive 📖 1997 - 2004 a texan named hobart huson, writing as strike, opened a forum in 1997 for people who wanted to argue about the practical chemistry of drugs. it ran for seven years and got large, past eight thousand active accounts and something near half a million posts by the counts its own veterans kept. an nbc d |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2003|
|_____|
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Nupedia 📖 2000 - 2003 nupedia launched in march 2000 in san diego under bomis, with jimmy wales as funder and larry sanger as editor-in-chief, running a seven-step peer-review pipeline for an open encyclopedia. by september 2003 it had produced only 24 finished articles plus around 150 in progress, while its side project |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2003|
|_____|
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Transformation Story Archive 📖 1995 - 2003 the transformation story archive was collecting amateur fiction about people turning into other things by may 1995, which makes it the oldest archive of its kind on the web. it lived for free on a media-arts non-profit's server in vienna until jörg haider's freedom party spent 1998 accusing that non |
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| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2003|
|_____|
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SAPARi 📖 1997 - 2003 6 february 1997 is early for a graphical chat world with avatars you could dress, and sony shipped it preinstalled on vaio laptops for four years, which got it to hundreds of thousands of users without a marketing campaign. then so-net took it over, put a 300 yen monthly fee on something that had ar |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2003|
|_____|
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GirlGeeks 📖 1998 - 2003 two filmmakers started girlgeeks in 1998 as a documentary about women in computing, and the original name carried a question mark. the site outlived both the film and the company that grew out of it. after the crash the business was handed to a nonprofit, the updates stopped in 2003, and the same fr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 2003|
|_____|
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Travel Companion Exchange 📖 1982 - 2003 jens jurgen ran a matching service out of long island from 1982 and would not move it onto the internet, because he did not trust the web with his members' addresses. a monthly envelope carried the profiles of everyone with travel plans. by 1997 it had been through more than 70,000 people, and he cl |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2002|
|_____|
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Adequacy.org 📖 2001 - 2002 adequacy.org opened on 4 july 2001 with the slogan news for grown-ups and a masthead of people who had spent years trolling slashdot. the method was to write something indefensible in a completely level voice and then wait. in december 2001 it ran a guide for worried parents on spotting a teenage ha |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
uXu 📖 1991 - 2002 nobody announced the ending, which is correct for the form. underground experts united came out of the swedish hackers association in 1991 and put out 617 english text files plus a hundred more in swedish, starting with bombs and phone systems and drifting into diary entries and poetry as its member |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2002|
|_____|
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ChickClick 📖 1998 - 2002 heidi swanson pitched a network of girl-run websites to imagine media in 1998 and got funded, which in that particular year was not a hard sell. chickclick pulled nearly forty independent sites under one banner, sold advertising across the whole set and shared the money back, and inside its first ye |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Clubs 📖 1998 - 2002 a club page in 1999 was a message board with a chat room attached to it, a photo album and a list of everyone who had joined, and yahoo would give you one for free about any subject you named. it was the first community tool a lot of people ever ran. then yahoo paid $432 million for egroups in 2000, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2001|
|_____|
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Enciklopedio Kalblanda 📖 1996 - 2001 stefano kalb registered mebsuta.com on 11 january 1996 and spent the next five years writing an encyclopedia in esperanto, by himself, one article at a time. he finished with 139 of them, released under the gfdl. in december 2001 he uploaded the whole thing into the esperanto wikipedia, which was se |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
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Segfault 📖 1998 - 2001 segfault was a parody of slashdot running slashdot's own machinery. readers submitted the stories and editors picked them. the front page filled with fake tech news at roughly the rate of the real thing. it ran from 1998 to the middle of 2001, edited by scott james remnant and leonard richardson, ho |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2001|
|_____|
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GNE 📖 2000 - 2001 richard stallman published an essay on 18 december 2000 arguing for a free universal encyclopedia, and the project that came out of it started in january 2001 as gnupedia. jimmy wales already owned gnupedia.org and pointed it at nupedia, so the fsf project renamed itself gne, short for gne's not an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2001|
|_____|
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The Digital Village 📖 1994 - 2001 covent garden, autumn 1994: douglas adams and six other founders set up a company to work out what the convergence of digital media was actually for. it shipped a cd-rom game that undersold badly and an encyclopedia of everything, written by its own readers. the encyclopedia went to the bbc in janua |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
