_,..-''~~``-..__
,' ',
/ \
| |
| ____ ___ ____ |
| | _ \ |_ _| | _ \ |
| | |_) | | | | |_) | |
| | _ < | | | __/ |
| |_| \_\ |___| |_| |
| |
| . s o . |
| |
|__________________________|
/____________________________\
/______________________________\
» dig up a name « search the catacombs
» wander by decade · the most mourned · the wake · visitors log
rest in peace, signed off
:: the digital graveyard ::
« back to all categories · 1474 graves in this section, sorted newest first
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Amazon Mechanical Turk 📖 2005 - 2026 twenty-one years of piecework, named after a fake. amazon posted the closure notice on its own homepage on 25 august 2026 and gave everyone five weeks. mturk ended on 30 september. the machine learning industry it had fed spent the last two years moving to annotation firms that pay vetted specialist |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Sina Cloud 📖 2009 - 2026 november 2009, six months after google app engine opened to the public, sina shipped the first alpha of sina app engine and china had a platform-as-a-service of its own. you pushed php or python at it and paid for the run in a currency called cloud beans. seventeen years later the notice went up: ev |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Relay.app 📖 2021 - 2026 every automation product in 2023 was selling the removal of people from the loop. relay.app sold putting one back in: a workflow that stopped, waited for a human to approve the draft, then carried on. jacob bank left google in july 2021 to build it and raised $8.1 million from khosla ventures and an |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
NFTfi 📖 2020 - 2026 nftfi was the largest peer-to-peer nft-collateralized lending platform on ethereum, launched in may 2020 by stephen young out of cape town, south africa. lenders offered eth or wrapped eth loans against borrowers' nft collateral (mostly bored apes, cryptopunks, doodles and other blue-chip pfp collec |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Manifest V2 📖 2012 - 2026 google took seven years to remove the interface that let a browser extension look at a network request and refuse to make it. manifest v2 was the format chrome extensions were written in from 2012, and its blocking webrequest api is what every serious content blocker was built on. the replacement ha |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Trinket 📖 2013 - 2026 three and a half million people wrote fifty million programs inside it, and on 31 august 2026 every one of those programs became unreachable on the same afternoon. trinket was a python and html sandbox that ran inside a browser tab with nothing to install, which is exactly why it ended up in school |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Bloctel 📖 2016 - 2026 a french law passed on 30 june 2025 made cold calling illegal without prior consent, which removed the reason for a do-not-call list to exist at all. bloctel had been that list since june 2016. three million people registered seven million numbers on it and then kept getting called, which a consumer |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
ShopStyle 📖 2007 - 2026 nineteen years is a long run for a shopping search engine, and shopstyle spent most of them owned by somebody else. andy moss built a magazine-shaped front end over a product feed crawler in 2006, popsugar bought it in 2007, rakuten bought it in 2017. the creator arm outlived the consumer site and t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Wolfoo 📖 2018 - 2026 a london judge gave a hanoi animation studio until four in the afternoon on 27 july 2026 to delete every video featuring a cartoon wolf, across every platform, in 166 countries. the finding was not about the character design that everyone argued over for four years. it was about short audio clips of |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Botanix 📖 2022 - 2026 botanix was a bitcoin layer-two network built by botanix labs, founded in june 2022 by belgian engineer willem schroé. the pitch was an evm-equivalent layer running on bitcoin via a design schroé called the spiderchain, which used a rotating federation of orchestrator nodes rather than a single cust |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Binance NFT 📖 2021 - 2026 binance nft launched 24 june 2021 as the largest centralized NFT marketplace by trading volume, at the top of the 2021-2022 NFT boom. it ran through the market crash of 2022-2024 with progressively narrower feature scope (bitcoin ordinals support dropped 4 april 2024, polygon support dropped septemb |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Loopring 📖 2017 - 2026 loopring was one of the first decentralized exchange protocols to bring zero-knowledge rollups to ethereum, founded in 2017 by daniel wang, a shanghai-based software engineer previously at google and jd.com. the lrc token ico in august 2017 raised about $45 million in ether before the china crackdow |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
PunterNet 📖 1999 - 2026 harriet harman asked arnold schwarzenegger to take this website down in 2009, which is the only reason most people in britain ever heard of it. punternet had been running since 1999 as a review board for the uk sex trade, and it sat on a server in california specifically so that westminster could no |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Robot Cache 📖 2018 - 2026 $532. that is what the store made selling game software across the whole of 2024, according to its own report to investors. brian fargo founded robot cache on 16 january 2018 to do the one thing steam would not, let you sell a digital game back and keep part of the money, with a cryptocurrency calle |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
EliteSingles 📖 2013 - 2026 elitesingles was the berlin company affinitas spinning out their eDarling formula in english. it launched in 2013, targeting university-educated professionals through a long personality questionnaire scored on the big five model. it expanded into the US in 2014 and reached over 13 million users by t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
ironSource Ads 📖 2010 - 2026 four and a half billion dollars of unity stock bought ironsource in november 2022, and three and a half years later unity switched off the part of it that sold advertising directly. the iads network stopped taking new campaigns on 15 april 2026 and stopped serving on the thirtieth. levelplay, the me |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Amara Public Workspace 📖 2010 - 2026 for sixteen years anybody could paste a video url into one box and start typing captions for it, and what came out the other side was a public pool of subtitles in more than four hundred languages that nobody owned. on 27 march 2026 amara gave that pool five weeks. everything not moved into a privat |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Newtoki / Manatoki / Booktoki 📖 2018 - 2026 the largest illegal korean webtoon piracy hub and its two sister sites. ran from 2018 to april 27, 2026, killed by an operator who saw the emergency blocking law coming. monthly traffic across the three brands exceeded 100 million visits at shutdown. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
ZAC Browser 📖 2008 - 2026 john lesieur wrote it for one child. his grandson zack was diagnosed with autism at three and could get nowhere with an ordinary browser, so lesieur, who ran a small software company called people cd, took the kids' program he already sold and stripped it down to a handful of controls with an aquari |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
i-mode 📖 1999 - 2026 i-mode was the closest thing the world had to a smartphone before there was a smartphone. ntt docomo launched it in february 1999 in japan as a managed mobile internet stack with proprietary protocols and a monthly subscription bill that handled micropayments inline. by 2006 over eighty million japa |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Drop (Massdrop) 📖 2012 - 2026 massdrop launched in 2012 to fix something forums were bad at, which was organizing a group buy that actually arrived. enough people committing to one order gave a hobbyist community the leverage of a wholesale customer, and the result was hardware that would never have existed otherwise. it renamed |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Clockwise 📖 2016 - 2026 seventy six million dollars and nearly a decade went into clockwise, an ai calendar that shuffled meetings around to protect blocks of focus time at companies like uber and netflix. in march 2026 salesforce hired the whole team to work on agentforce and took none of the product. the app went off eig |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Chtyvo 📖 2005 - 2026 at 13:34 gmt on 19 march 2026 a twenty-year-old ukrainian library replaced itself with a thank-you note. the day before, chtyvo.org.ua was still serving 85,557 works by 28,807 authors, free and without an account. the team wrote that conditions for projects like this had changed substantially and th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
HubPages 📖 2006 - 2026 hubpages was the 2006 paul edmondson content platform that paid amateur writers a cut of adsense and amazon affiliate revenue per article. it grew to a peak of around 35 million monthly uniques before the february 2011 google panda update cratered the visibility. maven acquired it in 2018 with the n |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Archiwum Allegro 📖 2013 - 2026 every allegro listing that ended more than sixty days ago fell into the archive, and had done since 2013, which made the thing a price history of a whole country's secondhand market by accident. poland's biggest marketplace posted a help-center note on 17 july 2025 saying it would close, and gave it |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
goo Mail 📖 1998 - 2026 goo mail opened in 1998 as a free mailbox on ntt's goo portal, and by 2008 it was the second most used webmail in japan behind yahoo. a redesign in march 2010 made it slow enough that the operators shipped a simple mode two months later to escape their own interface, and then the free tier became si |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Amazon Chime 📖 2017 - 2026 in september 2015 amazon absorbed a san francisco conferencing startup through a shell company and told nobody. what came out of it in february 2017 was chime, a meetings product sold at fifteen dollars a head against zoom and microsoft teams, on the argument that it would arrive on an invoice you w |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
ZeroLend 📖 2023 - 2026 zerolend was a decentralized lending protocol launched in early 2023 as a friendly fork of aave, initially deployed on linea (the zk-rollup bootstrapped by consensys) and then extended across a dozen other chains including manta and zircuit. total value locked peaked near $359 million in november 20 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Setapp Mobile 📖 2024 - 2026 macpaw launched setapp mobile in september 2024 as one of the first alternative ios app stores in the european union under the digital markets act. it ran for seventeen months. on 16 february 2026 macpaw closed it down, citing apple's complex business terms. setapp the mac subscription bundle stayed |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Google Dark Web Report 📖 2023 - 2026 google dark web report was a feature inside google one and later inside the standard google account that scanned dark web sources for your email address, your phone number and a handful of other personal-info fields. it launched as a paid google one perk in may 2023, opened to all google account hol |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1962-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
The World Factbook 📖 1962 - 2026 the world factbook was an almanac the cia compiled about every country on earth, classified from 1962, unclassified from 1971, in print from 1975, and online from october 1994. because it was a us government publication it carried no copyright, so its numbers leaked into encyclopedias and school ass |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Amazon Fresh (physical stores) 📖 2020 - 2026 amazon fresh's physical grocery chain opened its first store in september 2020 in woodland hills, los angeles. by 2022 the chain had 38 us stores plus 19 in the uk. on 27 january 2026 amazon announced that all locations would close on 1 february, with a handful converting into whole foods. the just |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Ready Player Me 📖 2021 - 2026 ready player me was the closest anyone came to an avatar you owned rather than rented. you built a face once, and developers wired it into their own games and social worlds through a free api, so the same character walked from one company's product into another's. it raised about seventy million dol |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
ShopRunner 📖 2010 - 2026 seventy-nine dollars a year, chosen because that was the number amazon charged for prime, spread across a hundred other people's stores instead of one. gsi commerce built it in october 2010 and ebay bought the parent eight months later, handing most of the service to michael rubin. alibaba took a st |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
EyeEm 📖 2011 - 2026 eyeem was the berlin photo marketplace and community that spent a decade positioning itself as the european alternative to instagram for the mobile-first photographer, and to shutterstock for the license-my-work photographer. it launched in august 2011 and partnered with getty images in 2014. it pea |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Mercedes-Benz mbrace 📖 2009 - 2025 mbrace was mercedes-benz usa's connected-vehicle service, the layer that sat between the car and verizon's 3g network and gave you remote start, stolen vehicle location, automatic collision notification, sos. verizon shut its 3g network down at the end of 2025 and that took mbrace with it for every |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Radish Fiction 📖 2016 - 2025 radish fiction was the new york based serial-fiction mobile app founded in february 2016 by seung yoon lee, a korean rhodes scholar and former byline reporter. the pitch was episodic romance fiction released chapter by chapter with a paid unlock for the next installment. the company raised around $3 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Bufftoon 📖 2013 - 2025 a game company remembered it was a game company. ncsoft opened bufftoon in december 2013 to sell webtoons and web novels, grew it to roughly three thousand titles, and closed the whole platform on 17 december 2025 as part of a restructuring back toward its core business. the coins stopped working al |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Cree Wikipedia 📖 2004 - 2025 eighty-six thousand people speak cree, and for twenty-one years the wikipedia carrying their language code sat almost empty. the code pointed at a continuum of varieties written in two different scripts, and the single administrator the wiki had did not read any of them. the closure request was file |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Fundly 📖 2009 - 2025 $350 million had gone through it by 2015, most of that in small gifts to school teams and animal shelters rather than to gadgets on kickstarter. fundly started in boston in 2009 as blueswarm with clayton christensen among its early backers, got bought by a nonprofit software company that liked the n |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
DappRadar 📖 2018 - 2025 dappradar was the analytics platform for blockchain applications, the one most web3 founders pointed traders at when they needed to prove their dapp had real users. it launched in february 2018, inspired by the cryptokitties traffic spike of late 2017, and grew into a dashboard tracking eighteen tho |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
BharatAgri 📖 2017 - 2025 bharatagri was a pune and bengaluru based agritech founded in 2017 by siddharth dialani and sai gole, both iit madras alumni. the platform ran an ai-driven farm advisory layer over an agri-input e-commerce catalog aimed at small and mid-sized indian farmers. by the time it wound down, it had crossed |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
SeatGuru 📖 2001 - 2025 one frequent flyer got tired of guessing and started drawing seat maps in 2001. by the time tripadvisor bought it in 2007, seatguru held over a thousand aircraft layouts with every bad seat marked in red, which is the sort of reference that only exists because one person was annoyed enough to build |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
edocr 📖 2007 - 2025 manoj ranaweera built edocr in manchester in 2007 and never took a penny of outside money for it. accusoft bought it in march 2015 and made the thing free to use, then left it mostly alone for a decade while the uploads curdled into search-engine filler. on 29 october 2025 it went off, eighteen year |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
All Partners Access Network 📖 1997 - 2025 for twenty-eight years the american military ran a website that was deliberately not on a .mil address, so that officers from countries outside the us defense network could log in and share a map. it grew out of a virtual information center at camp smith in hawaii and ended with more than five hundr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
dns0.eu 📖 2023 - 2025 sixty-two servers in fifty-five datacenters across twenty-seven european cities, free to anybody, run by the two people who had already built nextdns. this was the european union's privacy-first public resolver two years before the european union funded one of its own. it lasted two and a half years |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Bing Maps Streetside 📖 2009 - 2025 bing maps streetside launched in december 2009 as microsoft's google street view answer. it covered selected US metros plus vancouver, with europe added in may 2012 except germany where privacy appeals had it pulled before launch. the imagery refresh cadence fell behind google street view by the mid |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
AOL Dial-Up 📖 1991 - 2025 the dial-up internet service that defined the 1990s american internet experience. you tied up the phone line, listened to the modem handshake, logged in, heard "you've got mail" in elwood edwards' voice. broadband killed it slowly through the 2000s but the service kept running anyway for another two |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
10000 Flies 📖 2013 - 2025 every morning at nine, a small company in düsseldorf published the fifty german-language articles that had been shared hardest in the previous twenty-four hours, ranked by a single number. jens schröder started it on 23 january 2013 and it ran for twelve and a half years. spiegel and die zeit quoted |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Refern 📖 2023 - 2025 a recent college graduate posting as jaks024 launched refern on product hunt at the end of 2023 as an ad-free local-first visual reference library for illustrators and concept artists. two years later he posted a shutdown note saying the csam reports had piled up beyond what one solo developer could |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
EresMás 📖 2000 - 2025 retevisión spent the year 2000 buying spanish internet providers and gluing them into one green portal called eresmás, which had a million access users inside five months. the portal itself was finished within three years, sold to wanadoo for 255 million euros in shares and folded into a french bran |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Google URL Shortener 📖 2009 - 2025 goo.gl was google's tracking-flavored bit.ly. it launched in december 2009 as a feature inside the toolbar, got its own domain in 2010, stopped taking new users in 2018, and stopped serving links on 25 august 2025. firebase dynamic links was the replacement until firebase dynamic links also died. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Amazon Appstore on Android 📖 2011 - 2025 the amazon appstore on android was the alternate android app store amazon ran from march 22 2011 until august 20 2025 for non-fire android devices. the pitch was a free app of the day promo and a virtual currency called amazon coins that launched in may 2013. most android users in turkey and most of |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Banxso 📖 2021 - 2025 banxso was a cape-town-based cfd trading platform launched in 2021 that grew rapidly on the back of deepfake video ads impersonating elon musk and south african billionaire johann rupert. clicks on the ads funneled retail investors into banxsox and autobanxso trading accounts where high-risk contrac |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
MovieTickets.com 📖 2000 - 2025 a group of movie chains built their own ticket seller in 2000 so that fandango would not own the category outright. the war ran seventeen years and fandango won it by purchase in october 2017. the brand was then kept alive as a second storefront for another eight years, which is longer than most acq |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Piggy 📖 2016 - 2025 piggy was an indian direct-mutual-fund investment app founded in 2016 by ankush singh with co-founders kunal sangwan and nikhil mantha, later a y combinator s17 batch member. the pitch was simple: only direct plans, no commission, a clean mobile ui for a market where mutual-fund distributors traditi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
goo dictionary 📖 1999 - 2025 twenty-six years of free lookups ended at one in the afternoon on 25 june 2025. goo dictionary was the box japanese speakers typed a word into without thinking about it, roughly thirty licensed dictionaries from sanseido and shogakukan sitting behind one field, with prefix and suffix matching that t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Archetyp Market 📖 2020 - 2025 three hundred officers in germany, the netherlands, romania, spain and sweden moved between 11 and 13 june 2025, and the seizure banner went up on 16 june. archetyp had opened in may 2020 and outlived every market of its generation by refusing most of what made the others profitable. drugs only, not |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Altigreen 📖 2013 - 2025 altigreen propulsion labs was a bengaluru-based commercial ev startup founded in 2013 by amitabh saran with three co-founders (shalendra gupta, lasse moklegaard, john bangura). after an early powertrain-technology phase the company pivoted to full-vehicle manufacturing of electric three-wheelers aim |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
JPG.STORE 📖 2021 - 2025 jpg.store was the dominant nft marketplace on the cardano blockchain from 2021 through may 2025. it ran the trading layer for ada-denominated jpegs through the entire nft cycle, from the 2021 peak to the long retreat that followed. on april 23 2025 it switched to restriction mode and stopped new lis |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Otipy 📖 2020 - 2025 otipy was a gurugram-based farm-to-consumer fresh-produce startup founded in june 2020 by varun khurana and prashant jain as a tech-driven spin-off of crofarm agriproducts. the model routed produce directly from farmer clusters through a network of neighborhood community-seller partners (mostly home |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Catch.com.au 📖 2006 - 2025 two brothers in melbourne copied woot in october 2006 and sold one discounted product a day. by the year to june 2022 the marketplace was moving 989 million australian dollars for 3.1 million customers, and wesfarmers, which had paid 230 million for it in 2019, was writing off more every half. the w |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Pivotal Tracker 📖 2008 - 2025 broadcom bought vmware in november 2023, vmware had bought pivotal in 2019, and pivotal labs had written this tracker in 2008 for the only team it cared about, which was itself. notice went out in september 2024 and every account type ended on 30 april 2025, free and sponsored and paid and enterpris |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Amazon WorkDocs 📖 2014 - 2025 twelve months was the notice period, and aws counted it to the day. on 25 april 2024 the service stopped accepting new customers; on 25 april 2025 the site went dark along with the apis and the desktop client, and the purge of stored documents began the following morning. the product had launched te |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
BluSmart 📖 2019 - 2025 blusmart was india's first ev-only ride-hail service, founded in january 2019 by the two jaggi brothers with cofounder punit k goyal out of gurugram. it ran a fleet of leased tata and mahindra evs across delhi ncr and later bengaluru. the fleet was leased through gensol engineering, a listed company |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
openSNP 📖 2011 - 2025 eight days after 23andme filed for chapter 11, bastian greshake tzovaras announced that the genetics commons he had run for fourteen years was closing and that every byte of it would be erased. opensnp launched on 27 september 2011 and let people publish the raw file from their consumer dna test und |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Aspiration 📖 2013 - 2025 a los angeles neobank from 2013 that pitched itself as the climate-conscious alternative to wall street. the gimmick was tree planting and pay-what-you-want fees. the founder ran a $248 million fraud, got arrested in 2025, and the company filed bankruptcy a few weeks later. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
OSDN (SourceForge.JP) 📖 2002 - 2025 japan's own sourceforge, opened april 18 2002 by va linux and renamed osdn in 2015 to get clear of the american site's adware reputation. it hosted more than 5,000 projects and ran srad, the japanese slashdot. a quiet 2022 sale to open source china produced outages, then a shutdown notice with nine |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Zap2it 📖 2000 - 2025 zap2it launched on april 3 2000 from tribune media services, built by combining the in-house tvquest and moviequest listings sites with the ultimatetv acquisition. for nearly a quarter century it was the default tv-grid bookmark for american cable subscribers, what you opened in a second tab to find |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Lipa Later 📖 2018 - 2025 lipa later was a kenyan buy-now-pay-later platform founded in 2018 by eric muli. it raised about $22 million across seed and debt rounds. by 2023 it had expanded across east and southern africa and acquired the kenyan e-commerce site sky.garden for kes 250 million. a targeted fresh funding round in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
23andMe 📖 2006 - 2025 23andme sold you a saliva kit and mailed back a website that told you where your ancestors came from and what you might carry. it grew to more than fourteen million customers and went public in 2021 at a three and a half billion dollar valuation. a 2023 breach exposed the data of nearly seven millio |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Norfuk Wikipedia 📖 2005 - 2025 norfolk island sits in the tasman sea with around eighteen hundred residents, some of them descended from the bounty mutineers and the tahitian women who sailed with them. the creole those families speak got its own wikipedia on 24 october 2005 and never got writers to go with it. twenty years later |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
COVIDtests.gov 📖 2022 - 2025 covidtests.gov was a mail order form with no price on it. you typed a united states address into a postal service page and four rapid tests turned up a day or two later, with no account to create and no card to enter. it opened on 18 january 2022 and spent three years being switched off and switched |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Apostrophe 📖 2012 - 2025 apostrophe was a US direct-to-consumer dermatology service founded around 2012 in oakland california as yoderm. the platform matched patients with licensed dermatologists who prescribed compounded oral and topical medications shipped from a partner pharmacy. it rebranded to apostrophe in 2019 in a p |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Nifty Gateway 📖 2018 - 2025 nifty gateway was the nft marketplace the cock foster twins launched in 2018. gemini bought it in late 2019. its peak moment was march 2021, when beeple's 69 million dollar christie's sale moved through the platform's adjacent infrastructure. gemini wound it down to withdrawal-only mode on 27 januar |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Amazon Inspire 📖 2022 - 2025 amazon inspire was amazon's copy of tiktok, a vertical feed of shoppable photos and short videos that lived inside the shopping app. it launched in the us at the end of 2022, at the peak of the moment when every big app decided it needed a scroll of its own. the creators it needed never really showe |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Getaround 📖 2009 - 2025 three people out of singularity university's first class wanted the idle car on your street rentable by the hour from a phone. five hundred and sixty eight million dollars of private money went in before the december 2022 spac put a one point two billion valuation on it, and the stock gave back two |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Bento Africa 📖 2019 - 2025 bento africa was a nigerian hr-payroll platform that automated tax and pension remittances for its client companies. by early 2025 the payments were not clearing. the engineering team walked out over unpaid january salaries. the ceo resigned on january thirty and the board announced a temporary shut |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Bukalapak 📖 2010 - 2025 bukalapak was indonesia's third major c2c marketplace, founded on 10 january 2010 by achmad zaky with two ITB classmates. it scaled into a unicorn behind tokopedia and shopee, listed on the IDX in august 2021 at around $6 billion in the largest indonesian ipo to date, then watched the stock collapse |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Save This Life 📖 2012 - 2025 an austin company sold pet microchips and promised live operators 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. in early february 2025 the phones stopped being answered, email inquiries came back as form replies saying staff were aware of the problem, and the chip numbers it held stopped matching any owner at al |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Prime Try Before You Buy 📖 2017 - 2025 prime try before you buy started life as prime wardrobe in june 2017. the pitch was simple: prime members could order up to six clothing or footwear items, keep them at home for seven days, then pay only for the ones they wanted to keep. amazon closed the whole thing on 31 january 2025 and pointed c |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
WHOIS (port 43) 📖 1982 - 2025 on 28 january 2025 icann stopped requiring gtld registries and registrars to answer on port 43, and rdap became the official place to ask who owns a domain. the thing being retired was forty two years old and small enough to read over a coffee: send one line of text to a socket and read whatever cam |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Amazon Today 📖 2022 - 2025 the idea was that the fastest warehouse in america is the shop on the corner that already has the thing in stock. amazon signed up chains like pacsun and gnc, sent flex drivers to their shelves, and delivered in hours instead of days. it worked and it still got canceled, because amazon's own same-da |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
MakersPlace 📖 2018 - 2025 makersplace was the san francisco nft marketplace ex-pinterest engineers built in 2018 and shut down in january 2025. it was the venue that ran beeple's sixty-nine-million-dollar christie's sale in march 2021, the moment nfts went from internet curiosity to auction-house headline. four years later t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Dunzo 📖 2014 - 2025 dunzo was bengaluru's quick-commerce app founded in july 2014 by kabeer biswas with several cofounders. it grew from a whatsapp errand-runner group into one of india's most-hyped delivery startups. google put in $12 million in december 2017. reliance retail led a $200 million round in january 2022 t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Genieo 📖 2008 - 2025 somoto paid thirty four million dollars in july 2014 for an israeli company whose product apple's own malware blocklist already named. genieo was sold as a start page that learned what you read and built you a newspaper out of it, and it arrived on a great many macs inside something else, stayed aft |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Meta Fact-Checking Program 📖 2016 - 2025 facebook launched its third-party fact-checking program on 15 december 2016, six weeks after the us election, under pressure to explain what the platform had been serving. it ran for eight years across roughly ninety independent partners in more than sixty countries. mark zuckerberg announced its us |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
WhiteHat Jr 📖 2018 - 2025 whitehat jr was an india-based kids' coding tutor platform founded in november 2018 by karan bajaj, ex-ceo of discovery networks india. it sold 1:1 online video classes to parents of children aged 6 to 14, teaching a curriculum built around visual block-programming that promised commercial-ready gam |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Krugosvet 📖 2000 - 2025 collier's encyclopedia stopped being printed in the united states in 1998. two years later its twenty four volumes turned up on the russian web, free to read, under the name krugosvet. the launch was presented in moscow on 23 may 2000 with support from the open society institute, and 187 russian aut |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
GeldKarte 📖 1996 - 2024 the average geldkarte payment was three euros. that is most of the story of a german chip purse launched in 1996, peaked in 2007, and still physically present on millions of cards in 2018 when fewer than one in a hundred of them was ever used for it. contactless girocard made loading money onto a ca |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
DealsPlus 📖 2006 - 2024 dealspl.us was the address for seven years, because the real one was taken and a 2010 arbitration refused to hand it over. the site bought dealsplus.com outright in early 2013, ran a coupon community of roughly six million people on it, and was crawling along normally in october 2024 before the host |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
NETCOMICS 📖 2005 - 2024 netcomics put korean manhwa in english on the web in 2006 and charged by the chapter, at a moment when the rest of comics was still arguing about whether a screen was a threat. it was owned out of seoul and run out of los angeles, and for a few years it printed paperbacks too. naver and kakao later |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
wiki.vg 📖 2010 - 2024 tyler kennedy put the minecraft alpha protocol on a personal dokuwiki in 2010 because mojang had promised a modding api with documentation and then never shipped it. fourteen years later the stopgap was still the only place the wire format was written down, every third-party server and bot in the ec |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
TakeLessons 📖 2006 - 2024 takelessons started in san diego in 2006 as a way to find somebody within driving distance who could teach you guitar, and grew into a marketplace for private lessons in almost anything, taken in a teacher's front room or over video. it raised about nineteen million dollars and never became large, w |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Forward Health 📖 2017 - 2024 forward was an ex-google-founder's attempt to rebuild the doctor's office as a monthly-subscription tech product. adrian aoun founded it in 2017 in san francisco. the pitch was that ai-driven biometric sensors and telehealth would let a patient skip most of the traditional health-worker layer for co |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Start 📖 2021 - 2024 microsoft tried to retire msn in 2021 by calling the news feed microsoft start. for three years it shipped that name across edge, windows widgets and a phone app. nobody picked it up. in november 2024 the msn butterfly came back and start was unbranded out of existence. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
LocalMonero 📖 2017 - 2024 april 2017 gave the monero community its own version of localbitcoins: no verified accounts, no exchange holding the coins while two strangers agreed on a price. it ran for almost seven years and then read the room in april 2024, when the samourai wallet indictment and an fbi notice about non-kyc mo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Bowery Farming 📖 2015 - 2024 bowery farming was new york's vertical-farming unicorn founded in 2015 by irving fain. it ran indoor farms in new jersey and maryland growing leafy greens for whole foods and walmart. total capital raised was around four hundred and seventy two million dollars. fidelity led the last round in 2021 wi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Chollian 📖 1985 - 2024 chollian was the first of korea's four pc communication services and the last one to die. it began in october 1985 as a videotex trial at dacom, opened commercially the following september, and became a full dial-up service in 1992, peaking at 3.5 million paying subscribers in august 2000. the termi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Accord's Library 📖 2021 - 2024 in April 2024 yoko taro sent a thank-you note to the volunteers who had spent three years cataloging the books, drama cds and stage plays attached to his games. six months later square enix's legal team contacted the same volunteers, and accord's library closed on 31 october 2024. the council kept t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Miríadax 📖 2013 - 2024 seven million course enrolments, and the notice that ended it was one line of text above the search box. telefónica learning services opened miríadax in january 2013 with universia, the university network banco santander paid for, and 58 free courses from 18 ibero-american universities. for a decade |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
000webhost 📖 2007 - 2024 13,545,468 accounts, each with an email address and a password stored in plain text: that is what leaked from 000webhost in 2015, and it is what most people now remember the service for. the rest of its seventeen years was quieter. a lithuanian company called hosting media opened it in 2007 to give |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Flipgrid (Flip) 📖 2014 - 2024 a media lab at the university of minnesota built it in january 2014 and charged teachers a subscription to use it. microsoft bought the company in june 2018, when twenty million students across more than 180 countries were already on it, then made it free and refunded everyone who had paid. the rena |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Atom Publishing Protocol 📖 2007 - 2024 json took it apart without a vote. rfc 5023 shipped in october 2007 as the standard way to publish and edit resources over http, edited by joe gregorio and bill de hóra, and for a few years it was how a desktop client posted to your blog. wordpress deleted it from core in december 2012 after measuri |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Oracle Advertising 📖 2014 - 2024 two billion dollars of revenue in 2022 had become three hundred million by the summer of 2024, and safra catz ended the whole business in one sentence of an earnings call. oracle advertising was the data layer underneath other people's ad campaigns, assembled out of bluekai's cookie pools and datalo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Party.Space 📖 2020 - 2024 three founders in kyiv spent the first lockdown building a place you could throw a company party in, and for two years grammarly and wargaming actually booked it. the 2022 pivot into web3 took the pipeline down with it when that market went. nobody posted a closing note. the certificates simply stop |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
CrowdTangle 📖 2011 - 2024 crowdtangle started in 2011 as a small dashboard built by brandon silverman and matt garmur to help online activists, then pivoted into a publisher tool that showed which posts on facebook pages were winning engagement. by 2014 it was running in buzzfeed, cnn, vox, and nbc newsrooms. facebook bought |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Cartoonnetwork.com 📖 1998 - 2024 cartoonnetwork.com launched on july 27 1998 from the same atlanta team running cartoon network. for a quarter century it was the flash-and-shockwave games portal where american kids played dexter's laboratory and powerpuff girls minigames after school. peak was october 2000, the month it pulled 2.12 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Xbox 360 Marketplace 📖 2005 - 2024 xbox 360 marketplace was microsoft's on-console store, launched with the 360 itself on 22 november 2005 with a starting catalog of 400 items. it hosted xbox live arcade indies, downloadable dlc, avatar clothing, gamerpics, movie rentals, kinect experiments, and the entire microsoft points economy at |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Feedbooks 📖 2007 - 2024 a paris commercial court signed feedbooks over to a quebec distributor for 230,000 euros on 29 august 2019, after the company had spent fourteen months in receivership and lost half its turnover. the catalog was the point: public domain books typeset properly, served over an open format that every e |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
PixelMax 📖 2018 - 2024 manchester, 23 july 2024, a creditors' voluntary liquidation for imagin3d ltd, trading as pixelmax. it had taken two million pounds from praetura in march 2021 and built browser-based virtual venues for uefa and a children's hospital, on the stated premise that hybrid working was now a necessity. no |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Mutation Events 📖 2000 - 2024 november 2000 is when the w3c made mutation events a recommendation, and the design was understood as a mistake within a few years of shipping. the events fired synchronously, which meant your handler ran in the middle of the browser's own surgery on the document tree, and that made everything slow |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Classcraft 📖 2013 - 2024 a physics teacher in sherbrooke, quebec built it for his own classroom in 2013. shawn young gave every student a character with a health bar, and a team that took damage when one of them fell, so that handing in nothing on monday cost four other people something on tuesday. it reached more than 8 mi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
KnownOrigin 📖 2018 - 2024 knownorigin was the manchester nft marketplace that ebay bought in june 2022 and then quietly killed two years later. it launched out of a basement in 2018 from three uk engineers who wanted to put rare digital art on ethereum the same way galleries put paintings on walls. by july 2024 ebay's web3 d |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Byju's 📖 2011 - 2024 byju's was india's largest edtech company, founded in 2011 by byju raveendran and divya gokulnath around raveendran's math and physics test-prep videos. the company reached a $22 billion private valuation in 2022 with whitehat jr and aakash educational services on the balance sheet after an acquisit |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Internet Theatre Database 📖 1999 - 2024 keith scollick put it online in may 1999 and volunteers filled it in for twenty-five years. it was modeled on imdb and pointed at the stage, indexing the west end and the regional tours as well as broadway, which the new york databases never bothered with. by 2020 nobody had updated it in over a dec |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Google Domains 📖 2014 - 2024 google domains was google's domain registrar, launched as an invite-only private beta in june 2014 and a public beta in january 2015. it offered the registrar interface godaddy refused to build: ninety-second purchase, modern dns, whois privacy. it left beta in march 2022 with about ten million doma |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
CapFriendly 📖 2015 - 2024 capfriendly was the direct successor to [[capgeek]] and became the reference nhl contract database for the second half of the 2010s and the first half of the 2020s. the davis brothers plus a designer launched it in may 2015 as a fan-facing tool that team front offices quietly adopted as league infra |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Shoptime 📖 1995 - 2024 brazil got its first television channel that existed purely to sell you things in 1995, and the name on it was shoptime. americanas bought the business in 2005, folded it into b2w a year later and ran it for eighteen years as the third storefront over a single warehouse. the channel left pay televis |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Redbox 📖 2002 - 2024 the last big physical way to rent a movie in america. a bright red kiosk outside the grocery store where a dvd cost a dollar or two a night, run by a machine, with no membership and no late-fee lecture. redbox outlived blockbuster and most of the rental business by being cheap and everywhere, until |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Submarino 📖 1999 - 2024 submarino started in 1999 on top of booknet, an online bookstore jack london had opened in brazil in 1995, and it became the first brazilian e-commerce name with real mass recall. it passed a million customers by 2003 and listed on the bovespa in march 2005, then merged with americanas.com in 2006 t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
corega 📖 1996 - 2024 allied telesis put a consumer arm on the shelf in august 1996 to sell hubs and routers into japanese homes, and for two decades the corega box was the default cheap answer in every electronics shop in the country. the parent absorbed it in 2009, spun it back out as its own company in 2014, then merg |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Medical Heritage Library 📖 2010 - 2024 the medical heritage library was a group of medical libraries that scanned their own shelves and put the results on the internet archive with nothing in front of them. it started in 2010 on sloan foundation money and finished with 355,872 items, including nearly fifty state medical society journals |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
ICQmail 📖 1999 - 2024 for fourteen years this was a webmail you could not join. aol closed the signup door when it sold icq in 2010, and the accounts that already existed kept running on somebody else's mail platform, then got moved to a different platform in 2014 without being told, losing mail on the way. it outlived i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Google One VPN 📖 2020 - 2024 google one vpn was announced in october 2020 as a perk of the $9.99 google one 2tb tier and above, launched initially in the us. it expanded to about 22 countries by 2023 and became free-of-tier for all google one members in 2023. turkey was not one of the launch countries. on 11 april 2024 google a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Mozilla Location Service 📖 2013 - 2024 mozilla ran a free geolocation database built out of wifi and cell-tower sightings that firefox users donated by walking around with their phones. by 2019 it held over a billion wifi networks and it could answer the question of where you are without google being asked. a patent claim from skyhook ca |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Spreadsheet.com 📖 2017 - 2024 mitch kapor, who wrote lotus 1-2-3, was an angel in this one. 170,000 users and more than a thousand paying organizations still were not enough, and matt robinson put the reason in the farewell post in the plainest words anybody uses for it: unable to achieve venture-scale growth. the service went d |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
mail2web.com 📖 1997 - 2024 toronto, 1997. softcom put up a page where you typed an email address and a password and read your own mail, with no account to create and nothing to install, and the homepage claimed sixteen million people a month across two hundred countries. ingram micro bought the company in 2013 and hostway end |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Rooster Teeth 📖 2003 - 2024 rooster teeth started on april 1 2003 in austin texas as a six person team making red vs blue, a comedy series shot inside halo with the player characters as actors. red vs blue ran weekly through the 2000s and built a paid subscription audience around its forum. fullscreen bought the company in nov |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Karhoo 📖 2014 - 2024 november 2016 is when karhoo died the first time, eight days into the month, having spent a reported quarter of a billion dollars while charging most of its users nothing at all. the idea was never to run its own cars: it sat above the licensed taxi and minicab fleets that already existed and let yo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Gorillas 📖 2020 - 2024 nine months from the first delivery in prenzlauer berg to a unicorn valuation, the fastest in germany. kağan sümer's gorillas put groceries on a berlin doorstep in ten minutes with couriers on payroll, then burned through more than a billion dollars in nine countries before selling to getir of istan |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1972-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Kaspien 📖 1972 - 2024 albany, new york, december 1972: robert higgins starts a record business that becomes a mall empire. forty-eight years later the stores are gone, the company has renamed itself after a spokane agency that manages other people's amazon listings, and the stock ticker is still trading. in december 2023 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Goldstar 📖 2002 - 2024 on 14 february 2002 three e-commerce people in pasadena started selling cheap seats to shows that were not selling out, on the arithmetic that an empty theater seat is worth nothing the moment the curtain goes up. goldstar ran that trade for twenty-two years and got good at the unglamorous end of li |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Atlas VPN 📖 2019 - 2024 nord security announced the deal on 15 october 2021 and promised atlas vpn would keep running independently. it did, for two and a half years, until somebody did the math on maintaining two consumer vpn brands out of the same building in lithuania. the closure was announced on 25 march 2024 for 24 a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Visa Electron 📖 1985 - 2024 visa spent thirty nine years selling a debit card that had to ask permission before it would move any money. the number was printed rather than embossed and the balance could not go under zero, so banks handed it to students and to anyone with a thin file. it was also the card that a good share of t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Microspot 📖 1980 - 2024 a swiss electronics chain founded in 1980 was bought by coop in 1996 and had its shops folded into interdiscount three years later, which should have been the end of the name. it came back in may 2007 as an online shop and turned over 334 million francs in 2020. on 11 october 2023 coop announced tha |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Waitr 📖 2013 - 2024 lake charles, louisiana is not where food delivery apps come from, and that was the entire pitch. waitr started there in 2013 by signing up restaurants in towns the national apps had not bothered with, took tilman fertitta's spac money in 2018 at a valuation of 308 million dollars, then paid 321 mil |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
BlueJeans by Verizon 📖 2009 - 2024 bluejeans network was founded in 2009 by krish ramakrishnan and alagu periyannan as a cloud video bridge that could connect different conference room hardware to a single meeting. the consumer-facing service launched on june 29, 2011. for most of the 2010s it sat between webex and gotomeeting as the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Pokémon TV 📖 2010 - 2024 467,000 people were still opening it in December 2023. the free app where you could watch the pokémon anime without an account or a subscription, on the condition that you watched whatever happened to be up that week. the catalog ran past 700 episodes and the app showed around fifty, rotating them o |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Keen 📖 2020 - 2024 google's internal incubator built a pinterest with a machine learning engine underneath it. you made a board about a subject you cared about and saved links and images into it. the more you saved, the better the recommendations got at finding the next thing. it shipped in june 2020 and the last mean |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Blueboard 📖 2014 - 2024 on 12 march 2024 around five hundred companies opened an email telling them their employee rewards platform had ceased operations, effective immediately. blueboard had spent ten years selling the idea that a bonus should be a balloon ride rather than a gift card, and that model meant the money for t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
AWS Snowmobile 📖 2016 - 2024 amazon announced it in november 2016 by driving a shipping container onto the re:invent stage, and it was exactly what it looked like: a semi trailer full of disks that a company with an unmovable archive could park outside its data center for a few weeks. one hundred petabytes a load, under gps tra |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Whim 📖 2016 - 2024 helsinki got the first one of these in late 2016, a single app with a monthly fee that covered the tram and a taxi when you needed one, sold on the promise that you could give up your car. maas global raised somewhere around 149 million euros from toyota and others and pushed it into six more cities |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Drizly 📖 2012 - 2024 1.1 billion dollars in uber stock and cash, february 2021, for an app that had a liquor store bring the beer and scan your id at the door. three years inside uber it stayed a separate app, and in january 2024 uber said it would fold the idea into uber eats and retire the name by the end of march. th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Google Business Profile Websites 📖 2017 - 2024 sixty percent of small businesses did not have a website at all. that was the number google used in june 2017 when it switched on a free one page site for every business listing, built out of the opening hours and photos the owner had already typed in. seven years later the whole class of pages was |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Incognito Market 📖 2020 - 2024 six hundred and forty thousand cryptocurrency transactions ran through incognito between october 2020 and march 2024, and the ending was an inside job rather than a raid. the man holding the keys closed the withdrawals himself, kept what was inside, and then wrote to everyone who had traded there of |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Amazon Honeycode 📖 2020 - 2024 forty-four months in beta and not one day of general availability. aws launched honeycode in june 2020 as a spreadsheet you could turn into a real mobile and web app without writing code, priced to make trying it free. the community forum averaged a handful of new threads a month for three years, wh |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
OpenBitTorrent 📖 2009 - 2024 for fifteen years the largest public bittorrent tracker in the world held no files and no accounts, just a hostname you pasted into a torrent so that strangers could find each other. it survived a hollywood injunction in 2010 and its operator's arrest in 2014, and came back both times. on 4 february |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
LEGO Vidiyo 📖 2021 - 2024 lego and universal music shipped a toy on 1 march 2021 whose entire point was a phone app. you built a small stage, held your camera over plastic tiles called beatbits, and the app cut you a short music video with a licensed track under it. the sets were off sale by 31 january 2022 after eleven mont |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español 📖 2002 - 2024 on 26 february 2002 the contributors to the spanish wikipedia walked out and took the articles with them, because they believed advertising was coming and the license let them leave. the university of seville hosted the result for free for twenty-two years. it worked as a threat and failed as an enc |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
The Big Cartoon DataBase 📖 1997 - 2024 dave koch started it on his own computer in 1997 as a list of disney features. by 2009 it held a hundred thousand cartoons and librarians were citing it as the best free reference site on animation anywhere. the records after 2019 came back blank and nobody left on the project could fix them. in jan |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Gmail Basic HTML 📖 2005 - 2024 in september 2023 a notice went out from google: the gmail basic html view for desktop web and mobile web would be disabled starting early january 2024. it was the version of gmail that ran with no javascript at all, a page of text links that would come up on a browser too old or a line too thin for |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Amazon Cloud Drive 📖 2011 - 2023 amazon cloud drive launched in march 2011 as amazon's bet that the photo and document storage market would be a separate consumer product rather than a sub-feature of prime. it offered unlimited photo storage to prime members from 2014, got rebranded to amazon drive in 2017, and shut down for non-ph |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
DK Find Out! 📖 2015 - 2023 on the last day of 2023 dorling kindersley switched off dkfindout.com, the free children's reference site it had been running since march 2015. it was the publisher's cutout-on-white house style poured into a website, aimed at seven to eleven year olds, with quizzes and hand-built animations instead |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
LARM.fm 📖 2010 - 2023 since 1987 danish law has sent a copy of every radio and television broadcast to the royal library. larm.fm was the reading room built on top of that pile, a platform where academics could stream three million programs they were not permitted to download. it closed on 15 december 2023 after thirteen |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Noteable 📖 2020 - 2023 a company that had raised twenty five million dollars to host data notebooks ran out of runway in late 2023 and posted the notice to its own community forum, by which point the kernels had already stopped running. what was left was an export window of about three weeks. confluent hired much of the t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Pegipegi 📖 2012 - 2023 pegipegi launched in jakarta in may 2012, selling flights and hotel rooms inside indonesia with a local media group and japanese money behind it. in 2018 it was taken over completely by a singapore investment vehicle that indonesian reporting places under traveloka, which was the competitor winning |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Jumia Food 📖 2012 - 2023 jumia food started life as hellofood in 2012, one of rocket internet's african ventures, and took the jumia name in the 2016 rebrand. by late 2023 it was moving about eleven percent of everything jumia sold and had never once made money doing it. on 13 december 2023 the parent announced it was closi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
OkadaBooks 📖 2013 - 2023 an okada is the motorcycle taxi you take in lagos when the traffic has stopped moving, and okechukwu ofili named his publishing platform after one because nigerian book distribution was the traffic. authors uploaded straight to phones and kept seventy percent of a cover price that was often two hund |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
A.nnotate 📖 2008 - 2023 a small scottish company took proof-of-concept money from the scottish government in 2006 for work on authoring structured content out of plain text, and the side product was a website that let you upload a pdf in 2008 and write on it in a browser, years before that was ordinary. it ran fifteen year |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Veev 📖 2008 - 2023 veev was an israeli-founded proptech company that pivoted to modular home construction in the mid-2010s and scaled its manufacturing out of union city, california. the pitch was end-to-end vertical integration on prefab homes with a polymer-panel wall system replacing drywall. the company hit unicor |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Amazon Style 📖 2022 - 2023 glendale, california got the first one in may 2022, at a mall called the americana at brand, and columbus, ohio got the second and last one that october. amazon style was a clothing store with one of everything on the rack, where you scanned a qr code and the size you wanted turned up in a fitting r |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
NemID 📖 2010 - 2023 denmark switched on a single national login on 1 july 2010 and everyone over fifteen with a cpr number got one, which made it the rare piece of software with no competitor and no opt out. the second factor was a paper card of one-time codes that arrived by post. its security was argued about for a d |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Web SQL Database 📖 2009 - 2023 one implementation was the whole problem. web sql put a real sqlite database behind a javascript call, and every browser that shipped it shipped sqlite underneath. mozilla refused to standardize a spec whose only definition was whatever sqlite happened to do that year, so the w3c stopped work in nov |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Money Dashboard 📖 2010 - 2023 3,300 small investors put 4.6 million pounds into money dashboard in august 2019, the biggest fintech crowdfund on crowdcube that year. it was the uk's mint, an app that read your bank accounts and told you where the money had gone. clearscore bought the company in may 2022 and closed both apps to u |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Async Art 📖 2020 - 2023 async art was the san francisco nft platform built around an unusual mechanic. a piece had a master and a set of layers underneath. each layer was its own nft, and the master image updated depending on which layer-owners showed which version. conlan rios launched it in 2020 and shut it down on 23 oc |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Convoy 📖 2015 - 2023 convoy was seattle's digital freight brokerage founded in 2015 by dan lewis, an ex-amazon operations manager. it raised over a billion dollars across eight rounds from jeff bezos, bill gates, t rowe price, and generation investment. peak valuation was $3.8 billion in april 2022. eighteen months late |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Morhipo 📖 2011 - 2023 morhipo was boyner holding's online store, opened on 22 march 2011 with a celebrity-heavy television campaign and grown fast enough that internet retailer named it europe's fastest-growing e-commerce site for 2014, at around 117 percent. it started with clothes and ended up selling most of what a de |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Right Stuf 📖 1987 - 2023 the north american anime mail-order pioneer. founded in 1987 in grimes iowa by todd ferson and shawne kleckner, acquired by sony in august 2022, folded into the crunchyroll store on 10 october 2023. the catalog moved, the brand did not. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