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eCircles 📖 1998 - 2001 a private, invite-only site where families and friend groups kept photo albums and a shared calendar in one closed space, years before facebook made all of that public. it raised twenty-eight million dollars and reached around two and a half million users, then ran into the dot-com crash with thin r |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2001|
|_____|
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Microsoft V-Chat 📖 1995 - 2001 microsoft shipped a chat client where the room was a place you moved around in, and it did it in december 1995, before most people had seen a web browser. avatars were flat sprites with a front view and a back view, like cardboard cut-outs, and you edited yours in paint and put it on a web server so |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 2001|
|_____|
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PC-VAN 📖 1986 - 2001 pc-van was nec's pc communication service, opened on 26 april 1986, and with nifty-serve it was one of the two networks that were the japanese internet before japan had an internet. it ran bulletin boards, special interest groups, an online software library and a chat system with fifty channels, all |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2001|
|_____|
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bianca.com 📖 1994 - 2001 three people with day jobs at hotwired built a website in their off hours and gave it a fictional owner called bianca. the site was a house. you navigated it through a hand-drawn map, and each room had its own conversation, the kitchen doing recipes and the bedroom doing whatever the bedroom did. it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2001|
|_____|
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Abuzz 📖 1996 - 2001 a cambridge company built software that read what you were good at and routed incoming questions to you instead of posting them into a room, which is a better design than any forum and needed more people than the web had in 1999. the new york times paid $30.1 million for it that july, wrote off $22. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
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Dobedo 📖 1998 - 2001 the rooms were flat drawn backgrounds and everyone talked in speech bubbles, which in 1998 was enough to pull a hundred thousand swedes into a chat that looked like a comic strip. investor put 52 million kronor into beedo ab through novare kapital and asked for growth instead of revenue, and got exa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2001|
|_____|
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Swoon 📖 1996 - 2001 condenet put swoon online in 1996, a dating magazine assembled out of four conde nast titles with free personal ads and forums attached. on 16 november 2000 the company announced it was closing two of its five sites to concentrate on the travel and food brands. swoon was one of the two. the name sta |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2001|
|_____|
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SixDegrees.com 📖 1997 - 2001 sixdegrees.com was the first social network in the modern sense. andrew weinreich launched it in 1997 with the explicit goal of building a web product around milgram's six-degrees-of-separation theory. members listed friends, those friends listed their friends, and the site mapped the connection gra |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
eGroups 📖 1997 - 2000 the mailing-list service that turned into yahoo groups. scott hassan started it in 1997 as findmail, an archive for email lists, and it grew into the place where families and hobby clubs ran their group email without touching a server. it merged with onelist in 1999 and by the next summer had eighte |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
PlanetAll 📖 1996 - 2000 planetall was a 1996 web service for keeping your address book and your school directory in the same place. members got reminders when someone they knew was traveling near them, or when a classmate updated their contact details. amazon paid 800,000 shares for it in august 1998 and shut the service o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
InterSpace Cyber Society 📖 1997 - 2000 at five in the afternoon on 30 march 2000, ntt switched off the free 3d world it had been running since july 1997. the client was a native windows application, the worlds came in ntt's own file format, and the feature nobody else shipped was a camera pointed at your face, pasted onto the avatar. the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Computer underground Digest 📖 1990 - 2000 the final issue is dated 12 march 2000 and the first article inside it is titled "cud hasn't gone away (yet)". it marked the tenth birthday, apologized for six months of silence and promised to catch up on the backlog. nothing came after it. a faq updated that december answered the obvious question |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Amezou 📖 1997 - 2000 in april 1999 the busiest bulletin board in japan belonged to one anonymous person who had started it as a page of links two years earlier. amezou made the floating thread the japanese default, and it was pulling more daily traffic than yahoo's boards. a user advertised his own new site there in may |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
L0pht Heavy Industries 📖 1992 - 2000 on 19 may 1998 seven men gave evidence to a senate committee under their handles and told it they could take the whole internet down in half an hour. that was l0pht, a rented loft in boston's south end with a password cracker and a news site paying the rent. it ended in january 2000 by turning into |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