FOIAonline 📖 2012 - 2023 twenty-two federal agencies once ran their freedom of information act traffic through a single website, and that website cost 1.3 million dollars to build because it was bolted onto the plumbing already running regulations.gov. it opened on 1 october 2012. the part worth missing is that you could re |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Works with Nest 📖 2014 - 2023 at i/o in may 2019 google gave the works with nest program sixteen weeks to live, and the people who had wired their houses around it reacted badly enough that the company walked part of it back inside a week. existing connections were allowed to keep running. no new ones were accepted after 31 augu |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Gfycat 📖 2013 - 2023 gfycat is remembered as a gif host, which it was not. it took the gif you uploaded and re-encoded it as video, so the thing that loaded in a second was never the file you sent. by 2017 it was carrying over 130 million people a month and its links were sitting inside reddit threads and forum posts ev |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
CITV 📖 1983 - 2023 citv began as a scheduling strand, a name wrapped around the after-school hours on itv, and it held that job for twenty-three years before becoming a channel of its own in 2006. the channel version lasted seventeen years and never found a large audience, because by then children had stopped waiting |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Media Temple 📖 1998 - 2023 ninety four and a half million dollars in cash bought godaddy a hosting company it then spent ten years deciding what to do with. media temple sold shared and cloud hosting to designers who cared about their own uptime, and it was good enough at that job that agencies put the (mt) badge in page foot |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Freewebs / Webs.com 📖 2001 - 2023 a free website in the browser, back when that mostly meant geocities and a lot of patience. two brothers built freewebs out of a maryland dorm in 2001 and grew it to tens of millions of pages, the drag-and-drop answer to the free homepage. vistaprint bought it in 2011 for a hundred and seventeen mil |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
DiscordList.me 📖 2017 - 2023 discord shipped without a way to find anything on it, and for most of a decade that gap was filled by outsiders. discordlist.me was one of them, an ad-supported directory with a premium tier, built by a team whose own footer had to say they were not affiliated with discord. the goodbye letter went u |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
LinkedIn InCareer 📖 2021 - 2023 china was the last large market where an american social network still had a login screen, and linkedin kept it for seven years by censoring what appeared on it. in 2021 the compliance load got heavy enough that the chinese version closed and incareer replaced it, a jobs app with no feed and nothing |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Third Room 📖 2022 - 2023 funders who had said they were interested did not come through, element could not carry it alone, and in july 2023 the three people building third room were laid off. ten months of public life and two tech previews. every world forgot itself the moment the last person walked out, because state persi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Apple Photo Stream 📖 2011 - 2023 my photo stream was the free apple feature that pushed the last thousand photos from your iphone to your mac and your ipad without touching your icloud storage quota. it lived for twelve years quietly inside the photos settings page. apple announced the shutdown in may 2023, uploads stopped on june |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
AppHarvest 📖 2018 - 2023 appharvest was a kentucky greenhouse startup that combined climate-adjacent controlled-environment agriculture with an appalachian job-creation pitch. jonathan webb founded it in january 2018. it merged with novus capital in a january 2021 spac deal and listed on nasdaq at roughly a billion dollars. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Google Album Archive 📖 2016 - 2023 nobody signed up for album archive. google built it in july 2016 as somewhere to put the photos left over from products it was closing, starting with picasa, and it quietly took on everything else after that: google+ albums and hangouts attachments, down to the background image you once uploaded to |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
OmegaWiki 📖 2005 - 2023 on 27 december 2005 gerard meijssen started a dictionary meant to hold every word of every language with definitions in every language, stored as a relational database instead of as wiki pages. it was called ultimate wiktionary, then wiktionaryz, then omegawiki. the wikimedia foundation never adopte |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Vowel 📖 2018 - 2023 andy berman posted the news on a thursday night in june 2023 and gave customers until 5 july to download their own recordings. vowel was a video meeting tool with live transcription and search across every call a company had ever made, built in new york on $17.8 million. the official explanation was |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Google Code Jam 📖 2003 - 2023 twenty years of algorithm problems, open to anybody with a compiler and a connection, judged the same way for a student in minsk as for an engineer in mountain view. it grew from a recruiting exercise into the longest-running program at the company and topped out at 96,000 registrations in 2020. goo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Maestro 📖 1991 - 2023 1991, and mastercard put a debit brand on cards in ninety-three countries. it did one thing and did it nearly everywhere: pin at the terminal, checked against your bank before the receipt printed. it never learned the web, partly because maestro numbers ran to nineteen digits and half the checkout f |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Splice Studio 📖 2014 - 2023 version control for music, free, aimed at two producers passing a session back and forth instead of mailing each other zip files. splice was built around it in 2014 and had moved on from it by 2017, and the feature sat there working badly for six more years because nobody wanted to be the person who |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Bountysource 📖 2012 - 2023 the blockchain group filed for bankruptcy in november 2023, five months after the platform it owned had gone quiet on every developer waiting to be paid. bountysource sat between people who wanted a bug fixed and people who could fix it, holding the money until a pull request got merged, which is a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Zume 📖 2015 - 2023 four hundred and forty five million dollars went into a company whose central insight was that the oven should travel with the order. the robots worked. the trucks worked. the cheese did not stay on the dough through a left turn, and by the time zume admitted that, it had already spent most of the m |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
AddThis 📖 2006 - 2023 addthis was the row of colored share buttons at the bottom of every article on the western web from about 2008 to 2016. a small js include, a share dialog, a lot of quiet tracking underneath. oracle bought the parent for around $200 million in 2016 to feed the audience segments into its data cloud. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Dyn / DynDNS 📖 1998 - 2023 a sixteen-year-old put free dynamic dns on the internet in 1998 so he could reach a printer from off campus, and it turned into the company holding the names for a large part of the american web. the free tier that built it was switched off in 2014. in october 2016 a botnet made of home cameras knoc |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Sameroom 📖 2015 - 2023 lechat inc. spent two years building a team chat product called kato and lost to slack. instead of closing, it started selling the connection between the winners: hand someone a link, they pick their own chat service, and the two rooms became one. 8x8 bought the company in january 2017 for $3.1 mill |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Akan Wikipedia 📖 2004 - 2023 akan is not a language. it is the family that twi and fante sit inside, and in 2004 somebody opened a wikipedia for it anyway. for nineteen years the wiki collected articles that belonged on one of its own children, with a twi wikipedia running next door and nobody certain which door to use. ghanaia |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Tiscali 📖 1998 - 2023 tiscali was a sardinian phone bill that briefly convinced itself it was europe's internet. renato soru launched it in cagliari in 1998 and gave italy internet with no monthly fee, then rode the dot-com money into a buying spree across thirteen countries. the debt from that spree took the next twenty |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Grex 📖 1991 - 2023 ann arbor had a bbs whose owner kept threatening to turn it off, so a dozen of its users spent six months in weekly meetings designing one he could not. grex ran for thirty two years as a michigan non-profit with an elected board, free shell accounts for anyone who asked, and dues of two dollars a m |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
WeVPN 📖 2020 - 2023 13 april 2023 is the day wevpn's homepage stopped selling anything and started apologizing. the service was three years old, run out of the british virgin islands on ram-only servers at $2.49 a month, and it went down on money rather than on a court order. a competitor paid for the funeral: windscri |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Genesis Market 📖 2017 - 2023 a dollar bought a working copy of somebody else's browser. genesis market sold what it called bots. a bot was the cookies and saved logins of a real infected machine, plus the fingerprint that made the machine look normal. it shipped a chromium build called genesium so a buyer could load all of that |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
GOV.UK Verify 📖 2014 - 2023 the government digital service put it into public beta on 14 october 2014 and live in may 2016, with private companies doing the identity checking and the state buying the result. by february 2019 it had 3.6 million users against a forecast of 25 million, a verification success rate under half, and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
PHS (Personal Handy-phone System) 📖 1995 - 2023 china named it after a boy in a science fiction novel. xiaolingtong, little smart, the kid from ye yonglie's story who travels to the future, became the brand on a japanese radio standard that china telecom sold to more than ninety million subscribers by 2007 because the rules said it was not really |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
kividoo 📖 2015 - 2023 cologne built a netflix for six-year-olds and ran it for eight years. kividoo was super rtl's hedge against the day children stopped watching television on a television, with about 3,500 cartoons behind a login and a parent's password. it was nearly closed in 2020 and got a reprieve. the closure not |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Nintendo 3DS and Wii U eShop 📖 2011 - 2023 the 3ds and wii u eshops were nintendo's first proper digital storefronts. the 3ds version launched in june 2011 and the wii u version in november 2012. both went read-only on march 27 2023. roughly a thousand paid titles, including the only legal way to buy several virtual console games, became unb |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
WorldCat Identities 📖 2007 - 2023 thom hickey was oclc's chief scientist and he wanted to know what a library catalog could say about a person if nobody wrote a word of it by hand. worldcat identities was the answer: thirty million pages assembled by machine out of catalog records, one per author or organization or invented characte |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Hypermart 📖 1996 - 2023 ten megabytes, a real CGI directory and no bill, paid for by a banner the host wrote into the top of every page you published. go2net ran hypermart from 1996 as the free-hosting deal aimed at people with a small company rather than a fan page, which made it the odd one in a category otherwise full o |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
ChipMixer 📖 2017 - 2023 chipmixer opened in august 2017 and ran a bitcoin tumbler with no accounts and no records. you sent coins in and got back chips, fixed denominations that had already been funded before your money arrived, and you collected them as private keys rather than as a payment, so the withdrawal never appear |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
PopJam 📖 2014 - 2023 at ten in the morning london time, on 8 march 2023, an app full of children's drawings stopped taking posts. mind candy had built popjam in 2014 while moshi monsters was sliding, sold it to superawesome the next year with a million british kids already on it, and by the end it belonged to epic games |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Embark Trucks 📖 2016 - 2023 embark trucks was a san francisco autonomous-trucking startup founded in 2016 by alex rodrigues and brandon moak, both ycombinator winter 2016 alumni still in their early twenties. the pitch was head-of-cab autonomy for long-haul class-8 trucks moving freight between us sunbelt logistics hubs. in no |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Triposo 📖 2011 - 2023 three ex-google engineers decided in 2011 that a travel guide should be assembled by software rather than written by a person, and built one that still worked with the phone in airplane mode. ten million downloads by 2015. musement bought it in october 2017 and the consumer app quietly turned into a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
AmazonSmile 📖 2013 - 2023 amazonsmile launched in 2013 as a version of the amazon storefront that donated 0.5% of eligible purchases to a charity the shopper picked. over a decade it gave more than $400 million in the us, but spread across a million-plus charities the average payout was tiny. amazon ended it in february 2023 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
LocalBitcoins 📖 2012 - 2023 localbitcoins was helsinki-based and ran the actual peer-to-peer bitcoin marketplace for eleven years. no order book. people posted ads, met in cafes with cash, or wired via national bank rails. at peak it had over a million active traders and quarterly volume above six hundred million dollars. cryp |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
ProgrammableWeb 📖 2005 - 2023 forty public apis fit in the directory when john musser started it in 2005. seventeen years later it listed more than nineteen thousand, and mulesoft announced on 10 october 2022 that publishing would stop at the end of that month. the catalog kept serving anyway, full thirty-kilobyte pages of it as |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
eOldal.hu 📖 2007 - 2023 central médiacsoport put the notice on its own blog on 7 october 2022 and named 1 february 2023 as the day everything left on the servers would be deleted. what closed was a hungarian service that had been promising, since 2007, your own website in three minutes for nothing, with a photo album and a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
SciGraph 📖 2017 - 2023 linked open data was supposed to be how the scholarly record finally talked to itself, and springer nature was one of the few publishers that actually built the thing. scigraph went live in march 2017 with more than a billion rdf statements covering some thirteen million publications back to 1815, f |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Upsource 📖 2014 - 2023 jetbrains stopped selling upsource on 1 february 2022 and stopped supporting it a year later to the day, which is about as orderly as a software death gets. the pitch had been a code review tool that actually parsed your java instead of diffing text, which was a real advantage for about as long as c |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Genesis Global Capital 📖 2013 - 2024 when ftx fell over in november 2022, the largest institutional crypto lender in the business stopped letting anyone take money out. barry silbert's digital currency group owned it, and dcg was also one of the biggest names on the list of people who owed it money. the chapter 11 filing came on 19 jan |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Gemini Earn 📖 2021 - 2023 340,000 people had money in it. gemini earn paid interest on crypto deposits by lending them to genesis global capital, and when genesis paused withdrawals on 16 november 2022 the depositors learned that the savings account had been a loan the entire time. gemini terminated the master loan agreement |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Google Question Hub 📖 2018 - 2023 google built a tool whose entire content was the holes in its own index. question hub collected the search queries that came back with nothing useful and showed them to publishers in markets where google knew its index was thin, so somebody would go and write the missing page. it opened as a beta fo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Jinx.com 📖 1999 - 2023 jinx (stylized as J!NX) launched in 1999 as a home business run by san diego web developers sean gailey and tim norris, hand-printing shirts for counter-strike players. it grew through the early 2000s into a licensed-merch shop for blizzard properties and later picked up esports apparel deals with t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Archie 📖 1990 - 2023 archie was the first search engine on the internet, four years before there was a web to search. alan emtage built it as a postgraduate at mcgill in montreal to save himself the work of checking public ftp sites by hand, and it ended up holding the filenames of most of the open internet in one index |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Lot18 📖 2010 - 2023 forty three million dollars went into a wine site in thirteen months, which tells you what late 2011 felt like if you were selling something at a discount for twenty four hours at a time. lot18 launched in october 2010 with the gilt groupe model pointed at bottles, bought a paris competitor, opened |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Amazon Care 📖 2019 - 2022 an employee benefit that amazon tried to sell to other employers. it never got there. the internal memo said the offering was not complete enough for the large enterprise customers amazon had been targeting. shut down 31 december 2022, ten months after the nationwide expansion. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
La Cartoonerie 📖 2002 - 2022 flash ended on 31 december 2020 and took the studio with it, but the community it had built refused to go for another two years. la cartoonerie taught french children to make animated films by clicking on characters and sets, claimed 300,000 cartooneurs at its height, and was run at the end by volun |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
OpenStax CNX 📖 1999 - 2022 connexions was one professor's argument that a textbook is the wrong unit. richard baraniuk cut teaching material into modules of a page or two, licensed them so anyone could take one and change it, and let people assemble their own collections out of other people's work. it ran for twenty three yea |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Fosshost 📖 2020 - 2022 for two years a small british nonprofit gave away servers to open source projects that could not pay for them, and by the end of 2021 around 250 of them were on it, including gnome, debian, armbian and the fsfe. then the founder stopped answering. he was the only person with access to the bank accou |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Spinnup 📖 2013 - 2022 spinnup was universal music's do-it-yourself distributor, started in sweden in 2013. you paid a flat fee, kept all your royalties, and your record went to spotify and apple music like anyone else's, while universal's scouts read the platform as a talent pipeline. more than a hundred thousand artists |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
E-Postbrief 📖 2010 - 2022 to get an address you went to a post office counter and showed a photo id, then confirmed a code sent by sms and a second code posted to your home on paper. deutsche post launched the e-postbrief on 14 july 2010 and had a quarter of a million signups within two days. over a million people had regist |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
BlockFi 📖 2017 - 2023 blockfi was a crypto lender, founded 2017 in jersey city, valued at $3 billion at peak. it took customer bitcoin deposits, paid yield, and lent the same coins to institutional traders for the spread. that worked while crypto went up. it stopped working in summer 2022 when three arrows capital collap |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Google Surveys 📖 2012 - 2022 google's answer to the newspaper paywall was to charge you a question instead of money. one multiple-choice box slid over the article, the publisher earned a few cents when you cleared it, and google walked away with a cheap national sample it resold as market research. it launched on 29 march 2012 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Docracy 📖 2011 - 2022 two developers won a hackathon in may 2011 by making legal contracts free to read and free to sign. docracy ran for eleven years and spent its last ones quietly overrun by seo uploads nobody was moderating. eversign bought it in 2019 and switched it off in november 2022, leaving a one-screen notice |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Amazon Explore 📖 2020 - 2022 amazon explore was a pandemic-era product that let you book a live one-on-one video call with a local expert somewhere in the world. a 50-minute walking tour through a market in venice ran around 50 dollars. a shorter session with a costa rican animal sanctuary was closer to 7 dollars. it launched i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Hashbase 📖 2017 - 2022 paul frazee and tara vancil had built a browser that let you publish a website straight from your own machine, and then ran into the problem underneath it: a site with no server is only online while its author is. hashbase was the answer, a paid peer sitting in a datacenter that mirrored your dat ar |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
MBnet 📖 1994 - 2022 at 23:09 on 6 june 2002 somebody pressed a red switch in helsinki, with the former sysops standing around, and the largest bbs finland ever had went off the phone network. mikrobitti magazine had opened it for subscribers on 1 december 1994 with 20 lines and grew it to 250, on the only thousand-node |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
UzmanTV 📖 2007 - 2022 a turkish site that answered practical questions with ninety-second videos of somebody qualified, built by ersan ozer in 2007 and profitable by november 2011, which is rare enough for a turkish web company of that era to be the headline. about sixty-five thousand clips from close to two thousand exp |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Flowdock 📖 2009 - 2022 three helsinki developers built a shared team inbox in 2009, years before anybody was calling this category team chat. rally software bought them in february 2013 and slack opened to the public that august. the product was then sold twice more, to ca technologies and on to broadcom, while somebody e |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
hubiC 📖 2011 - 2022 ovh's answer to dropbox, launched in december 2011 and priced to embarrass everyone. twenty five gigabytes free, unlimited storage for eighty four euros a year until they worked out what unlimited costs. the files sat in roubaix and gravelines rather than virginia, which was the actual selling point |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Zipmail 📖 1998 - 2022 zipmail was brazil's answer to hotmail, a free webmail service launched in 1998 by the zip.net portal at the height of the dot-com rush. it grew fast, past a million users inside its first year, and became one of the country's oldest email addresses, the kind people kept for decades out of habit. th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
big big shop 📖 2018 - 2022 a shop bolted onto a livestreaming app, selling you the thing the actor on screen happened to be holding. tvb launched big big shop in may 2018 against hktvmall and it worked well enough to absorb a convenience-store chain's online arm the following spring. then the broadcaster spent two hundred mil |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Emporis 📖 1996 - 2022 emporis was the web's quiet card catalog for tall buildings, started in frankfurt in 1996 and opened as a public database around 2000. for two decades it was where wikipedia and news sites pulled their building heights from, an unglamorous reference that everyone trusted and almost nobody thought ab |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Yandex Zen 📖 2015 - 2022 yandex launched zen in may 2015 as a personalized infinite-scroll feed bolted onto the yandex.ru search homepage. the algorithm pulled in news and blog posts and ranked them against your reading history. by march 2022 the platform was pushing about fifty-nine million monthly readers, the biggest rus |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Waze Carpool 📖 2016 - 2022 waze carpool tried to sell the empty seats in rush hour traffic. it matched people driving the same way at the same hour and capped what a rider could pay at the american mileage rate, so a driver covered fuel and could not make a wage out of it. that cap was the product. it kept the thing out of ta |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Brainbench 📖 1998 - 2022 brainbench sold the idea that a short online exam could stand in for a line on your cv. it started as tekmetrics.com in january 1998, took the brainbench name at the end of 1999 and ended up with around 630 exams and more than six million people tested. the certificate it produced was really a trans |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Telekom De-Mail 📖 2012 - 2022 germany passed a law in 2011 that gave email the standing of a registered letter, and deutsche telekom was one of four companies licensed to sell it. between 2011 and 2020 the government agencies it was built for sent about six thousand of these messages in total. telekom's own chief executive calle |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Lexico 📖 2019 - 2022 oxford put its dictionaries on the open web in 2010 and then spent twelve years changing what the site was called. the last of those names was lexico, a joint venture with dictionary.com that ran from june 2019 until the partnership ended and the whole thing was pointed at a redirect. the definition |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1975-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
DECnet 📖 1975 - 2022 in july 2022 a kernel developer sent a patch to the linux mailing list arguing that decnet belonged in a museum rather than in the kernel, and twelve thousand lines came out on 22 august. digital equipment's protocol suite had been shipping since 1975. it carried the fifty four thousand node network |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Publons 📖 2012 - 2022 andrew preston and daniel johnston started publons in new zealand in 2012 to fix an accounting problem in science. peer review is unpaid and invisible, so the work never appears on anybody's cv and the people who do the most of it get nothing for it. publons let reviewers register what they had revi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Redis To Go 📖 2010 - 2022 heroku wrote the first redis add-on for its own platform, spun it out, and from july 2010 a separate team ran it as redis to go. heroku's own documentation called it the number one redis provider with over fifty thousand instances, and a great many of those were on the free plan, attached to a rails |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Movies 📖 1998 - 2022 yahoo movies launched on may 12 1998 as "upcoming movies," then rebranded inside the year. for most of its run it was the showtimes-plus-trailers-plus-reviews page that pre-google movie searches landed on. the digital-magazine wave in 2014 left movies in place when seven other verticals were cut in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Airlift 📖 2019 - 2022 eleven months separate the largest venture round in pakistani history from the evening staff were told the company would stop the next day. airlift raised 85 million dollars in august 2021 at a 275 million valuation, on dark stores and thirty-minute grocery delivery across eight pakistani cities and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Modsy 📖 2015 - 2022 $70.75m went into photographing people's living rooms and handing them back as 3d models with buyable furniture arranged inside. design work stopped in the last week of june 2022 and the company ceased operations about a week after that. shanna tellerman told techcrunch it was capital constraints an |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Voyager Digital 📖 2018 - 2023 voyager digital was a us crypto brokerage. customers deposited fiat or crypto, the app gave per-coin quotes with no visible commission, and the platform paid up to 12% apy on certain assets. that yield was financed by lending customer deposits to institutional crypto traders. three arrows capital de |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Volt Bank 📖 2018 - 2022 six thousand customers, A$113 million in deposits, and a funding round that never closed. volt was the first australian startup ever granted a restricted banking license, which made it the test case for the whole regulatory experiment, and it spent four years proving that the license was the easy pa |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
WanderJaunt 📖 2016 - 2022 on 30 june 2022 wanderjaunt stopped operating in all eight of its american markets, and the way most people found out was a recorded greeting on the customer service line blaming current economic conditions. it had raised more than $25 million since 2016 to lease other people's apartments and rent t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
OperaMail.com 📖 1998 - 2022 on 15 february 2021 fastmail began telling people that their email address was going to stop existing. the address ended in @operamail.com, which opera software had been handing out since 1998, when a browser company giving you a mailbox was a normal way to keep you. opera owned the domain and had s |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Katacoda 📖 2015 - 2022 o'reilly bought ben hall's katacoda in november 2019 and closed it to the public on 15 june 2022, a month after saying it would. the reason given was abuse. free root on a real machine in a browser tab turned out to be irresistible to crypto miners, and the company decided it would rather point its |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Oberlo 📖 2015 - 2022 vilnius, 2015: two brothers built a pipe between aliexpress and shopify, so that a store could list a product it had never seen and forward the order to a supplier in china. shopify bought oberlo in 2017 for a reported fifteen million dollars and it became the default tool of the dropshipping boom. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
SSNDOB 📖 2012 - 2022 ssndob sold american identities by the record. a full one, carrying a name and a social security number, went for fifty cents, and the catalog covered about 24 million people. it ran from 2012 across a handful of domains and took in nearly 22 million dollars in bitcoin. the irs criminal investigatio |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Trunk Club 📖 2009 - 2022 trunk club sent you a box of clothes a stylist had picked, you kept what you wanted and posted the rest back for nothing. nordstrom bought it in 2014 for $350 million and took a $197 million writedown on it twenty eight months later, because the sums never closed. every trunk was a warehouse operati |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Friday.app 📖 2016 - 2022 luke thomas raised $2.5 million for friday, added a hundred thousand users in the product's last twelve months, and switched it off on 3 june 2022 because he could not answer two questions about his own company: who is the buyer, and what is the willingness to pay. the notice went up on 4 april and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Yaari 📖 2019 - 2022 indiabulls tried to run a meesho competitor by giving resellers a curated catalog and a share-to-whatsapp button. the funnel worked. paying the suppliers behind the funnel did not. yaari's tech team was folded into dhani and the app went quiet. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
CTemplar 📖 2018 - 2022 reykjavik was the whole pitch, icelandic privacy law and anonymous signup, sold under the name armored email. the holding company was registered in the seychelles. on 26 april 2022 ctemplar posted a short notice saying the last day of operation would be 26 may of that year, and offered no reason at |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Alexa Internet 📖 1996 - 2022 the little green bar at the bottom of your browser that said you were visitor number five hundred thousand of a website nobody else was on. amazon bought it in 1999 for the panopticon, kept it on life support for two decades while the panopticon migrated to other parts of the building, then finally |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Hydra Market 📖 2015 - 2022 hydra was the largest darknet market ever built and almost nobody outside the russian-speaking internet ever saw it. it ran from 2015 to april 2022 and reached seventeen million customer accounts against nineteen thousand sellers, with sales passing a billion dollars in 2020 alone. the thing that ma |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Blender.io 📖 2017 - 2022 blender.io ran as a bitcoin mixer from 2017 and moved more than half a billion dollars through itself before it was finished. in march 2022 north korea's lazarus group took almost 620 million dollars out of the axie infinity bridge and pushed 20.5 million of it through blender. the operators closed |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Stack Overflow Jobs 📖 2009 - 2022 stack overflow careers launched in october 2009 as joel spolsky's plan to pay the bills on the q&a site. it grew into stack overflow jobs, attached the developer story resume product, ran for thirteen years, and shut down on march 31 2022 after prosus acquired the company for $1.8 billion. talent ac |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
EZweb 📖 1999 - 2022 ezweb was the mobile internet on au phones in japan, launched by the ddi cellular group on 14 april 1999, seven weeks after docomo shipped i-mode. it ran on wap and hdml where i-mode ran on a cut-down html, which made it the harder platform to write for and also the one the rest of the world had sta |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Amazon Books 📖 2015 - 2022 amazon books was the first physical retail concept amazon opened under its own name. the first store launched in november 2015 at university village in seattle. the concept was designed to look like a bookstore but function as an amazon promotion channel, with every book displayed cover-out and shel |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Amazon 4-star 📖 2018 - 2022 amazon 4-star was the general-merchandise sibling to amazon books, opened in soho manhattan in september 2018 with a simple idea: only stock items rated four stars or higher on amazon.com. the shelves rotated by whatever the site's review data said was working that week. thirty stores in total acros |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
CrowdsUnite 📖 2012 - 2022 the jobs act cleared congress in april 2012 and suddenly anybody in the united states could try to raise money from strangers online, which meant hundreds of platforms appeared to help them do it. alex feldman built crowdsunite in new york that same year so you could tell them apart, five stars at a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Diem (Libra) 📖 2019 - 2022 diem started life as libra, facebook's plan to give billions of people a single global currency they could send as easily as a message. the moment it was announced in 2019 the world's governments treated it as a threat, and central banks and finance ministers lined up against it. facebook stripped i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
LEGO Digital Designer 📖 2003 - 2022 lego digital designer was a free cad program for lego bricks, and the point of it was that the box on screen never ran out. you built whatever you wanted and it wrote the instructions for you. for a few years in the middle it would ship the actual pieces to your house. the ordering half died in 2012 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
VPNLab 📖 2008 - 2022 vpnlab sold openvpn access with 2048-bit keys for sixty dollars a year and advertised on dark web forums, which tells you who the customer was, because a service for ordinary people does not buy space where ordinary people never go. ransomware crews used it to stage attacks and to keep their infrast |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
N26 US 📖 2019 - 2022 eighteen months after walking out of the united kingdom, germany's biggest neobank walked out of the united states too. the announcement came on 18 november 2021, nine days after its own regulator at home capped how fast it was allowed to grow. american customers had until 11 january 2022 to move th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
iTunes U 📖 2007 - 2021 free stanford and mit lectures on your ipod nano, downloaded over a 2008 broadband line and shuffled in with podcasts. itunes u was the early delivery layer for open courseware, before coursera and edx existed. apple announced its death in june 2020 and pulled it down on december 31, 2021. the lectu |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Amazon Prime Now 📖 2014 - 2021 prime now was amazon promising that the thing you ordered would be at your door before the afternoon was over. it ran out of small warehouses rented inside expensive cities, and it lived in its own app with its own cart, because the main amazon catalog was the wrong shape for a van that had to come |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
XS4ALL 📖 1993 - 2021 people out of the hacker magazine hack-tic put the dutch public on the internet in 1993 and then spent a decade arguing in court on their own customers' side, most famously against the church of scientology. kpn bought the company in december 1998 and then left it alone for twenty years. in january |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Zopa (P2P) 📖 2005 - 2021 the world's first peer-to-peer lender ran from march 2005 to december 2021. about six billion pounds of retail loans routed through in that time. pandemic default spike and regulatory tightening broke the model, zopa the bank bought back the retail book at par, and the p2p side quietly wound down. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Livefyre 📖 2009 - 2021 livefyre sold publishers a comment section that updated while you were still reading it. from 2009 it replaced the refresh-and-see-what-happened thread on a large number of news sites, then sold the same machinery to brands as a way of pulling other people's instagram and twitter posts onto their ow |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
AppCache 📖 2008 - 2021 the standard way to make a web page work offline for most of a decade, and the thing every developer who touched it warned the next one about. you listed your files in a text manifest and the browser kept them, then served the stale copy first no matter what the network said, so every update landed |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Google Bookmarks 📖 2005 - 2021 google bookmarks lived inside the bookmarks.google.com subdomain for sixteen years without ever being absorbed into chrome or anything else google ran. it was a private bookmark list with labels and full-text search. nobody at google built around it. nobody at google killed it for a long time. then |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
YanukovychLeaks 📖 2014 - 2021 on 22 february 2014 the president of ukraine left his estate in a hurry and a quantity of his paperwork went into the kyiv reservoir. divers brought up 174 folders that day. journalists spent eight days drying and scanning the pages, put the site up on 25 february, and then ran it for seven and a ha |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Lola.com 📖 2015 - 2021 a boston office near south station closed in september 2021 with two shutdown dates a couple of days apart, the spend product on the fifteenth and the travel product on the seventeenth. paul english and bill o'donnell had built lola out of kayak six years earlier as a consumer app where you chatted |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Google Sites Classic 📖 2008 - 2021 classic google sites was the closest thing google ever shipped to a free webpage builder for normal people. it was a 2006 jotspot acquisition turned into a 2008 product with a wysiwyg editor that looked exactly like google docs. for thirteen years it ran middle-school class pages, sports team roster |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Souq.com 📖 2005 - 2021 souq was the arabic-speaking gulf's amazon before amazon bought it. ronaldo mouchawar started it in dubai in october 2005 as a maktoob auction site, pivoted to a fixed-price marketplace, scaled across the uae, saudi arabia and egypt. amazon paid around $580 million for it in march 2017 and spent fou |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Excite Mail 📖 1997 - 2021 a webmail brand that outlived the portal that made it famous by twenty years. excite launched free mail in july 1997 next to yahoo and rocketmail and hotmail. the portal collapsed in 2001. mindspark (iac) kept the mail login page alive as an authentication surface for excite's remnant brand until 31 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
FrontlineSMS 📖 2005 - 2021 one laptop with a phone plugged into it was the whole requirement, which is why this worked in places where nothing else did. ken banks wrote frontlinesms in 2005 so conservationists around kruger national park could text the communities living next to it, and fifteen years later it had carried elec |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
FTP in the Browser 📖 1991 - 2021 chrome 88 switched it off on 19 january 2021 and firefox 90 deleted the code on 13 july, which closed thirty years in which an address bar did not care whether you typed http or ftp. both teams gave the same account of why: the client was old enough to be a maintenance risk, and almost nobody was po |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Relatieplanet 📖 2002 - 2021 chris van tuijl started relatieplanet in 2002 and by 2005 it was the largest dating site in the netherlands, with more than 1.1 million accounts and around 600,000 active profiles. he sold it to telegraaf media groep that year for 21 million euros and it never got bigger again. the owner tried to se |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Make School 📖 2012 - 2021 fifty-five former students filed suit on 1 july 2021, and make school's for-profit arm entered insolvency proceedings the same day. what it had sold them was an income share agreement: nothing up front, then a fifth of your pre-tax salary for at least three and a half years. the degree underneath it |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
DataMarket 📖 2008 - 2021 a reykjavík company that took the world's public statistics, the kind published by central banks and statistical offices in whatever format the office preferred, and normalized all of it into one place you could search and chart. around thirteen thousand datasets by the end of its independent life. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
MetroLyrics 📖 2002 - 2021 metrolyrics was a lyrics site founded in vancouver in late 2002 that grew into a 25 million monthly user database of over a million songs. cbs interactive bought it in 2011 and red ventures inherited it in 2020. on june 29 2021 the site simply went offline. no shutdown announcement, no archive plan, |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
TV.com 📖 2000 - 2021 tv.com was where you went to find the air date of the episode you missed or the name of the writer who handled the season finale. it ran on volunteer fans for years before cnet bought it. then cbs bought cnet. the wiki layer rotted slowly through the 2010s and one morning in 2021 the domain just sto |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Lynda.com 📖 1995 - 2021 lynda weinman paid thirty-five dollars for a domain in 1995 so her students could find their course notes. twenty years later linkedin paid one and a half billion for what it had become, which was a flat monthly fee against every creative application anybody was hired to use. microsoft inherited it |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Phabricator 📖 2010 - 2021 phacility wound down on 1 june 2021 and left phabricator in what its own maintainer called bare minimum maintenance mode. evan priestley had written it inside facebook, spun a company out around it in 2011, and then carried a code review suite used by wikimedia and llvm on a business that never grew |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Zync Render 📖 2011 - 2021 thirteen months after google finished rewriting it from the ground up, the render farm stopped taking customers. zync came out of a boston visual effects shop in 2011, put frames from looper and star trek into darkness through amazon's cloud, and sold itself to google in august 2014. there was never |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Simple 📖 2009 - 2021 simple was the us neobank that prefigured chime and varo. josh reich founded it in 2009 with shamir karkal as cfo and alex payne on the technical side. the pitch was a checking account whose ui actually showed you what you could safely spend. 40,000 customers by mid 2013. bbva acquired the company i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Nuzzel 📖 2012 - 2021 nuzzel was a social news reader founded by jonathan abrams of friendster in 2012. it watched your twitter follow graph, counted how many of the people you followed had shared a given link in the last twenty-four hours, and surfaced the top results as a daily email or app feed. scroll acquired nuzzel |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Zaarly 📖 2011 - 2021 a 2011 startup weekend idea that promised a real-time bazaar for anything you wanted done nearby. kleiner perkins put in $14 million. the demand side never held. after a pivot to a curated home services roster in kansas city, zaarly ceased operations in april 2021. airtasker bought the shell three w |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Thodex 📖 2017 - 2021 thodex was a turkish crypto exchange that put up a maintenance notice on 21 april 2021 and never took it down. by then its founder was on a flight to albania. around three hundred and ninety thousand people could not reach their accounts, and prosecutors later put the missing figure near two billion |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Azlo 📖 2018 - 2021 pnc agreed to buy bbva's american business in november 2020, and two months later the parent closed both of the us digital banks it owned. azlo had been built inside bbva's new digital businesses unit by brian hamilton and cameron peake, and what it sold was a business checking account with no month |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
iAuthor 📖 2013 - 2021 on 5 december 2020 somebody at an address in ealing filed form ds01, the short document a company uses to ask the registrar to delete it. the first notice went up ten days later and the final one on 16 march 2021, and that is the entire obituary of iauthor, a book site the trade press had called a p |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
The COVID Tracking Project 📖 2020 - 2021 on 7 march 2020 two atlantic journalists merged their covid spreadsheet with a data scientist's, and the covid tracking project existed. for the next year roughly thirty paid staff and something like three hundred volunteers read american state health department webpages and typed the numbers out by |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
TLS 1.0 📖 1999 - 2021 rfc 2246 landed in january 1999 and was mostly netscape's ssl 3.0 with a new name and a few corrections, which is why so much of the web ran on it for the next twenty years without anyone thinking about it. by 2018 it was held together by habit: sha-1 and md5 in the handshake, cipher modes that had |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
PictureTrail 📖 1999 - 2021 picturetrail started in 1999 in santa clara as an online photo album and turned into something more useful than that: the place people kept the pictures they wanted to display inside somebody else's website. forum signatures, auction listings, hobby-club galleries and myspace profiles, all of it hot |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Griddy 📖 2017 - 2021 ercot took griddy's members on 26 february 2021 and the company was finished by the same afternoon. the product was a $9.99 monthly membership that bought you electricity at the exact price the texas grid was charging that minute, no markup on top, no fixed contract underneath. that was a good deal |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
YouTube Space 📖 2012 - 2021 free studio time, in a real building, for anyone with enough subscribers to qualify. youtube opened the first one in london in 2012 and got to ten cities by 2018, then covid shut all of them and they never opened again. robert kyncl confirmed the permanent closure on 18 february 2021 and said the re |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Eventful 📖 2004 - 2021 brian dear founded evdb in la jolla in january 2004 and renamed it eventful in september 2005. underneath it was a searchable database of concerts and screenings, but the idea nobody else had was a button that let you demand an act come to your town, which turned wanting something into a number a pr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Banjo 📖 2011 - 2021 banjo launched on 22 june 2011 as an app that read the public geotagged posts around you and told you which of your friends were already at the same bar. by 2015 softbank had put a hundred million dollars into it and the product had turned into an event-detection engine sold to governments, ending i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
SecretBuilders 📖 2008 - 2021 31 january 2021 is the date on the goodbye note, and adobe flash is the reason it had to be written. secretbuilders launched in december 2008 as a virtual world for six to fourteen year olds where the neighbors were huckleberry finn and dracula, and it outlasted almost every rival that opened in the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Project Loon 📖 2013 - 2021 loon was the project that put internet service providers in the sky. helium balloons at twenty kilometers altitude with lte radios slung underneath, steered by software that picked a wind layer the way a pilot picks an airway. it covered emergency-response gaps in puerto rico and in kenya. it was ne |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Google App Maker 📖 2016 - 2021 in january 2020 google bought appsheet, and two weeks later it announced that app maker was finished. the low-code builder had shipped in november 2016 so that a g suite admin could assemble an approval form or an equipment tracker by dragging widgets around, with javascript underneath for anyone wh |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Amazon Prime Pantry 📖 2014 - 2021 five dollars ninety-nine bought one box, and you filled it: up to forty-five pounds or four cubic feet of the cheap heavy things that never made sense to ship one at a time. amazon launched it in april 2014 for prime members in the lower 48 and closed it on wednesday 6 january 2021 without an announ |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
HauteLook 📖 2007 - 2021 a los angeles flash-sale site that sold designer fashion by the morning email. nordstrom bought it in 2011 for around 180 million dollars and ran it for a decade. in 2021 it quietly folded into nordstrom rack. the model reached turkey through markafoni. the brand never did. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Koofers 📖 2008 - 2021 at virginia tech a koofer is an old exam in the hands of somebody who has not sat it yet. three people from that campus put the practice on a server in 2008, raised five million dollars from steve case's firm two years later, and got to two million registered users. koofers.com stopped being koofers |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Story Wars 📖 2014 - 2021 in november 2019 the site posted that it was closing in december. three weeks later a forum thread titled "story wars is saved (officially)" told everyone it had been given five more years. it got about fifteen months. a swedish site out of gothenburg where a story was never one person's: you wrote |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Google Cloud Print 📖 2010 - 2020 google cloud print was a 2010 google service that let any device send a print job through google's servers to any printer set up on a user's account. it existed because the first chromebooks shipped without any printer drivers and chromeos needed somewhere to forward print jobs from a browser. it ne |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
fromAtoB 📖 2008 - 2020 1.5 million searches a month across fifty european rail and coach operators, and it still could not survive a year without travel. three graduates of rwth aachen started fromatob in 2008 to answer one question, which was whether the train or the bus was cheaper for a given trip on a given day. the c |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Rinmaru Games 📖 2008 - 2020 on 31 december 2020, hours after adobe flash stopped running, rinmarugames.com replaced its catalog with one painted picture: a woman on the deck of a ship at sunset, holding a scroll that reads thank you. twelve years of avatar makers and dress-up games had run on the work of a single artist who si |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Questia 📖 1998 - 2020 questia was for a demographic i was not part of. a chicago-founded paid online library from 1998, aimed at american college students writing citation-heavy research papers. 94,000 full-text books. 14 million articles from journals and newspapers. gale acquired it in january 2010 as part of the cenga |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Xinja 📖 2017 - 2020 eric wilson founded xinja in 2017 as one of the first australian neobanks to chase a full ADI license. it got there in september 2019 and launched accounts in january 2020. covid stopped the funding round it needed to hold its 2.25 percent stash savings rate. it handed the license back in december 2 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Fooooo 📖 2007 - 2020 the five o's stood for the five continents and the f stood for find, which tells you how big the ambition was for a japanese video search engine launched in march 2007. it crawled fifty-odd video sites in eleven languages and reached 130 million indexed clips inside fifteen months. then youtube won, |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Encyclopedia ynet (אנציקלופדיה ynet) 📖 2002 - 2020 in 2007 a paid hebrew encyclopedia decided the way to compete with a free one was to put the words knowledge with responsibility under its own logo. yedioth ahronoth had spent a year and a half and about ten staff building it out of four printed encyclopedias, opened it free in december 2002, then p |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
OpenGrey 📖 1980 - 2020 700,000 bibliographic records of the european research output that no publisher ever put a price on: technical reports, doctoral theses, conference papers, government documents. it started in 1980 as sigle, a cooperative between national libraries across fifteen countries, and inist-cnrs in nancy pu |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Kidzworld 📖 1999 - 2020 a vancouver company spent twenty one years running moderated chat for children, which is the least thankful job on the internet, and then posted a goodbye note on 30 november 2020 telling its members their profiles were gone and their friendships were over. the note was filed in the homework help se |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Quantopian 📖 2011 - 2020 on 9 november 2020 quantopian told its community it had five days to copy out nine years of work. the boston company had given a decade of market data and a working backtesting engine to anyone who could write python, on the theory that the next great trading strategy would arrive from a stranger. t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
WinWin 📖 2007 - 2020 israel's biggest newspaper took its classifieds section off paper on 4 march 2007 and spent millions of shekels putting it on the web under a new brand. winwin fed itself the levi yitzhak price lists that the insurance trade treats as authoritative, and sent eighty photographers out to shoot the cou |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Unseen.is 📖 2013 - 2020 reykjavik was most of the pitch. unseen sold encrypted mail and chat out of iceland in the years right after snowden, with 4096-bit keys in the marketing and a free tier to bring people in, and security researchers spent 2014 taking the claims apart. service from iceland ended on 31 october 2020. us |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Tiddlyspot 📖 2006 - 2020 dreamhost decided that the thousands of wikis on tiddlyspot were personal backups, which its terms of use forbid, and moved the lot into object storage. that was the end of fourteen years of free hosting for tiddlywiki, the single html file that edits itself. by the early hours of 24 october 2020 ev |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Rakuten Deutschland 📖 2007 - 2020 5,500 german merchants were selling on rakuten.de at the end, against more than 300,000 on amazon.de. the site had begun life in 2007 as tradoria, a bamberg company that rented shop fronts to sellers and ran a single checkout across all of them, and rakuten bought eighty percent of it in july 2011 w |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Curbed (city sites) 📖 2006 - 2020 curbed was the real-estate blog that scaled itself into a network of city desks. new york first, then los angeles, san francisco, boston, atlanta, chicago, detroit, seattle, philadelphia, new orleans, washington dc. vox bought the network in 2013 and slowly pared it down. the last of the city sites |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
YouTube Community Contributions 📖 2015 - 2020 for five years anyone watching a youtube video could write its subtitles and hand them to the uploader for approval, in any language, for nothing. it is how a large part of the world's non-english audience reached english-language youtube at all. youtube switched it off on 28 september 2020, citing |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Awok 📖 2013 - 2020 awok sold electronics and household goods in the uae and saudi arabia at prices nobody else would match, and for a few years it was the largest thing in gulf e-commerce that amazon had not bought. ulugbek yuldashev built it without outside money until april 2019, when it raised $30 million in one of |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Google Hire 📖 2017 - 2020 google hire was a paid applicant-tracking system for small and medium businesses built on top of gmail and the google workspace stack. it launched in '17 out of the bebop acquisition that brought diane greene into google. it never got picked up beyond a niche customer base. shutdown was 1 september |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Everalbum 📖 2013 - 2020 a photo-cloud startup found consumer traction with unlimited backup, quietly trained a face-recognition model on user photos with consent toggles that did not really work, sold the model to enterprise buyers, then dropped the consumer product and took an FTC order for the training. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1933-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Telex 📖 1933 - 2020 telex was a switched network of teleprinters, started in germany in 1933 and eventually reaching every country with a post office. you dialed another machine's number and typed, and the paper came out at the far end carrying a receipt a court would accept. fax was faster and email was free, so by th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Bookogs 📖 2015 - 2020 in august 2020 discogs switched off four of its own databases on the same day, and bookogs was the biggest of them. a hundred and fifty five thousand books cataloged by volunteers who were never paid and never asked to be. the stated reason was focus. the company wanted to be a music database again, |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1899-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Sprint 📖 1899 - 2020 sprint was the fourth us carrier. it never reached turkey at the carrier layer, where the names on a bill were turkcell or vodafone. when t-mobile bought sprint in 2020 the brand quietly turned off, 121 years after a kansas telephone startup gave it its first name. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Yandex.Money 📖 2002 - 2020 yandex.money launched in 2002 as a joint venture between yandex and the paycash electronic-money operator out of saint petersburg. it became the default e-wallet for the russian-language internet, the checkout button on most russian-language stores said yandex.money. sberbank bought 75% of the busin |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Hobbi 📖 2020 - 2020 between seven and ten thousand people installed hobbi, total, across its whole life. facebook's new product experimentation team put it on the ios store on 13 february 2020 as somewhere to photograph your own projects and sort them into collections, and the press filed it immediately as a pinterest |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Bitbucket Mercurial Support 📖 2008 - 2020 bitbucket launched in 2008 as a mercurial-only host, added git three years later, and by 2019 fewer than one percent of its new users were picking mercurial. atlassian announced the sunset on 20 august 2019 and removed every hg repository and wiki and snippet on 1 july 2020, thirty days later than o |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