OZ Virtual 📖 1996 - 1999 24 november 1999 is the day oz interactive spun its visual technology group out into a company called smartvr, and that is the day oz virtual stopped being a product. for three years before that it was one of the better vrml browsers on the internet: you opened a url, and anyone else who had opened |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Cleveland Free-Net 📖 1986 - 1999 a medical school professor put a question-and-answer board online in 1984 so patients could ask doctors things, and by 1986 it had turned into a free public network for the entire city of cleveland. no fee, no contract, one hour per login and a lot of busy signals. case western paid for it for thirt |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
WebChat Broadcasting System 📖 1990 - 1999 before every portal ran a chat product, wbs was where you went to talk to strangers in a browser window with nothing installed. a million registered users by february 1997 and seven million page views a day by that june, out of a menlo park office that had started life broadcasting interviews. infos |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Firefly Network 📖 1995 - 1999 firefly went up in october 1995 out of a media lab recommendation engine called homr, and it worked by asking you to rate records and then matching your ratings against strangers who had rated the same ones. that was collaborative filtering years before anyone outside a research group used the phras |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1999|
|_____|
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Cyborganic 📖 1993 - 1999 ramona avenue, san francisco, 1993: one block long, where a group of friends rented apartments next to each other so they could share a connection and eat together every thursday. the company they grew out of that spent $710,000, over $400,000 of it on credit rather than cash, and was evicted from 6 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Nikkei MIX 📖 1987 - 1997 a conferencing program written at the university of guelph ended up running japan's business-press dial-up service, because nikkei's american joint venture partner was already using the same program for byte magazine. the build was called cosy 3.1.3j. 日経mix went paid in september 1987 and had about |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Pegasus Networks 📖 1989 - 1997 a laptop and a modem wired to a cellular phone, running off a solar powered bus, in the rainforest at terania creek on 14 september 1989. telstra had to change something at short notice to let a data call reach austpac from a mobile network, because nobody had tried it. that was the formal launch of |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
MindVox 📖 1991 - 1996 mindvox was a new york dial-up service started in december 1991 by two former members of the legion of doom, and for about four years it was where the city's writers and its hackers argued inside the same conference. it never got large, around three thousand subscribers at its widest, and it never n |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Event Horizons BBS 📖 1983 - 1996 jim maxey started event horizons as a hobby in lake oswego, oregon in late 1983, and by 1993 it was grossing more than 3.2 million dollars a year on dial-up alone. by 1994 it had 128 phone lines and over 34,000 paying members, run by eighteen employees, which probably makes it the most profitable bu |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1993|
|_____|
|
Compunet 📖 1984 - 1993 compunet was a british dial-up service for the commodore 64, reached through a boxy 1200/75 modem that carried the client software in its own rom. you paid by the quarter and wrote your pages offline in the built-in editor to keep the phone bill down, then dialed back in to upload them into a sectio |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 1991|
|_____|
|
Aces of ANSI Art 📖 1989 - 1991 two people in san jose, california, going by zyphril and chips ahoy, decided in 1989 that the color text screens sysops used to decorate their boards were worth organizing around. that decision created the artscene. within a year the strongest members had walked out to start acid productions, which |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
Boston CitiNet 📖 1982 - 1990 applied videotex systems ran a local online service out of belmont, massachusetts that cost nothing to read and made its money from advertisers. it started in 1982 as yellowdata and took the citinet name in 1985. mail and chat were $9.95 a month, which is a freemium tier a decade before the word exi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1989|
|_____|
|
Microtex 666 📖 1986 - 1989 an australian videotex service for microcomputer enthusiasts, reached by dialing telecom australia's viatel network. sean howard owned it and promoted it through australian personal computer, the magazine he also owned. it carried a large telesoftware download library and a near-realtime chat, plus |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1988|
|_____|
|
Lucasfilm's Habitat 📖 1986 - 1988 habitat was the first place online that looked like a place. chip morningstar and randy farmer put jointed cartoon bodies on a commodore 64 in 1986 and let a few hundred people walk around a world of twenty thousand rooms at three hundred baud. it broke in most of the ways a virtual world can break, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1985|
|_____|
|
Plover-NET 📖 1984 - 1985 quasi-moto put plover-net up on an apple in long island in january 1984 and it became the busiest phreak board in the united states inside a year. six hundred users, one 300 baud modem, one phone number, and a long distance carrier that eventually started refusing calls to it. lex luthor was the co- |