honestbee 📖 2015 - 2020 three hundred and nineteen point nine million singapore dollars is what honestbee still owed once the liquidators finished counting, most of it to former staff and to the vendors who had supplied them. the company launched in july 2015 doing grocery delivery in singapore and got as far as eight asia |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Tigris.org 📖 2000 - 2020 collabnet gave the internet twelve weeks of notice, in one line of text across the top of every page on 7 april 2020, naming 1 july as the end. tigris.org had hosted subversion itself since 2000 and had stopped accepting new projects six years before it closed. the copyright line in the footer of it |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Genographic Project 📖 2005 - 2020 national geographic and ibm started a study in 2005 to map how humans had moved across the planet, then did something unusual with it and sold the public a kit so anyone could put their own dna into the science. 1,006,543 people in more than 140 countries mailed in a swab. it made consumer ancestry |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
123 Importados 📖 2020 - 2020 123 importados opened in january 2020 selling televisions and refrigerators at prices no real retailer could match, took payment by boleto only, and told buyers delivery could take up to ninety days. the ninety days were the whole design: by the time the first customers understood nothing was coming |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
CodeFund 📖 2017 - 2020 no cookies and no tracking pixels: codefund sold ads on open source documentation and refused the mechanisms that make ad tech pay. eric berry started it as code sponsor in 2017, lost that version to a dispute with github, and rebuilt it on runway from gitcoin and consensys. it paid $670,000 out to |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
ScaleFactor 📖 2014 - 2020 $103 million went into an austin company selling small businesses automated bookkeeping, and the automation was dozens of accountants in texas and an outsourced office in the philippines keying the work in by hand. kurt rathmann told forbes on 23 june 2020 that covid-19 had cut sales in half and the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Topspin Media 📖 2007 - 2020 beats music bought topspin on march 4, 2014 and sold it on to a private equity firm inside about a month, weeks before apple bought beats for three billion dollars. that transaction is most of what happened to it. before that it had been the software behind direct-to-fan stores for paul mccartney an |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Airy Rooms 📖 2015 - 2020 airy signed up small independent hotels across a hundred indonesian cities, held every partner room to the same seven-point standard and put its own brand on the door. the price was fixed and low, and by 2020 the arrangement covered around 2,000 properties and more than 30,000 rooms. all of it reste |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Moven (consumer bank) 📖 2011 - 2020 the funding fell through in march 2020 and the consumer bank went with it. brett king had started movenbank in 2011 on the argument that banking was something you did on a phone rather than somewhere you went, which by 2020 was so thoroughly accepted that a dozen better-capitalized companies were do |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Google Contributor 📖 2014 - 2020 the pitch fit in one sentence. you paid google a few dollars a month, and on sites inside its ad network the ads came out and a pattern of colored pixels went in, with your money going to the publisher instead of the advertiser. it opened as an invite-only beta on 20 november 2014, aimed at readers |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
BBC Mixital 📖 2015 - 2020 more than a million things got made on mixital: doctor who games, and robots in strictly costumes that you programmed to dance using a few lines of html. the bbc launched it in 2015 under make it digital, won a children's bafta with it, and then announced on 24 april 2019 that it would close over th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
SETI@home 📖 1999 - 2020 seti@home was a berkeley screensaver that borrowed idle cpu time from home pcs to sift arecibo radio data for narrow-band signals from other civilizations. it ran from 17 may 1999 to 31 march 2020, pulled in over 1.8 million total users, and burned nine sextillion floating point operations across ro |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
freedb 📖 2001 - 2020 an audio cd carries no text on it at all, only track lengths. every program that showed you song titles was quietly asking a server somewhere to identify the disc by its shape. cddb did that job until gracenote closed it to unlicensed software in 2001, and freedb was the volunteer fork that kept a f |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
American FactFinder 📖 1999 - 2020 twenty years of census tables sat behind one query form, and on 31 march 2020 the form went away. american factfinder was the census bureau's public front door, the thing a city planner or a local reporter used to get a population figure for one county without knowing what an api was. the bureau had |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Wikimedia Space 📖 2019 - 2020 it lived on a test server for its entire life, at an address ending in wmflabs, which is a fair measure of how much the foundation had committed to it. wikimedia space opened on 25 june 2019 as a blog bolted to a discourse forum, to give organizers and affiliates somewhere to talk that was not a wik |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
VALU 📖 2017 - 2020 on 15 august 2017 a japanese youtuber sold off every pseudo-share he had issued in himself, at the top, into the fans who had bid him there. valu had been open eleven weeks. it survived that and was killed two and a half years later by a rewritten japanese payments law that turned holding somebody e |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Xiu.com 📖 2008 - 2020 warburg pincus and kpcb put a hundred million dollars into a chinese luxury fashion store in august 2011, the largest second round the sector had seen there. five years later its founder was in indonesia with an interpol notice out for him over a smuggling case. the site kept taking orders it could |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Upthere 📖 2015 - 2020 western digital bought the whole company in august 2017, ran it for two and a half years, then posted a banner saying the service would end on 3 march 2020. bertrand serlet had raised seventy-seven million dollars on the idea that your files should live in the cloud first and that sync should not ex |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Atrium 📖 2017 - 2020 justin kan co-founded the company that became twitch and sold it to amazon for $970 million, then spent 2017 to 2020 trying to do the same thing to corporate law. atrium employed its own lawyers and charged startups a flat subscription instead of billable hours, and it never got enough efficiency ou |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Mozilla IRC 📖 1998 - 2020 at noon eastern on 2 march 2020, irc.mozilla.org was switched off after more than twenty-two years. moznet was where the mozilla project did its synchronous talking from the late 1990s onward, and #developers was the room where browser decisions got argued in front of anyone who cared to idle there. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Car2Go / Share Now 📖 2008 - 2024 car2go was daimler's free-floating carshare. it launched in ulm in october 2008, expanded through europe and north america across the next decade, merged with bmw's drivenow in 2018 to form share now, withdrew from all of north america on 29 february 2020, and was sold to stellantis in 2022. by apri |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Wandoujia 📖 2010 - 2020 two hundred million dollars is what alibaba paid in july 2016 for a company that had been valued above one and a half billion two years earlier. wandoujia was the largest android app store in china that no phone brand and no giant owned, and being independent in that market turned out to be the whol |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Pokémon Global Link 📖 2010 - 2020 pokemon global link was the companion website that ran competitive ladders and the dream-world layer for gen 5 through gen 7 of the main pokemon games. it ended february 24 2020 at 23:59 utc, after the sword and shield launch deprecated the gen-7 online layer. casual battles and trades still go thro |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
One Today 📖 2013 - 2020 on 27 january 2020 the people still using one today got an email giving them ten days. google.org had launched it in april 2013 as an invitation-only android app for the united states, one nonprofit project a day at a dollar a time, with network for good vetting the charities and moving the money. t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
HTML Imports 📖 2014 - 2020 two percent of chrome page loads were still using it when google filed the paperwork to remove it, and most of that two percent was polymer. html imports let a document load another html file whole, markup and script together, which is an obvious way to ship a reusable component and the one no other |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Virgin Mobile USA 📖 2001 - 2020 virgin mobile usa was a joint venture between richard branson's virgin group and sprint, incorporated on 18 october 2001 and selling phones from the summer of 2002. it never owned a tower. it rented sprint's network and sold prepaid service to young americans at a moment when prepaid in the united s |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Cool Site of the Day 📖 1994 - 2020 cool site of the day was glenn davis's link-of-the-day site, the original one-good-link-a-day publication on the web. davis launched it on august 10 1994. newsweek profiled him in '95 as one of the fifty most influential internet people and gave him the king of cool tag. davis left in november 1995. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Google Station 📖 2015 - 2020 a program that put free public wifi into railway stations and other crowded places, mostly in india, then across a handful of emerging markets. google built the plumbing and local partners like railtel ran the last mile. it worked well enough that hundreds of stations came online faster than planned |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Kulmosnet (קולמוסנט) 📖 2003 - 2020 seventeen years of hebrew writing, none of it paid, edited by volunteers who were not paid either. kulmosnet opened in march 2003 to give people who wrote in hebrew somewhere to publish and, more unusually, somewhere to write a story in installments together. the author eli eshed and the journalist |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Canon Irista 📖 2014 - 2020 canon europe built a cloud that would only take photographs. it launched in june 2014 out of a beta codenamed project 1709, handed out 10 gb free and charged in euros for anything larger. five years later canon decided it was not in the storage business, gave notice on 29 october 2019 and deleted ev |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
ScryptMail 📖 2014 - 2020 five hundred mailboxes was the opening inventory. sergei krutov announced scryptmail on an email forum in november 2014, promising encrypted metadata and encryption at rest from a one-man shop in spokane, washington, and for a while it was on every shortlist of secure providers. the code stopped bei |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Hipmunk 📖 2010 - 2020 adam goldstein and steve huffman launched hipmunk in 2010 as a flight-search site with an 'agony index' that ranked itineraries by total misery rather than just price. it raised about $55 million and got copied by every major flight search engine. sap concur acquired it in september 2016 to fold a c |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
TerraServer.com 📖 1997 - 2020 eliot higgins found out from the error page. the commercial half of the old microsoft terraserver project sold satellite and aerial imagery for a few hundred dollars a year, which made it the only option a freelance investigator could afford. it stopped serving images on 18 january 2020 and said not |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
3D Buzz 📖 2001 - 2020 jason busby died of cancer in 2017 and the company he started did not really survive him. he founded 3d buzz in january 2001 in dickson, tennessee, and spent two decades recording video training for 3ds max and unreal in a voice that sounded like a man talking you through a problem rather than a tea |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Mozy 📖 2005 - 2020 mozy was a cloud backup service that started in 2005 as berkeley data systems in american fork, utah. emc bought it in october 2007 for 76 million dollars. dell inherited it through the 2016 emc deal and offloaded it to carbonite for 148.5 million dollars on 19 march 2018. carbonite suspended every |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Curiosity.com 📖 2014 - 2020 six million dollars of chicago venture money went into a website whose main job was pointing at other people's videos. curiosity launched inside discovery communications in january 2014 and spun out that november with gabe vehovsky running it. it ended up back inside discovery, its articles folded i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Edorble 📖 2015 - 2020 in december 2015 two developers opened a public beta for a 3d classroom you could walk a seminar into, built in unity, about five years before every large company on earth decided that was the future. the blog stopped on 17 september 2017 and nothing shipped after it. the domain was serving 404s by |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Amazon Underground 📖 2015 - 2019 amazon underground was a strange 2015 experiment. amazon launched an android app store where the apps were fully free forever, in-app purchases included, and amazon paid the developer $0.002 for every minute a user spent inside the app instead. the "actually free" pitch was aimed at parents tired of |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Himabu 📖 2015 - 2019 on 30 october 2019 nanameue announced it was closing the biggest students-only app in japan, with two months of notice and roughly eight million registered accounts still on it. the founder's public reason was that the app probably made the deepest happy connections in the country and the most sadne |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Sandstorm Oasis 📖 2015 - 2019 about two hundred people were paying six dollars a month for oasis when kenton varda decided he no longer felt right taking the money. oasis was the managed half of sandstorm, a personal server where you installed apps with one click and each app ran boxed off from the others. the company behind it |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
OpenAirplane 📖 2013 - 2019 one checkout instead of a new one at every counter. that was the whole product. a pilot flew a universal pilot checkout in a given make and model at a member operator, and after that could rent the same model anywhere else in the network, which took an afternoon and a few hundred dollars out of ever |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Comic Book DB 📖 2005 - 2019 the closing notice promised a new and improved tool for collectors. seven years later there is no tool, and the catalog that thousands of readers spent fifteen years filling in by hand is not online anywhere. chris seifert sold comicbookdb.com and all its data in march 2019 to the people who run com |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
GameRankings 📖 1999 - 2019 gamerankings launched in 1999 and averaged every review it could find into a percentage score. no taste hierarchy, no weighted metascore. cbs interactive owned both this and metacritic and eventually decided one aggregator was enough. on 9 december 2019 the older one was folded into the newer one. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Google Fusion Tables 📖 2009 - 2019 a 2009 google labs project that let anyone turn a csv into an embeddable map or chart. journalists used it to visualize war deaths for the guardian in 2010 and to map the japan tsunami in 2011. google shut it down on 3 december 2019 and pointed people at data studio and bigquery. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Ofo 📖 2014 - 2019 ofo was the yellow dockless bike-share that came out of peking university in 2014. at peak in 2017-2018 it had about ten million bikes on the ground across 250 cities and twenty countries. by late 2018 the refund requests had piled up at the beijing headquarters and the company quietly stopped opera |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
iOffer 📖 2002 - 2019 seventeen years of haggling ended when the card companies stopped answering. ioffer ran a marketplace with no bidding and no clock in it: a seller posted an asking price and a buyer made an offer, and the two of them argued from there. it worked, and then it filled up with replica handbags, and in m |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Viggle 📖 2012 - 2019 you held the phone up to the television and the app listened, worked out what was on and paid you points that turned into gift cards. robert f. x. sillerman, who had made his money in radio and live events, launched it in january 2012 and took 1.8 million registrations in the first year. it bought g |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
OnlinePizza 📖 2005 - 2019 three students in linköping started taking pizza orders over the web in the summer of 2005, and by the end the service carried more than 1,400 restaurants across over 200 swedish towns. delivery hero bought the group in april 2012 for more than a quarter of a billion kronor, which amounted to one of |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Google Express 📖 2013 - 2019 google launched the service in march 2013 as google shopping express, a same-day delivery pilot in the san francisco bay area for items from target, walgreens and a handful of other partners. it rebranded to google express in 2014 and tried to scale nationally with a 95 dollar annual membership that |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
vcash 📖 2017 - 2019 a cashback war killed this one. digi launched vcash in november 2017 as one of the first malaysian e-wallets and switched it off two years later, on 30 november 2019, after competitors funded by venture money bought the users a telco's digital division could not afford to buy back. the remaining bal |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Plated 📖 2012 - 2019 two harvard business school classmates worked out that the expensive part of dinner is not the food, it is deciding and shopping. plated shipped the decision in a box with the ingredients already weighed out. it raised around seventy five million dollars, sold to albertsons for three hundred million |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Microsoft HealthVault 📖 2007 - 2019 healthvault was microsoft's bet that consumers would assemble their own electronic medical record by hand and store it in a microsoft cloud. it shipped in october 2007 with partner integrations from withings to myfitnesspal, and it never reached the scale microsoft had assumed was waiting. the offic |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Google Touring Bird 📖 2018 - 2019 touring bird was a google area 120 incubator project for tours and city activities. it stealth-launched in paris in april 2018 and opened publicly in september 2018 with 20 destinations. by mid-2019 it covered about 200 markets and 75,000 experiences across global tour operators. google folded the t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
CrowdRise 📖 2010 - 2019 edward norton ran the 2009 new york city marathon for a kenyan conservation trust, put up a page to collect the pledges and pulled in one point two million dollars against a target of seventy-five thousand. crowdrise came out of that in may 2010, a fundraising site for charities with points and joke |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Withoutabox 📖 2000 - 2019 four hundred thousand filmmakers had an account, and for most of them this was the only route into a festival that did not involve a padded envelope and a screener disc. withoutabox turned submission into a web form in 2000 and sold itself to imdb for a reported three million dollars in 2008. then i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Discord Store 📖 2018 - 2019 the discord store was discord's attempt to sell pc games directly through the chat client. it opened as a closed beta on august 9, 2018, expanded to all users that october, and shut down on october 16, 2019. the model included a "first on discord" exclusivity program and a rotating free-game library |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Zimbra Desktop 📖 2008 - 2019 four owners in eleven years, and not one of them wanted to maintain the desktop client. zimbra desktop put the whole web mailbox on your machine and let you work with the network unplugged. development stopped under vmware in 2013, started again in february 2014 under the next owner, and ran out for |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
CyberBunker 📖 1995 - 2019 cyberbunker sold server space out of a decommissioned nuclear command post and advertised that it would refuse nothing except child pornography and terrorism. the pirate bay ran on it. so did a row of dark web drug markets, and in 2013 the spamhaus attack that news desks spent a week calling the big |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
MoviePass 📖 2011 - 2019 moviepass launched in 2011 as a moderate monthly pass priced like one or two movie tickets. in august 2017 helios and matheson bought it and dropped the price to $9.95 a month for unlimited tickets, which is below the cost of a single ticket in most us cities. the company hit 3 million subscribers a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Android Beam 📖 2011 - 2019 android beam let you put two phones back to back and push whatever was on the screen across, using nfc for the handshake and bluetooth or wifi for the actual transfer. it shipped with ice cream sandwich in october 2011 and it was on effectively every android handset sold for the next eight years. go |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
BluWiki 📖 2004 - 2019 in november 2008 apple's lawyers told a one-man wiki host that a page about how ipods talk to itunes was a copyright violation, and the pages came down. the eff sued on the host's behalf and apple withdrew in july 2009. bluwiki itself kept running on donations for another decade, then went quiet in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Distribber 📖 2009 - 2019 distribber sold independent filmmakers a way onto itunes and the other video stores for one upfront fee instead of a permanent cut of the takings. you paid, your film went up, and the money that came back was yours. that was the pitch from 2009 and it was a good one. in september 2019 the offices cl |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Wikilivres 📖 2006 - 2019 new zealand lets copyright expire fifty years after the author dies. the united states does not, and wikilivres existed inside that gap. yann forget started it in april 2006 as a place for texts and images that were legal somewhere but not legal on wikimedia's american servers, and it moved from can |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
niconare 📖 2015 - 2019 seven weeks after dwango finished rebuilding it, dwango announced it was closing it. niconare was a slide host with niconico comments flying over the page, which is a good idea that about four hundred people wanted. the relaunch in february 2019 removed the slide editor, so for its last six months t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Tomnod 📖 2010 - 2019 eight million people signed on in march 2014 to look for a missing airplane one satellite tile at a time, and the servers gave out at a hundred thousand visits a minute. the platform had started in 2010 as a san diego research project about getting strangers to read satellite imagery, and digitalglo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Cartoon Doll Emporium 📖 2005 - 2019 seventy million visits a year went through a site whose entire purpose was letting eleven year old girls put outfits on a drawing. it sold in 2009 for a reported five or six million dollars. the community half stopped accepting logins in june 2015 without telling anyone, the games half kept running |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Surfingbird 📖 2011 - 2019 march 2011, two engineers out of mail.ru's blogs team put up a russian answer to stumbleupon: press the button, get one page chosen for you, rate it, press again. it raised money from durov and milner's fund among others and its founders were claiming fifteen million users by early 2015. a moscow ci |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
ThinkGeek 📖 1999 - 2019 thinkgeek launched august 13, 1999 out of virginia, founded by willie vadnais, jen frazier, jon sime, and scott smith as the e-commerce arm of geeknet. it sold t-shirts, caffeinated soaps, tauntaun sleeping bags, and bag-of-holding tote bags to the same audience that read slashdot, which geeknet als |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Sanalpazar 📖 2009 - 2019 three percent seller commission and twelve installments at the cash price was the whole pitch, aimed straight at gittigidiyor. gold internet teknolojileri opened sanalpazar in 2009 and it worked well enough to matter for six years. then four sister companies in the gold group asked for bankruptcy pr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
WebCite 📖 1997 - 2019 dormant over two hundred scholarly journals were routing their cited links through webcitation.org by 2008, which is as close to famous as this piece of academic plumbing ever got. gunther eysenbach had the idea in 1997: a paper is permanent, the web page it cites is not, so freeze the page at the moment of |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
LISWiki 📖 2005 - 2019 john hubbard registered liswiki.org in june 2005, installed mediawiki on it and told other librarians it was there. fourteen years later he turned it off for lack of participation, which is an odd thing to have to write about a profession whose entire job is making knowledge findable by other people |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Hello Barbie 📖 2015 - 2019 seventy five dollars bought a barbie with a microphone in her necklace and a wifi chip in her back. you held the belt buckle, the doll recorded you, and toytalk's servers in california worked out the reply. the privacy campaign against her was the loudest thing in the 2015 toy season and mattel stop |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
BT MyDonate 📖 2011 - 2019 bt built a donations platform in 2011 and took no commission on it, which in british fundraising was the entire point, because everybody else was keeping a percentage. by the end of 2015 more than 8,750 charities were registered and the sponsored-run economy ran through it every spring. on 21 januar |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Engrade 📖 2003 - 2019 a high school student wrote a gradebook in 2003 because the one his school used was bad, gave it away free, and watched teachers adopt it district by district without anybody above them approving it. eleven years later mcgraw-hill paid around $50 million and 4.5 million users became part of a textbo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Koinex 📖 2017 - 2019 on 27 june 2019, at two in the afternoon india time, koinex stopped trading. it had been the country's largest digital asset exchange, with over a million registered users and more than three billion dollars of volume in under two years. the reserve bank of india told banks in april 2018 to stop ser |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Amazon Restaurants 📖 2015 - 2019 amazon launched restaurants in seattle in september 2015 as a perk for prime now subscribers. it pushed into about twenty us metros plus london over the next two years, then started pulling back in late 2018. the uk service shut down in november 2018 and the us service ended on june 24 2019. at the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Carrot Rewards 📖 2016 - 2019 a government bought behavior change from a startup and paid for it in loyalty points people already collected. it worked well enough to reach 1.1 million canadians across four provinces and territories. what it never found was a customer who would keep paying after the launch grants were spent, and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
LemonStand 📖 2009 - 2019 mailchimp and shopify broke up in public in march 2019, and the week before that happened mailchimp had quietly taken the team behind a small shopify competitor in vancouver. lemonstand told its merchants on 5 march that the platform would close, and closed it on 5 june. ten years of work, from a pa |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
KidsCom 📖 1995 - 2019 a milwaukee company called circle 1 network put a site for eight to fourteen year olds online in february 1995, when there was almost nothing else on the web aimed at children at all. within two years it was the test case for the federal trade commission's first public statement on collecting person |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Texture 📖 2012 - 2019 texture was the netflix-for-magazines that condé nast, hearst, meredith, news corp, time inc and rogers media built together as next issue media in 2010. the app launched in april 2012, rebranded as texture in september 2015, and reached a catalog of over 200 titles at a flat monthly subscription. k |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Waffle.io 📖 2013 - 2019 broadcom finished buying ca technologies in november 2018. ca had bought rally software in 2015, and rally had built waffle.io as an accelerator project in 2013. so when broadcom decided waffle did not fit the strategy, the people making the call were four corporate steps away from the people who ma |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Cryptopia 📖 2014 - 2019 a christchurch altcoin exchange that peaked at 1.4 million users and listed roughly 900 different coins. hacked in january 2019 for around nz$24 million, went into liquidation four months later. one of the era's cleanest examples of a small exchange killed by a single security breach. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
İlkposta 📖 2001 - 2019 on 8 april 2019 a blogger page nobody was reading carried the notice. mail service would stop on 15 may and every account would be deleted a month after that, for reasons the company described as legal and economic. ilkposta had been handing out five gigabytes of turkish-language webmail from istanb |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Dream Market 📖 2013 - 2019 dream lasted five and a half years, which for a market of this kind is an absurd number. silk road managed two and a half, alphabay under three. it survived the 2017 police operation that took both of its rivals and inherited their traffic afterwards, carrying well over a hundred thousand listings b |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Sinemia 📖 2014 - 2019 sinemia launched in 2014 in turkey as a subscription movie ticket service and expanded internationally over the next four years. it ran cheaper plans than moviepass without unlimited tickets and arrived in the us in 2017. by early 2019 sinemia was mass-terminating accounts citing fraud, demanding ph |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Daum Storyfunding 📖 2014 - 2019 in september 2014 a korean portal started letting readers pay journalists for stories that no newsroom had commissioned. newsfunding took in 2.5 billion won across about 200 projects in its first year, widened past journalism and renamed itself storyfunding in october 2015, and passed ten billion wo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Chitika 📖 2003 - 2019 a contextual ad network out of massachusetts that ran for 16 years serving text ads to the long tail of the blog web. bloggers who could not get into adsense went to chitika. when its biggest ad exchange partner terminated the relationship in early 2019, chitika sent one letter to publishers and clo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Noddle 📖 2011 - 2019 four million british people had a free look at their own credit file because callcredit decided in 2011 that charging for it was the worse business. noddle gave the report away for life, which was the entire pitch and most of the product. transunion sold it to credit karma on 12 april 2019 and the n |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Google Cloud Messaging 📖 2012 - 2019 announced at google i/o on 27 june 2012 as the replacement for android's c2dm service, gcm was the thing that actually delivered your notifications for the rest of the decade. a developer's server posted a message to a google endpoint, google held it until the handset checked in, and the notificatio |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Notification Protocol 📖 1999 - 2019 1999 to 2019, and almost nobody who spent those years inside it ever saw its name. msnp was the line-based text protocol that msn messenger spoke to microsoft's servers, and it kept running long after the product was switched off: skype was moved onto msnp24 in 2014 and stayed there for five more ye |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
alaMaula 📖 2009 - 2019 four men in cordoba built a free classifieds site at the end of 2009 and sold it to ebay inside two years. alamaula was the door ebay walked through to reach latin america, and behind that door stood mercado libre, which never moved. argentine currency controls after 2012 cut off the money that woul |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Inbox by Gmail 📖 2014 - 2019 inbox by gmail was google's redesign of email around bundles and snooze. it launched in october 2014 as invitation-only, opened to the public in may 2015, and ran alongside gmail for four and a half years. people who used it loved it. the team eventually folded the better ideas back into gmail prope |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Tictail 📖 2011 - 2019 shopify paid a reported fifteen to twenty million dollars in november 2018 for a swedish company that had raised thirty-three, took the team, and closed the product on 1 april 2019. tictail had spent seven years arguing that a person with a good eye and no coding should be able to run a shop, and wi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
KidsClick 📖 2017 - 2019 seventy-five million american households could pick up kidsclick on the day it launched in july 2017. sinclair built it with toon goggles and mgm distribution, then switched it off twenty-one months later with no warning on air. the final program was an episode of oggy and the cockroaches, and the p |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Context.IO 📖 2011 - 2019 bruno morency started with a gmail extension for finding attachments and turned it into the thing developers actually wanted, which was an http api that handled imap so nobody else had to. return path bought it in october 2012 and kept it running for six and a half years. the api answered its last c |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Japan Bookstore 📖 2011 - 2019 on 11 march 2019 every product page in yahoo! japan's bookstore started redirecting to a different shop, and three weeks later the store itself closed. it had opened in november 2011 on top of a comics site from 2003, with thirty thousand titles and epub files you actually downloaded. it went out as |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Ganfyd 📖 2005 - 2019 only a registered medical practitioner was allowed to edit it, and 449 of them did, across six countries. a server failed on 27 march 2019 in a way that could not be recovered, and although backups existed, rebuilding thirteen years of doctor-written medical text was more work than the volunteers ha |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Google Spotlight Stories 📖 2013 - 2019 spotlight stories was google's in-house immersive-film studio inside the advanced technologies and projects group. jan pinkava founded it at motorola mobility in 2013 and brought it to google atap with the 2014 motorola breakup. across six years the team shipped about 13 interactive shorts, the most |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Listbox 📖 1996 - 2019 fastmail bought listbox in november 2015 and took three years to decide it did not want to be in the newsletter business. the discussion-list half was handed to topicbox and the marketing half was told to find another provider. seven years later the farewell page is still being served. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
IBM Watson Workspace 📖 2016 - 2019 the memo said the product was innovative and agile, and that it had not resonated with clients. ibm announced the end on 16 january 2019 and switched the service off on 28 february, about two years after putting it in front of customers. watson workspace was team chat with watson layered over the to |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
ARKive 📖 2003 - 2019 christopher parsons ran the bbc natural history unit and wanted one permanent record of every animal on the red list before the film stock aged out. he died in november 2002, six months before the site opened. wildscreen kept it running for sixteen years on lottery money and donations, and in its la |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Microsoft DreamSpark / Imagine 📖 2008 - 2019 every computer science student between 2008 and 2017 had a DreamSpark login. bill gates announced it at stanford in february 2008, free visual studio, sql server, windows, all the things. microsoft renamed it imagine in 2016, then folded it into azure dev tools for teaching in 2019 and the brand was |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
iPass 📖 1996 - 2019 ipass started in january 1996 selling a single idea: one account and one client program that let a company's travelers get online in any country and have it billed centrally, built on top of roughly eight hundred other people's networks rather than any of its own. it went public on nasdaq in july 20 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Chariot 📖 2014 - 2019 chariot was a shuttle startup that ford bought for sixty-five million dollars in 2016, betting that a car company should also sell rides to people who did not want a car. its vans ran fixed routes chosen partly by riders, across ten us cities and london. it carried over three million people and stil |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Yokoku.in (予告.in) 📖 2008 - 2019 on 11 june 2008 japan's internal affairs minister said the government would need several hundred million yen to build software that could detect crime threats posted online. satoru yano built one the next day, in two hours, and put it at yokoku.in. it searched 2channel and blogs for phrasing that re |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Herotopia 📖 2010 - 2019 the enemy in this one was called the bully bunch. herotainment built a flash world where children picked a superpower and went after a gang whose crimes were pranks, because the premise was teaching kids how to handle being picked on. jagex took it worldwide in 2011 and marvel's former chief executi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Demon Internet 📖 1992 - 2019 demon internet is the reason a generation of britons got online without watching a meter. from june 1992 it offered the uk's first flat-rate home dial-up, ten pounds a month plus vat, funded by cliff stanford asking 200 people on a bulletin board to each send a cheque. it worked, and by 1997 it had |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Wii Shop Channel 📖 2006 - 2019 nintendo's downloadable storefront on the wii. opened with the console november 19 2006. you bought wii points with a credit card or a paper card from a retailer, then spent them on virtual console roms of nes / snes / n64 / genesis / turbografx games, on wiiware indie titles, and on free channels l |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
HTTP Public Key Pinning 📖 2015 - 2019 after a dutch certificate authority was breached in 2011 and used to forge google certificates, the web wanted a way for a site to tell browsers which keys to accept for it. rfc 7469 was that answer, and it turned out to be more dangerous than the attack it was built against. a wrong pin or an expir |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
xDedic 📖 2014 - 2019 a russian-speaking marketplace that sold remote desktop access to servers whose owners had no idea they were for sale. in may 2016 it listed 70,624 of them across 173 countries, from six dollars for an ordinary machine up past ten thousand for something worth having. kaspersky published the whole th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Do Not Track 📖 2009 - 2019 do not track was one line your browser could attach to every request, saying you did not want to be followed around. nothing in the web made anyone read it, and the industry that was supposed to honor it spent eight years arguing about what the word tracking meant instead. microsoft turned the setti |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Hyper.sh 📖 2015 - 2019 on 21 december 2018 the hyper crew emailed its customers to say new signups were already closed and the platform would be deleted on 15 january. the farewell post on their blog says the lights actually went out on the 16th. hyper.sh ran docker images directly on a hypervisor with no virtual machine |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Zuji 📖 2002 - 2019 sixteen airlines and travelocity went in together in 2002 to build the booking site asia did not have, and for most of that decade zuji was the one people in singapore and hong kong actually typed. webjet bought it for a$25 million in 2013 and sold it three and a half years later for a$56 million to |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
AOL Portfolios 📖 2000 - 2019 aol portfolios was the personal stock-tracker inside the aol finance portal. you created named watchlists tagged with your buy prices and got back a daily snapshot email. the service rolled forward through the time warner era and survived the verizon acquisition, then closed on 8 january 2019 once t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Datex-P 📖 1980 - 2019 the west german post office opened a packet network in august 1980 and it outlived almost everything ever built on top of it. compuserve came into germany through datex-p. so did the chat servers people dialed before the web existed. by the end its customers were card terminals behind shop counters |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
ZipcodeZoo 📖 2004 - 2019 it launched on 26 september 2004 with one goal, a web page for every living thing science had named, and it got most of the way there by refusing to generate any of the content itself. the species list came from catalogue of life, the maps from gbif, the photos from flickr, the bird recordings from |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Field Trip 📖 2012 - 2019 niantic's first product was not a game. field trip launched on android in the united states on 27 september 2012 and pushed cards at you about the building you were walking past, pulled from zagat and roughly a hundred and thirty other databases. john hanke built it inside google to get people to lo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
TangoCity 📖 2011 - 2019 buenos aires had a cable channel that played nothing but tango, founded by juan fabbri in 1995 and called sólo tango. it went off air in january 2011 and came back five months later under the name of its own website, tangocity.com, with grupo clarín's digital arm as a partner. the channel stopped tr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Fisher-Price Smart Toy 📖 2015 - 2019 ninety-nine dollars bought a teddy bear that learned a child's name and favorite color and kept both of them on mattel's servers. a rapid7 researcher was handed one as a baby-shower present in late 2015, found that the api guarding those profiles barely checked who was asking, and fisher-price patch |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Tapingo 📖 2012 - 2019 grubhub announced it was buying tapingo on 25 september 2018 and had switched the app off within a year. what it bought was the order-ahead system on more than 150 north american college campuses, wired directly into university meal plans so a student could pay for lunch with dining dollars instead |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
ScraperWiki 📖 2009 - 2019 channel 4's venture arm put money into a liverpool startup in december 2009, on the theory that journalism needed scrapers more than it needed another publishing system. scraperwiki was the answer: write a scraper in the browser and leave it running somewhere the next person could fork it. the name |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
SovArch.ru 📖 2008 - 2019 denis romodin and alexander strugach put a catalog of soviet architecture on the russian web in january 2008, with nikolai kalashnikov credited beside them on the earliest version of the page. it was free and non-commercial and the first of its kind, and it took the runet prize for artistic site of |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Horseland 📖 1998 - 2019 eight million accounts, most of them girls somewhere between ten and twenty two, spent two decades breeding and showing virtual horses on a site that began in 1994 as one person's page about horses. the flash runtime underneath it stopped being supported, and rewriting twenty years of stables was no |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
YossarianLives 📖 2012 - 2019 joseph heller supplied the name and the whole attitude. daniel foster-smith and j. paul neeley built a search engine that refused to give you what you asked for, returning images connected to your query by metaphor rather than by keyword, on the theory that a search engine which only confirms what y |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Wikipedia Zero 📖 2012 - 2018 wikipedia zero was a wikimedia foundation program that paid nothing and asked mobile operators to waive the data charges on wikipedia. it started in malaysia in may 2012 and grew to 97 carriers across 72 countries, reaching something like 800 million people who could read an encyclopedia for free on |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
WiBro 📖 2006 - 2018 korea set aside a hundred megahertz of spectrum for it in february 2002 and had commercial service running by june 2006, which was years ahead of lte anywhere. kt and sk telecom both built networks and the gear worked, and at its best it carried close to a million subscribers on more than two trilli |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Edline 📖 1997 - 2018 blackboard bought a school portal in 2011 and switched it off on the last day of 2018, having renamed it blackboard engage somewhere in the middle. for most of two decades edline was how american parents found out their kid had missed an assignment, and it got into all fifty states by being the thin |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
BOLT! Super 4G 📖 2013 - 2018 pt internux launched bolt on 14 november 2013 and sold indonesia its first 4g connection, a modem you bought once for a network that only reached jakarta and medan. four million people were on it by august 2018. none of that counted against an unpaid frequency bill of 343 billion rupiah. the ministr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
OSCAR protocol 📖 1997 - 2018 aol built it to carry aim in 1997 and then spent a decade defending it, locking out microsoft and trillian and anyone else who tried to sign in with software aol had not written. after the icq acquisition it carried both of the messengers that mattered. aim's servers went dark on 15 december 2017, a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Tipeez 📖 2009 - 2018 tipeez opened on 15 december 2009 as the first turkish web portal built for children and teenagers, a licensed local edition of the israeli tweegee network. it had a virtual world, a play currency called tippuan, forums and a comic maker, and it went from 552,000 members in its first year to 2,293,5 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Club Penguin Island 📖 2017 - 2018 disney closed a twelve year old virtual world with a lot of childhoods inside it and replaced it, the same week, with a mobile game built in unity. the players it inherited compared the two immediately and refused the trade, and a good number of them went off to unofficial servers running reconstruc |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
HighBeam Research 📖 2002 - 2018 patrick spain sold hoover's, bought elibrary and encyclopedia.com off tucows, and in august 2002 turned the pile into a subscription archive. around eighty million articles from six and a half thousand publications, most of them findable nowhere else without a library card, for a bit over two hundre |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
DealDey 📖 2011 - 2018 dealdey was nigeria's groupon, founded in 2011 by sim shagaya and built on the same promise as every other daily-deals company of that decade. it raised five million dollars from kinnevik in 2015 and cut most of its staff shortly after. ringier africa deals group bought it in 2016 for five million, |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Kudzu.com 📖 2005 - 2018 a newspaper company built a review site. cox enterprises launched kudzu in atlanta in june 2005, named after the vine that grows over everything in the american south, and pointed it at the contractors and plumbers a metro daily was already selling ads to. it went national in 2007, then came home to |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Plex Cloud 📖 2016 - 2018 26 september 2016, and the pitch was that you could finally turn the old box in the corner off. plex would run your server for you and read the files out of your amazon drive, which was selling unlimited storage for sixty dollars a year. amazon lost interest by december. plex spent two more years tr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Seatwave 📖 2006 - 2018 ticketmaster bought seatwave's operating assets in november 2014 and switched the brand off four years later, on the same day it switched off get me in. a decade of british pressure on ticket touting had made owning two resale marketplaces more expensive in reputation than they were worth in fees. j |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
CrashPlan for Home 📖 2007 - 2018 crashplan for home was code42's consumer cloud backup product, launched in 2007 out of minneapolis. the differentiator was the free tier, which let users back up to another user's drive over the internet instead of paying for cloud storage. code42 announced on 22 august 2017 that the home product wo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Apple iPhoto Books 📖 2002 - 2018 apple iphoto books was the photo-book printing service apple ran out of iphoto and then photos for sixteen years. you would lay out a hardcover album inside the mac app, hit order, and apple would ship a printed and bound book to your door. it never reached ios. it never reached most of the world. i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Racked 📖 2007 - 2018 racked was the shopping-and-retail blog that came out of the curbed network. lockhart steele started it in new york in 2007, added la and san francisco editions, and vox media bought the whole network in 2013. a national relaunch in 2015 pushed it wider. by september 2018 vox folded it into a new ad |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Dollz Mania 📖 2001 - 2018 the gifs are still there. every html page on the site answered 403 by april 2019, while the doll images they used to sit on kept returning 200 to anyone who knew the exact filename. seventeen years of pixel art for other people's homepages, outliving the pages that indexed it. the domain is an indon |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Snapcash 📖 2014 - 2018 snapcash was the moment snapchat decided it wanted to be venmo. square ran the rails, snap ran the UX, the two carried it for four years. when venmo had already won and the feature kept attracting the wrong kind of transaction, snap quietly killed it. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
DaWanda 📖 2006 - 2018 dawanda was germany's etsy, a berlin marketplace where people sold handmade and one-off things to a couple of million buyers across the german-speaking web. it started in 2006 and for a decade it was the place in europe for that kind of craft trade. but it never turned a real profit, and the actual |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
P3P 📖 2002 - 2018 the w3c obsoleted p3p on 30 august 2018, noting that fewer than six percent of the ten thousand busiest websites still published one and that no browser was reading them anyway. the idea had been that a site would state its privacy practices in a form software could check against your preferences. i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Tez 📖 2017 - 2018 google's payments app for india, built on the country's own instant transfer rails instead of on card networks. its one real invention was cash mode, which sent money between two phones over a sound too high to hear, so neither person had to hand over a phone number or hold up a qr code. it worked w |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Highrise 📖 2007 - 2018 highrise was 37signals's small-shop CRM. it launched on 20 march 2007 as the third product after basecamp and backpack. it was spun off as its own company in 2014 with nathan kontny as ceo. basecamp folded it back in-house in april 2018. new signups closed on 20 august 2018 and development stopped. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Project Wonderful 📖 2006 - 2018 ryan north, the man who writes dinosaur comics, spent 2006 building the ad network he wished existed. you bid by the day for one specific box on one specific site, the floor was zero cents, and nobody was tracked anywhere. ten thousand publishers ran it and around five thousand of those were webcomi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Wikispaces 📖 2005 - 2018 wikispaces launched in march 2005 in san francisco as a hosted wiki anyone could spin up in a minute. it found its market in k-12 classrooms, where every teacher who wanted a class website used it for collaborative lesson pages. tes global bought it in 2014 and shut down the free and classroom tiers |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Etsy Wholesale 📖 2014 - 2018 etsy wholesale was the experiment where the craft marketplace tried to grow up into a b2b channel and ran into the same wall every consumer marketplace finds when it goes pro. five thousand of the two million sellers signed up. most of those moved less than ten thousand dollars a year through it. th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
DoubleClick 📖 1996 - 2018 doubleclick was the dot-com era ad-serving company that survived long enough to become the load-bearing wall of google's ads business. google bought it in 2008 for 3.1 billion dollars and ran it as a brand for another ten years before folding everything into google marketing platform on 24 july 2018 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Plenti 📖 2015 - 2018 one loyalty currency spendable at both a gas station and a department store had been working in britain and canada for years before american express tried it in the united states on 4 may 2015. americans took the plastic card and then left it in a drawer. the partners started walking in 2017, macy's |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Tesco Direct 📖 2006 - 2018 500 jobs and a 650,000 square foot shed in milton keynes went with it. tesco launched direct in september 2006 as a catalog and a website for the things that did not fit in a grocery aisle, with order desks beside the checkouts, and sold more than 180 million pounds of it in the first full year. the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Fantage 📖 2008 - 2018 a kids' virtual world that ran for ten years out of a fort lee new jersey office, backed by nexon money, with a customizable avatar and a town map and minigames you could only fully access if your parents bought an emembership. closed at half past midnight on a sunday in july with a farewell party s |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Otto 📖 2016 - 2018 otto was a self-driving trucking startup founded in january 2016 by anthony levandowski and lior ron after they left google. uber acquired it in august 2016 for a reported $680 million. in october '16 an otto rig ran a 132-mile budweiser delivery in colorado, the first commercial autonomous truck ha |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Tripsta 📖 2005 - 2018 tripsta started in athens in 2005 as travelplanet24 and grew into the largest ecommerce business in greece, selling flights in more than 45 countries and 34 languages. by 2018 it was moving 35 percent of all greek airline ticket sales through iata's clearing house. in june of that year it could not |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Fieldbook 📖 2015 - 2018 jason crawford spent five years building a spreadsheet that was secretly a relational database, and in may 2018 he published the number that ended it: under sixty thousand dollars of annual recurring revenue. the product worked and the reviews were kind. almost nobody paid for it. the last day onlin |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Alioth 📖 2003 - 2018 alexander wirt sent the mail at 21:49 on 5 june 2018, subject line "its dead jim - alioth is gone". for fifteen years alioth had been debian's own sourceforge, the box where the packaging work for most of the distribution actually happened. the projects moved to a gitlab instance at salsa.debian.org |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Code School 📖 2011 - 2018 gregg pollack was running a web consultancy in orlando when he put out a free ruby tutorial with zombies in it, and the tutorial got big enough to become the company. code school taught in the browser, a short video and then an editor that checked your answer before letting you move on, and it was w |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Kindle Scout 📖 2014 - 2018 kindle scout was amazon's crowd-vote publishing arm. authors uploaded a manuscript and a five-thousand-word excerpt, readers spent thirty days voting on which ones amazon should sign. selected books got a 1500 dollar advance, a 50 percent ebook royalty and a run through the kindle press marketing pi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Hungryhouse 📖 2006 - 2018 shane lake and tony charles built hungryhouse out of a 2003 project that became a public takeaway-ordering site in 2006. the founders went on dragons den in 2007 and walked off with a verbal £100,000 offer from james caan and duncan bannatyne that quietly fell through later, replaced by £150,000 fro |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Socialcast 📖 2008 - 2018 socialcast was a facebook for the inside of a company: one feed for the whole organization, plus a version you could run on your own servers. vmware bought it in may 2011 to spread the stream across everything else it owned, and then did not. it sat inside an infrastructure company while slack took |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Lycos Mail 📖 1997 - 2026 one of the first free webmail services on the open web, launched october 1997 out of pittsburgh. lycos itself was sold to terra networks in 2000, to daum in 2004, to ybrant digital in 2010. the mail service kept running through every change. free tier ended 15 may 2018 and cut off an estimated 90 pe |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Universal Jobmatch 📖 2012 - 2018 from march 2013 a jobcentre adviser could instruct you to use this website, and refusing could cost you your benefits for as long as three years. universal jobmatch went live on 19 november 2012, built by monster worldwide for the department for work and pensions, and by february 2013 it held two mi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Producteev 📖 2008 - 2018 a bootstrapped task manager out of new york, launched on stage at leweb in december 2008, built around a grid of project boxes you could fill by email or by messaging a bot. jive software bought it in november 2012 and made it free for everyone the following spring, which meant the people using it s |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Mugobi 📖 2009 - 2018 in february 2018 eyal shamy posted on the official blog that the servers of a nine-year-old children's virtual world would go dark on 1 may. he wrote that the people running it wanted to keep going, and that one petty customer was stopping them. he did not say who. two months earlier somebody had fi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Yandex.Fotki 📖 2007 - 2018 yandex ran a photo host for eleven years, and for the middle stretch of that it was where a good part of the russian-language web kept its pictures. by 2018 only five percent of the people holding an account had opened it in six months, and yandex disk was taking a hundred times more photo uploads. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Spinlister 📖 2011 - 2018 a board of investors in santa monica decided in march 2018 that spinlister was not going to raise again, and the peer-to-peer bike rental marketplace closed on 22 april with every booking after that date canceled and refunded. it had reached listings in 63 countries on $2.3 million raised over seven |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Pokémon Brick Bronze 📖 2015 - 2018 the pokémon company filed one notice and a game with twenty-two thousand people inside it disappeared the same day, badges and purchases included. brick bronze was a full pokémon role-playing game built inside roblox by a teenager and about a dozen collaborators, with a region and a story of its own |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Workopolis 📖 2000 - 2018 workopolis was what canada had instead of monster. it came out of a globe and mail careers site in 1999, took its name when torstar joined in 2000, and spent eighteen years as the job board owned by the country's own newspapers, in both official languages, with offices in eight cities. it hired for |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Backpage.com 📖 2004 - 2018 backpage was an american classifieds site that started as a craigslist imitator inside the village voice newspaper chain. it spent fourteen years splitting between mundane "for sale" listings and adult-services ads, the second of which generated most of the revenue and all of the legal exposure. on |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
COSMiQ 📖 2006 - 2018 lycos europe put up a question and answer site called lycos iq in january 2006 to go after yahoo answers. lycos europe then dissolved, and the site did not. hubert burda media took it over in june 2009 and renamed it cosmiq, then handed it on to gutefrage.net at the start of 2011, where it sat for s |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Flipnote Gallery: World 📖 2013 - 2018 on 8 september 2017 nintendo put a notice on its japanese support site giving a paid service seven more months. flipnote gallery: world was where you uploaded hand-drawn 3ds animations, and it never left japan: the american and european builds of flipnote studio 3d shipped with the gallery cut out o |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
CoinTouch 📖 2014 - 2018 a european privacy law came into force on 25 may 2018 and one of the things it removed from the web was a free, no-custody bitcoin matching service run by one person out of his evenings. chris beach asked people he trusted how to comply, got different answers from each of them, and closed it in apri |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Josephine 📖 2014 - 2018 alameda county spent 2016 telling oakland home cooks that selling dinner to a neighbor was a misdemeanor. josephine, the startup that had signed those cooks up, answered by helping write a law. the bill cleared the california assembly on 29 january 2018, the company announced its own wind-down three |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Category 📖 1996 - 2018 about 800,000 sites, every one of them read by a person before it went anywhere. yahoo japan opened its directory on 1 april 1996 with roughly fifteen thousand entries and kept the hand-sorting going for twenty-two years, three years longer than the american version managed. the company announced th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Nintendo Zone 📖 2008 - 2018 nintendo put wifi hotspots into shops and restaurants so that a handheld would notice them by itself and pull down a demo or a video without anyone typing anything. mcdonald's was the big partner and by 2012 there were around twenty five thousand locations across europe. later it became somewhere to |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Shyp 📖 2013 - 2018 kevin gibbon's on-demand shipping startup ran couriers as W-2 employees, raised $62 million from kleiner perkins, expanded to five cities and then had to pull back to san francisco when the small-business pivot did not save it. shut on 27 march 2018 with gibbon posting the notice on linkedin. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Phantom Secure 📖 2008 - 2018 vincent ramos was arrested in a restaurant in bellingham, washington on 7 march 2018, and eight days later the department of justice unsealed an indictment naming him and four associates. phantom secure had been selling blackberries with the camera and gps physically removed, running pgp mail throug |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
ImageBrief 📖 2011 - 2018 simon moss started this in sydney in 2011 and moved it to new york a year later, on an idea that reads well on a slide: instead of searching a stock catalog for a photo close enough to what you wanted, post the brief and let photographers send you the real thing. seventy thousand of them signed up. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Sandglaz 📖 2011 - 2018 one idea, executed narrowly for seven years: a task you did not finish should move itself into next week rather than sit there accusing you. nada aldahleh and zaid zawaideh built it in toronto, took it through techstars seattle, raised five hundred thousand dollars in 2012 and never raised again. fi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1973-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Stan James 📖 1973 - 2018 the brand was 45 years old on the day it was switched off. two partners opened a betting shop in 1973 and built the name out of pieces of their own, stan out of steve fisher and his wife anne, james out of james holder. by the 2000s the chain ran more than ninety shops and spent on sponsorship well |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
PubMed Central Canada 📖 2009 - 2018 four percent. that is the share of papers from cihr-funded research that ever got deposited into canada's own copy of pubmed central, and it is the number the funders reached for when they decided to switch it off. pmc canada opened in october 2009 as a partnership between two canadian agencies and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Flixster 📖 2006 - 2018 flixster was a san francisco movie site from 2006 that let you rate films and see what your friends were watching, first as a website and then as a big early facebook app. it bought rotten tomatoes in 2010 and became a proper movie-data company before warner bros picked up the whole thing in 2011. f |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Quagga 📖 2003 - 2018 a project called zebra was forked by its own contributors and renamed after the quagga, a subspecies of zebra hunted to extinction in the 1880s. for fourteen years that software was how an ordinary linux box learned to speak bgp, and it sat inside firewalls and university networks that never knew it |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Microsoft BizSpark 📖 2008 - 2018 bizspark was the startup-tier sibling of dreamspark. three years of free microsoft developer licenses for any company under one million dollars in revenue and less than three years old. microsoft launched it at the web 2.0 summit in november 2008 and over 38,000 startups joined globally before the p |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Pledgie 📖 2007 - 2018 mark daggett and garry dolley met working at revver and shared a taste for ruby. what they built in 2007 was a donation page you could embed anywhere as a small yellow badge showing what a cause had raised so far. the money went straight into the campaign owner's paypal account and pledgie took thre |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Hatreon 📖 2017 - 2018 cody wilson soft launched it in june 2017 as a crowdfunding site with no content rules, built for people patreon had removed. it worked for roughly four months and moved real money to named far-right figures. visa stopped processing its cards in november 2017 and the pledges never came back. the sit |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Mapzen 📖 2013 - 2018 on 2 january 2018 a post went up on the company blog with a sad face in the title. samsung's new york mapping lab had spent four years building search and routing engines entirely in the open, and the hosted service that funded the work went dark on 1 february. nobody ever said why. the code outlive |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Classroom 📖 2016 - 2018 a free class hub for office 365 education tenants, opened as a preview on 14 april 2016, where a teacher made a class and handed out assignments that came back without paper. it was microsoft's answer to google classroom and it never got to drop the preview label. teams for education turned up in ja |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Ando 📖 2016 - 2018 ando was david chang's bet that delivery food failed because the food was an afterthought, not because delivery was hard. so momofuku built a restaurant with no dining room, cooking dishes engineered to survive the trip to your door. it was a manhattan-only experiment that lasted under two years. in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
SiteMeter 📖 1996 - 2018 for a decade SiteMeter was the small color bar at the bottom of every blogger.com blog. it counted visits, plotted referrers, and gave you a dashboard for free. after a 2014 malware controversy users stripped the widget out, and the brand quietly went dormant a few years later. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Lanyrd 📖 2010 - 2018 lanyrd started as a honeymoon project in june 2010 and launched that september at a conference in brighton. it signed in with twitter and read who you followed, then told you which events those people were speaking at, which was the only question anyone actually had about a conference calendar. even |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
RocketHub 📖 2009 - 2018 fifteen million dollars is what efactor group paid for rockethub on 15 april 2015, and three years later the brand was switched off. it was the third-place crowdfunding site, the one that took your project when it did not fit the categories kickstarter cared about, and it let you keep the money when |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
ExpressCard 📖 2003 - 2018 thirty-four millimeters wide, with one lane of pci express and one usb port wired to the back of it. expresscard was the 2003 replacement for the pc card slot, faster and thinner than the thing it replaced, and it arrived at the exact moment laptops stopped needing an expansion slot at all. pcmcia d |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Foodily 📖 2011 - 2018 february 2011, two former yahoo marketers with five million dollars from index ventures and one idea: recipe search was already solved, recipe trust was not. foodily crawled the food web and then drew your facebook graph over the results, so a lasagna arrived with the name of the friend who had save |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1972-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
BIBSYS 📖 1972 - 2018 trondheim, february 1972: two university libraries and a computing center started automating their card catalogs together, and what they built ended up holding the catalog of every research library in norway. bibsys ran on one shared database, so a book cataloged once was cataloged for everybody, an |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Begun 📖 2002 - 2018 andrey andreev built the runet's first traffic counter in 1999, sold it, and in 2002 built the runet's first contextual advertising network. google offered $140 million for begun in 2008 and the russian antitrust service refused to let the deal happen, on the grounds that the buyer would end up cont |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1979-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Dial-up Internet 📖 1979 - 2010s the way most of the world got online from the early 1990s to the early 2000s. the 14.4k modem became 33.6, then 56k. the handshake sound is one of the few audio artifacts everyone over 35 can imitate from memory. you paid by the minute. mum needed the phone line. you planned downloads. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Plaxo 📖 2002 - 2017 plaxo was the contact-updater service that mailed your friends to ask them to refresh their phone numbers in your address book. for two years the inbox-spam wave was its growth engine. comcast bought it in 2008 and the service shut down on 31 december 2017. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
The Real Tooth Fairies 📖 2008 - 2017 the kids' tooth fairy site. you took a quiz, got matched to one of six fairies, and got to explore their world. each fairy had a song and a storybook. there were time elffs (yes spelled like that) as the boy counterpart. it was a more elaborate kids' multimedia project than people remember. shut dow |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Edusim 📖 2007 - 2017 a kansas education service center spent a decade arguing that the whiteboard at the front of the room was a 3d surface, not a projector screen. edusim was that argument in software form, free and open source, built on the squeak lineage that ran from croquet through open cobalt. it froze in 2012 and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
TitanPad 📖 2010 - 2017 on 14 april 2010 etherpad.com stopped letting anyone create a new pad, because google had bought appjet and was switching it off. michael prokop, christian hofstädtler and a few friends put up a replacement the same day and then ran it free for seven years. it became the pad that teachers and activi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
The Outliner of Giants 📖 2009 - 2017 a web application for people who think in nested lists, which is a smaller audience than it sounds and a more stubborn one. it ran from 2009 on google's app engine and did real-time collaboration years before that was ordinary in a browser. working offline was never possible, which was the trade. an |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Gratipay 📖 2012 - 2017 152 thursdays in a row it paid people, and then one thursday it did not. stripe had told gittip that what it was doing looked like money transmission under american state law, and the lawyer gratipay hired came back agreeing. it returned as a tool for companies rather than a tipping jar for individu |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Docs.com 📖 2010 - 2017 docs.com was two different microsoft products wearing the same address. the first launched on 21 april 2010 at facebook's f8 conference, a fuse labs project that let you open and share office documents with your facebook friends. the second, from 2015, was a publishing site where anyone could put a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
FeedSync 📖 2005 - 2017 ray ozzie posted a thing called really simple sharing on 20 november 2005, three weeks into his job as microsoft's chief software architect. the idea was that rss already moved items around the web one way, and a few extra elements would let the items move back. renamed feedsync in 2007, shipped ins |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Alto Mail 📖 2012 - 2017 aol built an email client that did not want to give you an email address. alto opened on 18 october 2012, invitation only, and logged into the gmail or yahoo account you already had. it sorted the incoming mail into stacks without being asked, which was a new idea in 2012 and is now how every phone |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Dev Bootcamp 📖 2012 - 2017 three people in san francisco started a nineteen-week program in february 2012 that would take somebody with no background and try to make them employable as a developer. it worked well enough that an entire industry copied the format, and kaplan bought the school in 2014. tuition never covered six |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Verizon.net Email 📖 2000 - 2017 the company that took over verizon's mail in 2017 was aol, which verizon itself had bought two years earlier. the mx record for verizon.net moved onto aol's servers that june and every customer was told to migrate or leave. on 5 december 2017 whatever had not been moved was deleted. one owner sat on |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
SaveUp 📖 2011 - 2017 seven million dollars of venture funding went into a product whose entire thesis was that americans would save more if saving felt like a lottery ticket. from november 2011 saveup linked to accounts at 18,000 financial institutions, handed you credits every time a balance rose or a debt fell, and le |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Fatso 📖 2004 - 2017 a dvd and blu-ray rental service that ran through new zealand post, started in auckland in 2004 by rob berman of westside media. you paid a monthly fee, kept a disc as long as you liked and posted it back when you were finished, which in a country of four million people spread over two long islands |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Moldovan Wikipedia 📖 2004 - 2017 article 13 of moldova's constitution says the state language functions on the latin alphabet, and that single clause did most of the argument's work. a moldovan wikipedia existed because iso 639 had issued the codes mo and mol, so the software created one automatically in june 2004, and what filled |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Toy Freaks 📖 2012 - 2017 six point nine billion views, and then a termination notice one day after youtube rewrote the rule it fell under. toy freaks ran from 2012 to 17 november 2017 on videos of a single father and his two young daughters in staged gross-out scenarios, and while it ran it sat inside the hundred most-watch |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Bluegogo 📖 2016 - 2017 a little over a year is the whole life of china's third-largest bike-share company. li gang, who made carbon racing bicycles at speedx, had around 70,000 blue bikes out by january 2017 and dropped a few hundred more in san francisco without asking the city first. the money went in eleven months, 600 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Nintendo TVii 📖 2012 - 2017 nintendo tvii was a tv-discovery feature for the wii u gamepad. it shipped in japan on december 8 2012 and in north america on december 20 the same year. europe never got it. the north american version was switched off on august 11 2015 and the japanese version held on until november 7 2017. the wii |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Junglee 📖 1996 - 2017 junglee died twice under the same owner. amazon bought it in august 1998 for 1.6 million shares, used its database technology to launch a service that searched other shops, and pulled that service within a year once it worked out that sending customers elsewhere is not a business amazon wants to be |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
IBM Bluemix 📖 2014 - 2017 ibm announced bluemix as an open beta in february 2014, a cloud-foundry-based platform-as-a-service running on softlayer infrastructure. general availability landed in july that year. for the next three years it tried to take share off azure and aws and never got there. in october 2017 ibm rebranded |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Efritin.com 📖 2015 - 2017 efritin was a nigerian classifieds site, the local build of the pattern olx and gumtree had already proven elsewhere, run out of stockholm by saltside technologies and launched in august 2015 with real money behind it. it went at the market hard, with a lagos office and a managing director who was q |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Doorman 📖 2013 - 2017 san francisco, 2013: a company whose entire product was being home when you were not. doorman took delivery of your packages and brought them to your door inside an evening window you picked yourself. robert herjavec put $250,000 into it on shark tank in january 2015 and three million dollars went i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
TrackID 📖 2005 - 2017 years before there was an app store to download one from, sony ericsson was shipping a phone that could listen to a room and come back with the name of the song. trackid ran on walkman handsets from 2005, querying gracenote's fingerprint database over whatever connection the phone had, and it surviv |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Stack Overflow Documentation 📖 2016 - 2017 documentation was stack overflow's biggest product expansion since launch. the pitch was example-first developer docs, written and edited the same way answers were written, with reputation flowing through them. it ran for thirteen months. on 8 august 2017 the company disabled editing and started the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
deltathree 📖 1996 - 2017 on 14 march 1997 the company demonstrated a telephone conversation carried over the internet, which at the time was closer to a stunt than a product. deltathree turned it into an international calling business, listed on nasdaq in november 1999 at fifteen dollars a share and cleared ninety-six milli |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
BTC-e 📖 2011 - 2017 btc-e ran for six years as the crypto exchange that did not ask questions. no kyc, no anti-money-laundering, russian ownership, headline low fees. on 25 july 2017 greek police arrested alexander vinnik on a beach at ouranoupoli and the servers went dark the same day. the us charged it with launderin |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Graphiq 📖 2009 - 2017 kevin o'connor had already built doubleclick when he started findthebest in 2009 as a machine for comparing anything against anything. the database behind it reached a billion entities, and by 2015 the company had renamed itself graphiq and was handing finished interactive charts to the associated p |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Hansa Market 📖 2015 - 2017 hansa was the third largest market of its kind when the dutch national police took it off two german administrators in june 2017 and then kept it open. for the next month every password typed into it went into a police log. alphabay was seized two weeks into that month and its refugees went looking |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
The Iron Yard 📖 2013 - 2017 $15.9 million bought the company behind the university of phoenix a 62 percent stake in a code school running out of greenville, south carolina. that was june 2015. twenty-five months later the board closed every campus in one announcement, taught out the students already enrolled, and left about th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Hackpad 📖 2011 - 2017 a fast collaborative editor that startups loved for the same reasons every etherpad fork gets loved: real-time cursors and plain text with just enough markdown to feel like writing. dropbox bought it for the team as much as the product. when paper launched, hackpad became the thing paper was going t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
AlphaBay 📖 2014 - 2017 alphabay took the silk road model and industrialized it. by the middle of 2017 it carried roughly 200,000 users against 40,000 vendors, with somewhere between six hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand dollars a day moving through it, all of it behind tor and paid in cryptocurrency. it ended in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Xbox Fitness 📖 2013 - 2017 microsoft's biggest bet on the Kinect 2.0 sensor as a fitness camera. an xbox one launch title in november 2013 that read your heart rate off skin-tone shifts while grading your form against celebrity trainers. licensed workouts from Jillian Michaels plus the P90X library. free through 2014 for gold |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Russian Anonymous Marketplace 📖 2012 - 2017 ramp opened in september 2012, a year and a half after silk road, and it was still running when every market that had copied silk road was gone. it survived by being a forum rather than a shop. there was no central escrow holding everybody's coins and no single catalog to seize, only vendor sections |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
rlogin 📖 1983 - 2017 in 1983 berkeley shipped a command that logged you into another machine by having your machine vouch for you, and for a decade that was simply how people moved around a network. ssh arrived in 1995 and made the arrangement look reckless. openbsd deleted the r-commands in 2002, freebsd stopped buildi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Yahoo News Digest 📖 2014 - 2017 yahoo news digest opened twice a day, with eight summarized stories at 8am and another eight at 6pm. it won the 2014 apple design award. the algorithm came from summly, a startup yahoo had bought a year earlier for thirty million dollars from a seventeen year old named nick d'aloisio. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Tilt 📖 2012 - 2017 tilt was the social-payments app that thought venmo plus kickstarter was a single product. it raised more than sixty million dollars on that theory. when user growth in the US flattened in late 2016, the whole valuation went with it. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Markafoni 📖 2008 - 2017 markafoni was turkey's flash-sale fashion site, founded in 2008 by sina afra in istanbul. the south african media group naspers took a stake in 2011 and full control in 2014. between 2010 and 2013 it was the dominant local instance of the gilt and vente-privée model in the turkish market. naspers an |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
My Coke Rewards 📖 2006 - 2017 coca-cola started printing codes under bottle caps and inside cardboard packaging on 20 february 2006, and typing them into mycokerewards.com turned trash into points. a cap was worth three. it ran for eleven years and trained a large number of american households to stop throwing the cap away, then |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Japan Translate 📖 2005 - 2017 the shutdown notice said the role had been completed, which is an unusually plain thing for a company to write about its own product. yahoo! japan translate opened on 31 january 2005, when machine translation on the web meant pasting a paragraph into a box and hoping, and it ran on an engine license |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Photobucket 📖 2003 - 2017 the image host that ate forum signatures and myspace pages. you uploaded a photo and pasted the link into your signature. on 28 june 2017 photobucket flipped a switch and demanded ninety-nine dollars a year for that link to keep working. ten billion images went to broken-image icons overnight. the c |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
grenouille.com 📖 2000 - 2017 grenouille started in november 2000 as a group of angry wanadoo cable customers who stopped arguing with their isp and wrote software to measure the line instead. it published what it called la meteo du net, a live map of how every french operator was actually performing, built entirely from volunte |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
SixXS 📖 1999 - 2017 38,393 people in 140 countries were still running sixxs tunnels in march 2017, which is the month pim van pelt and jeroen massar announced they were closing it. most of the stated reasons were good news, in that the content providers had moved to ipv6 and the access providers were starting to. one r |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
SDCH 📖 2008 - 2017 in september 2008 four google engineers sent the http working group a proposal for compressing the parts of a web page that repeat between responses, not just the parts that repeat inside one. sdch shipped in chromium from the beginning and early adopters measured double-digit improvements, and then |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
ZeroPC 📖 2011 - 2017 san mateo, 2011: a company founded by the man behind eMachines and NComputing decided that the desktop should be a web page. zeropc gave you a start menu, icons and a file manager inside a browser tab, then pulled in dropbox, google drive, box, flickr and facebook so the files looked like they lived |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
AgileZen 📖 2009 - 2017 niki and nate kohari shipped agilezen in july 2009 and sold it to rally software nine months later, which is a fast exit by any standard and a very fast one for a two-person project management tool. what they had built was a kanban board in a browser, with cards that dragged across columns and a lim |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
BuyVIP 📖 2006 - 2017 amazon bought buyvip in october 2010, eleven months before there was an amazon.es, and closed it in may 2017 saying the business still did not make money. buyvip was a members-only fashion club from madrid, built in 2006 on the vente-privee model: short sales of brand overstock at 30 to 70 percent o |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Phanfare 📖 2004 - 2017 phanfare was a subscription-only photo and video storage service launched in november 2004 by andrew erlichson and mark heinrich. it targeted the prosumer tier with archival backup on amazon s3, a desktop organizer, and an iphone app called phanfare photon. carbonite acquired the company on 6 june 2 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Gna! 📖 2004 - 2017 a code forge for free software, started in january 2004 by loïc dachary and a group of former gnu savannah maintainers who had fallen out with the free software foundation over who was allowed to run the machines. it accepted only projects under gpl-compatible licenses, which kept it small and kept |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Monstermob 📖 2000 - 2017 three profit warnings in a single year took ninety percent off monstermob's share price, and the lancaster company that had floated on aim as a ringtone business never got it back. a spanish buyer took majority control in february 2007 and the consumer operation stopped being its own concern almost |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
CMIS 📖 2008 - 2017 the promise was explicit and the people who made it said it out loud: do for enterprise content management what odbc did for databases in the 1990s, so any application could read any repository. version 0.5 was published on 10 september 2008, oasis chartered a committee for it that november, and six |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Dukgo 📖 2011 - 2017 the thing that killed it was the promise. duckduckgo would not add any anti-abuse feature that could compromise anonymity, so the abuse kept coming, so the server kept falling over, and in april 2017 they gave up and announced a closing date twenty-nine days out. a free jabber account from a search |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Bridj 📖 2014 - 2017 bridj was the clever entry in the on-demand transit boom: instead of fixed routes it used an algorithm to place temporary stops wherever riders asked for them. fourteen-seat vans covered boston and a couple of other us cities. it looked like the future of the bus until toyota walked away from a fund |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
MathJax CDN 📖 2011 - 2017 in its last measured month cdn.mathjax.org served 3.3 billion requests to 179 million people and shipped 70 terabytes of javascript, and every byte of it was free. then cloudflare told the mathjax consortium to move to a significantly more expensive plan, and a nonprofit funded by scientific publish |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Imhonet 📖 2007 - 2017 imhonet opened in april 2007 as alexander dolgin's attempt to build one recommendation engine across every kind of culture at once. you rated things, it found the people whose ratings looked like yours, and it told you what they had liked that you had not seen yet. at its widest it ran thirteen sect |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
java.net 📖 2003 - 2017 sun opened it at javaone on june 11 2003 as the place where java projects would live in public, and for thirteen years the reference implementations and the mailing lists of the java community process sat there. oracle inherited it with sun, moved it onto project kenai's code in 2010, then announced |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
DSi Shop 📖 2008 - 2017 dsi shop was the digital storefront baked into the nintendo dsi when the handheld launched in late 2008. you bought nintendo dsi points and spent them on dsiware games and apps. nintendo announced the closure on april 1 2016 and shut down purchases on march 31 2017, leaving the dsi as a piece of har |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Google Map Maker 📖 2008 - 2017 for nine years google let volunteers draw the map. you added the road that was missing or traced a building off the satellite tile, and once a reviewer signed it off the edit was live in google maps for everybody. it mattered most in countries where there was no commercial map data to buy. google fo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Demae Channel 📖 2009 - 2017 nintendo and denyusha put a food delivery counter into the wii menu on 26 may 2009, free to download and japan only. you typed your address in once, picked a cuisine or let a roulette wheel pick one for you, and the receipt turned up on the wii message board. payment happened at the door in cash, to |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Kids goo 📖 2001 - 2017 the shutdown notice was written twice. once in hiragana for the children, to tell them that キッズgoo had been going since 2001 and finished on the 31st of march, and once underneath in formal japanese for the adults, where ntt resonant gave its reason as a review of how much the service was being used |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
The Deck 📖 2006 - 2017 jim coudal started it in early 2006 with jeffrey zeldman and 37signals, and daring fireball was the fourth site to join. the rule was one ad per page and no user tracking at all, which is why readers took it off their blocklists by hand. it served somewhere north of 7.5 billion impressions over elev |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Spark City World 📖 2009 - 2017 ottawa built a flash city for eleven-year-old girls and kept it running for eight years. fuel industries had the miniclip deal and an ios port, and none of that mattered once the studio itself ran out of money. the game pages answered until 9 march 2017 and the domain was a godaddy parking lander tw |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Fedora Hosted 📖 2007 - 2017 late 2007 to march 2017, and github was only half the reason. fedora infrastructure worked out in early 2016 that it could not afford to run two forges at once, and the older one was the one with trac 0.12 in it. the mailing lists were spared. everything else left as a tar.xz you had to ask for, wit |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
HomeHero 📖 2013 - 2017 a federal labor rule finished this one. an appeals court upheld the us department of labor's home care rule in 2015 and home aides became entitled to minimum wage and overtime. homehero had to move ninety-five percent of its contractors onto payroll. onboarding got ten times more expensive. on 24 fe |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Stayzilla 📖 2010 - 2017 stayzilla was the indian homestay marketplace yogendra vasupal and rupal yogendra ran out of chennai. the parent company inasra technologies began in 2005 as a hotel-booking aggregator and rebranded to stayzilla in 2010 around a pivot into alternative-stays in small indian towns. matrix partners and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
SIGAINT 📖 2013 - 2017 nobody ever said what happened. the service answered one week in february 2017 and did not answer the next, and the administrators who had given press interviews two years earlier said nothing at all, then or since. sigaint had been the default mailbox of the tor network since around 2013, squirrelm |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Modlife 📖 2007 - 2017 modlife was the software tom delonge built after watching napster take the album business away from his own band. it went into beta in november 2007 and launched properly in june 2008, selling artists the machinery for running a direct-to-fan business with nobody in the middle: membership paywalls a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
XO Communications 📖 1996 - 2017 xo communications was four companies wearing one name. it started as nextlink in the pacific northwest and absorbed concentric network and then allegiance telecom. at the top of the market in march 2000 it was worth about $17 billion. it filed chapter 11 on 17 june 2002 carrying roughly $8.5 billion |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Oktogo 📖 2010 - 2017 a polish investment fund took control in 2015 and decided in early 2016 that it would rather find a buyer than put in more money, and no buyer turned up. oktogo had taken twenty six million dollars by then, ten million of it from vtb capital for thirty percent of the company in 2012, and had carried |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Map of Russian Science 📖 2013 - 2017 four hundred and fifty million roubles of ministry money went into a database that decided the lebedev physical institute worked on horticulture, pediatrics and gynecology. karta rossiyskoy nauki was supposed to index every russian scientist and everything they had published, automatically, from web |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
humyo 📖 2007 - 2017 a decommissioned bullion vault held the disk arrays, and that was the detail everybody repeated about humyo while it was alive. the offer was ten gigabytes for nothing and no card number, at a point when webmail was still counting megabytes out one at a time. trend micro bought the company in june 2 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
OpenStudy 📖 2010 - 2017 a georgia tech professor and an emory dean, married to each other, built a place where a student anywhere could ask a question and have it answered by a stranger working through the same chapter. it opened in august 2010 and ran for six years on grant money and a reputation score. brainly bought it |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
OneCoin 📖 2014 - 2017 onecoin was not a cryptocurrency. it was a multi-level marketing sales scheme built by ruja ignatova and sebastian greenwood in sofia bulgaria in 2014, selling training packages that included fake onecoin tokens with no blockchain behind them. it collapsed in january 2017 when the internal marketpla |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Ekoloko 📖 2008 - 2017 two israeli businessmen, one out of a voip company and one out of a chocolate chain, opened a virtual world for children in october 2008 and named the planet ekoloko. it ran in flash, aimed at seven to fourteen year olds, and taught recycling by making you do the recycling. about three million accou |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
PORT.ro 📖 1996 - 2017 port.ro went online in june 1996 and spent twenty years being the place romanians checked to find out what was on. it carried the grid for 243 television channels and a film database past a hundred and ten thousand titles. about a million people a month used it. the listings also fed the electronic |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
LatinMail 📖 1997 - 2017 latinmail was the spanish-language free webmail starmedia launched in 1997 from manhattan. it beat gmail to market by seven years and the spanish-language hotmail rollout by months. at its peak the @latinmail.com address was on business cards across the latin american and us hispanic markets. starme |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Screenhero 📖 2013 - 2017 a screen sharing tool built for two people working on the same code at once, where both cursors were live and either person could click and type on the shared screen. it was the good remote pair-programming setup before there was a standard one, low latency and quiet about it. slack bought the compa |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
WIEM Encyklopedia 📖 1998 - 2017 poland's national encyclopedia lived on poland's national portal, and for most of nineteen years it was free. it came off a printed set and went online in 1998, and onet bought it two years later. the entries were counted and edited and stopped at about 125,000, which was the whole proposition until |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Marketleap 📖 2000 - 2017 acxiom had no commercial reason to keep marketleap's tools running and kept them running anyway, for about eleven years, under a line on the front page saying the site was being maintained as a free resource for the search engine marketing community. the agency itself was sold in july 2004 and the b |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Compete.com 📖 2000 - 2016 compete sold estimates of other people's web traffic. you typed in a domain and it handed back a monthly unique visitor count and a rank, worked out from a panel of americans who had installed its toolbar or agreed to have their browsing watched. wpp paid a hundred and fifty million dollars for the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
The European Library 📖 2005 - 2016 the european library opened on 17 march 2005 and put one search box in front of the catalogs of forty-nine national libraries, which is something no commercial search engine has ever managed. it was owned by the conference of european national librarians and paid for by subscription from its own mem |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Bionicle 📖 2001 - 2016 lego was nearly bankrupt when this launched in 2001, and a line of biomechanical action figures with a mythology attached turned into one of the properties that pulled the company out. the story ran in comics and books and films and, most memorably, in nine episodic flash chapters that templar studi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
FinanceWorks 📖 2008 - 2016 you never chose financeworks. it arrived inside your bank's online login in 2008, pulled your accounts together and drew you a budget, and whether you had it at all came down to which bank you used. the team that built it changed hands three times in eight years. the product was switched off in 2016 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
BBC Radio Explorer 📖 2014 - 2016 jason williams built it in the ten percent of the week the bbc gave its engineers for their own ideas. you typed a subject, it searched every program title and synopsis the archive would admit to, and it played the results back at you as a station about that one thing. it went live in may 2014 with |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
TiddlySpace 📖 2010 - 2016 a telephone company paid for this. bt bought jeremy ruston's shop in 2007 and let the resulting open-source team spend years putting tiddlywiki on a server, which is how a free hosting service for single-file wikis came to be run by a british telecom. it carried the tiddlywiki community's own docume |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
e-kolay.net 📖 2000 - 2016 e-kolay was doğan online's portal, launched in 2000 to sell dial-up hours to turkish households that had never been online, advertised by kemal sunal on the single promise that using the internet was easy. adsl took the access business away after 2005, so the site turned into a magazine and webmail |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Venere.com 📖 1994 - 2016 four people in rome started taking hotel reservations over the web in 1995, back when most of the italian hotels they were selling did not have an email address to forward the booking to. by 2008 they held direct contracts with twenty nine thousand properties, twenty six thousand of them in europe, |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
iPredict 📖 2008 - 2016 simon bridges, then new zealand's associate minister of justice, declined a small wellington prediction market's application for an exemption from anti money laundering law in november 2015. the average ipredict account held forty one dollars. compliance cost more than the operation was worth, so th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Mozilla Persona 📖 2011 - 2016 persona was a mozilla foundation project launched july 2011 under the name browserid, a decentralized authentication system built on email-as-identifier with cryptographic assertions issued by your email provider and verified by relying sites. the design point was that the identity provider could no |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
ChangeTip 📖 2013 - 2016 for a few weeks in november 2014, handing a stranger a few cents of bitcoin by replying to them was a thing the english-speaking internet actually did, and changetip was how. in april 2016 airbnb hired most of the team, leadership included, and explicitly declined to buy the company or anything it o |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Grove.io 📖 2011 - 2016 three ex-convore founders put grove online in november 2011 selling companies a private irc server with searchable archives, which was a strange thing to sell because irc is free and always had been. what you were buying was somebody else keeping it running. on 15 september 2012 they posted a shutdo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Nasty Gal 📖 2006 - 2016 nasty gal was the los angeles fashion e-commerce brand sophia amoruso built out of a 2006 ebay vintage store. it moved off ebay in 2008 and took index ventures money in 2012. by 2016 the operations losses had outrun the growth story. the company filed for chapter 11 on 9 november 2016. boohoo bought |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Panoramio 📖 2005 - 2016 panoramio was the photo layer of the old google earth. joaquín cuenca abela's spanish team launched it on 3 october 2005, google bought it in july 2007 to populate the visual carpet on its globe view, and the upload product carried 94 million geotagged photos from 4.16 million users at peak. google |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Demand Studios (Demand Media) 📖 2006 - 2016 the santa monica content factory that owned the ehow and livestrong property cluster and pumped fifteen dollar articles into it at industrial scale. richard rosenblatt and shawn colo founded it in 2006. revenue peaked at three hundred twenty five million in 2011. google's panda update broke the marg |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Hailo 📖 2011 - 2016 three london cab drivers and three tech founders built the app that let you summon a licensed black cab instead of standing in the rain with your arm out. it raised over 120 million dollars and reached sixteen cities before uber turned the whole category into a knife fight. daimler bought it in 2016 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Panfu 📖 2007 - 2016 panfu was a virtual world for children where you made a panda and explored an island of the same name. a berlin studio launched it in 2007, and by 2009 it was the biggest kids' virtual world in europe, running in more than a dozen countries. the money stopped adding up around 2013 as mobile and yout |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Pixelapse 📖 2012 - 2016 20,541,100 revisions and about 92 terabytes of design files went through pixelapse before it closed on 1 november 2016. it was git for people who work in photoshop, built by a designer and a developer who had both been on the wrong end of a folder full of files named final, and it did the one thing |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Aukro.ua 📖 2007 - 2016 sixty four thousand sellers were carried off aukro.ua in the autumn of 2016 and almost none of them had to lift a finger: the goods and the hard-won seller ratings were copied across automatically. that is an unusually gentle way for an auction site to die, and it happened because the people switchi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Zaption 📖 2012 - 2016 workday bought zaption on june 30 2016 for the team and the technology, and named the closing date in the same announcement. the platform ran three more months and stopped on september 30. what went with it was a way to take any youtube video and turn it into something a class had to answer to, with |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Pogoplug 📖 2009 - 2016 eight days is how much warning cloud engines gave before it deleted everything. the notice went up on 20 september 2016 and the unlimited storage tier stopped at nine in the morning on 28 september, with the data securely destroyed immediately afterward. pogoplug had started in 2009 as the opposite |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Dipity 📖 2007 - 2016 newsrooms built election timelines on dipity and teachers built history lessons on it, and then one september it stopped answering and nobody wrote anything down. the site turned a pile of links and photos into a scrolling chronological strip you could embed on any page, which in 2008 was a new thin |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
AppFog 📖 2010 - 2016 appfog was the paas that started as phpfog, became a heroku competitor, then got swallowed by a telecom that did not know what to do with it. three years from acquisition to shutdown. the standard 2010s paas arc. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Washio 📖 2013 - 2016 washio wanted to be uber for laundry, and for a few venture-funded years it was. you tapped an app and a driver in branded gear came for your dirty clothes and brought them back folded. the math never worked. delivery fees and per-pound pricing could not cover the drivers and the vans behind them, a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Picturelife 📖 2013 - 2016 picturelife wanted to be the calm, safe home for every photo you ever took, back when that still sounded like a business. it got bought by streamnation in 2015 and shut down a year and a half later, in august 2016. two hundred million photos got handed to smugmug on the way out, so nobody lost anyth |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
AskMe 📖 2010 - 2016 askme was an indian local-search portal that scaled into a multi-category e-commerce roll-up through 2014 and 2015, buying askmebazaar for goods, mebelkart for furniture and bestatlowest for grocery price-comparison, all loaded on top of the search base. parent getit infoservices was about 95 percen |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Drupal Gardens 📖 2009 - 2016 drupal gardens was acquia's attempt to make drupal usable by people who would never read a hook_menu doc. it hit a hundred thousand sites at peak. dries buytaert later said killing it was his biggest regret. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
LoQUo 📖 2002 - 2016 ebay bought spain's craigslist in may 2005 and closed it on 31 july 2016, eleven years later. ubaldo huerta had started loquo in barcelona in 2002 because the city had no free place to post a room or a secondhand bike, and he copied the thing that worked: gray text on white, one page per city, no fe |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Symform 📖 2007 - 2016 two former microsoft engineers, praerit garg and bassam tabbara, looked at the price of a data center in 2007 and decided not to build one. symform's deal instead was a trade: contribute space on your own hard disk to the network, and get cloud backup in return, with your files erasure-coded into fr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Kagi 📖 1994 - 2016 kee nethery built the thing that let a one person software company in finland get paid by a stranger in australia, and he ran it for twenty two years. one client's chargebacks put a six hundred thousand dollar hole in the books around 2006 and kagi spent the rest of its life failing to climb out. th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Gmane 📖 2002 - 2016 163,643,204 messages from 15,119 mailing lists, and then the counter stopped. lars magne ingebrigtsen ran gmane out of oslo for fourteen years, mirroring the world's software mailing lists into usenet groups and a web archive with permanent urls. a ddos against his employer's servers on top of years |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
FlightCar 📖 2013 - 2016 three eighteen-year-olds worked out that an airport parking lot is a fleet nobody is driving, and for three years they were right. you left your car, they rented it to somebody arriving, and you flew home to free parking and a check. then the airport sued and the reviews turned. on 14 july 2016 flig |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Pinpoint 📖 2008 - 2016 seven thousand application listings from thirty thousand vendors, and the product was a sales channel wearing the clothes of a marketplace. pinpoint existed so a business that needed some microsoft-shaped thing built could search for a certified company to build it, which meant its real customers we |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Amazon Webstore 📖 2007 - 2016 amazon spent nine years renting out the software behind amazon.com, first at fifty nine dollars a month plus seven percent of everything sold, later at under ten. it ran the storefronts for timex and for black and decker along with several thousand smaller companies. on 16 march 2015 amazon told all |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Mon.service-public.fr 📖 2009 - 2016 the french state put every citizen's paperwork behind a single login in early 2009 and switched that login off on 1 july 2016. the account came with a digital safe for official documents, and it handled voter registration and changes of address without anyone going to a counter. a million people had |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Apple iAd 📖 2010 - 2016 iAd was apple's attempt to own the mobile ad layer the way it already owned the app store. steve jobs announced it on stage in april 2010 with a million-dollar minimum buy and a 60/40 revenue split favoring developers. by 2013 the minimum was 50 dollars. by june 30 2016 the iAd app network was dead |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Google Wallet Card 📖 2013 - 2016 the bancorp bank issued it and mastercard cleared it, which made this the most ordinary object google ever shipped. it existed because money kept arriving in the wallet balance with nowhere to go, and a card was the only way to let it out. then android pay took over the tapping and the wallet app wa |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Bluebottle 📖 2002 - 2016 "i now only get emails from mum," the founder said at the launch in august 2002. robert pickup's melbourne webmail answered every unknown sender with a challenge and let through only the ones who replied. it went free in 2004, stopped being free in 2008, and closed on 30 june 2016 with a letter admi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
CurrentC 📖 2012 - 2016 a payment app designed by retailers who did not want to pay card fees or hand apple their customer data. it made you scan a qr code at the register instead of tapping a phone, which nobody wanted to do. by the time it reached a real beta the members were already defecting to apple pay, and the whole |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
malariacontrol.net 📖 2006 - 2016 basel had a malaria modeling group and not enough computers, so in 2006 the swiss tropical institute put its simulations on boinc and asked the public for the spare cycles. two hundred thousand people signed up across ten years and the output fed into who policy work on the rts,s vaccine. work units |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
蜂買 (BeeCrazy) 📖 2010 - 2016 a tvb supporting actor and two friends pooled seven figures into a hong kong coupon site in july 2010, and in december 2013 they sold it into an australian holding company that floated on the sydney exchange the same month. on 20 june 2016 the checkout stopped working and staff were told to stay hom |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Poetica 📖 2014 - 2016 london, june 2014: twitter's first lead engineer launches a text editor whose one good idea is that a suggested edit should look like somebody wrote on your page in pen, not like a comment parked in a margin. condé nast bought the five-person team twenty-one months later, folded the technology into |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Bitcasa 📖 2011 - 2016 bitcasa promised unlimited cloud storage for a flat $99 a year. the math never worked. in 2014 the company killed the unlimited plan, gave subscribers 23 days to migrate or lose their files, then got hit with a federal restraining order from judge alsup. the consumer service shut down on 20 may 2016 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
MyHabit 📖 2011 - 2016 gilt groupe sold for a fraction of its billion-dollar valuation in january 2016, and four months later amazon closed the site it had built to beat gilt. myhabit opened on 3 may 2011 with a new designer sale every morning at nine pacific and no invitation required, which was the entire argument again |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Time Warner Cable 📖 1992 - 2016 comcast tried to buy it first, announcing in february 2014 and spending fourteen months failing to convince washington that one company should carry more than half the country's broadband. charter turned up with 78.7 billion dollars and no such problem, and closed on 18 may 2016. time warner cable h |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Tvidi 📖 2008 - 2016 18 september 2008 is the date the russian internet got a social network for six-year-olds, and it worked: 2.1 million people a month by 2013, most of them under fifteen. tvidi was a joint project between rbc and an israeli company, which is an ownership structure that reads fine until the money stop |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
SPDY 📖 2009 - 2016 may 2016 is when chrome stopped speaking it, and by then there was nothing left to kill. spdy spent six years as google's experiment in making http faster, proved the point on enough of the real web to matter, then handed its design to http/2. the protocol won the argument and lost the name. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Sqwiggle 📖 2013 - 2016 a webcam pointed at your desk all day, refreshing your face into a grid of colleagues every few seconds, was somebody's sincere answer to remote work in 2013. it was also the first company ever funded through angellist syndicates, $1.1m that august. three years later slack owned the category and nob |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Freebase 📖 2007 - 2016 freebase was a crowdsourced structured knowledge base started by metaweb technologies in 2007. it described 44 million topics and 2.4 billion facts as nodes and typed edges, ran on a custom graph database called graphd, and was queried in a json-shaped language called mql. google bought metaweb in j |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Copy.com 📖 2013 - 2016 copy.com was barracuda networks putting a consumer face on the storage it already ran for its backup appliances. it opened in february 2013 with fifteen gigabytes free and five more for every person you brought in, and it split the cost of a shared folder between the people in it, which nobody else |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Kliksa 📖 2012 - 2016 sabancı wanted an online retailer and built one from scratch instead of buying one. kliksa opened in 2012 and spent four years discounting against hepsiburada and n11 in a market that had no room left, then failed to raise the outside money it needed to keep going. on 11 january 2016 the group annou |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Livemocha 📖 2007 - 2016 livemocha was the 2007 bellevue peer language exchange community. you filled in your native language and the language you wanted to learn, the site routed your written and spoken exercises to a native speaker for correction, you reviewed someone else's exercises in return. 38 languages on the menu b |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Shuddle 📖 2014 - 2016 one day of notice. shuddle emailed parents and drivers on 14 april 2016 to say the service would stop at the end of business the following day, which is not enough time to arrange a school run. the company had raised 12.2 million dollars to move children around the bay area with vetted caregiver-dri |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Search BOSS 📖 2008 - 2016 boss was an api on yahoo's web index. you signed up, got a key, called the endpoint, got json or xml ranked-and-relevant search results back. yahoo imagined an open ecosystem of small specialized search engines built on top of its crawl. a small group of startups actually built that. the microsoft s |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Clearwire (CLEAR) 📖 2003 - 2016 craig mccaw's second wireless company sold home and mobile broadband over wimax under the clear brand, starting in portland in january 2009. sprint and intel led a $3.2 billion investment in 2008 and the network carried about eleven million connections by early 2012. wimax lost to lte anyway. sprint |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
NutshellMail 📖 2008 - 2016 a social network aggregator that ran in the opposite direction to everything around it. instead of opening facebook or twitter you told nutshellmail when to mail you, and a digest of the waiting updates arrived on that schedule. four founders started it in october 2008 and it won a place in facebook |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
享樂團購網 (FunShare) 📖 2010 - 2016 hong kong got its group-buying wave in 2010, the same year everybody else did, and funshare was the local entry that never got bought by anyone bigger. it sold six years of restaurant vouchers and spa packages to a city that eventually stopped needing a middleman for either. the notice went up on 16 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
SpoonRocket 📖 2013 - 2016 spoonrocket was the on-demand meal startup that treated lunch as a logistics problem. drivers carried insulated bags full of pre-cooked $6 meals around berkeley and san francisco, waiting for an app ping. it ran for almost three years before the bay area on-demand crash of 2016 took it down with spr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Open Hunt 📖 2015 - 2016 on 15 december 2015 somebody published a post about how product hunt's front page actually got chosen. three days later there was a rails app with twitter login, public comments and a thousand upvotes on hacker news. seventy-nine days after that the shutdown notice went up, with an offer of the sour |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Elance 📖 1999 - 2016 bernard sheth and srini anumolu founded elance in 1999 out of jersey city, moved it to silicon valley by the end of the year. the platform spent the 2000s as the dominant online freelance marketplace, sat alongside guru.com and ifreelance as the early-internet bidding-board cohort, then absorbed the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Rakuten Belanja Online 📖 2011 - 2016 rakuten belanja online was rakuten's attempt at indonesia, launched in 2011 as a joint venture with the media group behind MNC. the model was the japanese one, a marketplace where merchants run their own storefronts and the platform takes a fee rather than holding stock. it never got near the top of |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
BBC Lab UK 📖 2009 - 2016 a national broadcaster with an audience of millions is, looked at from one angle, a recruitment channel no university could ever afford. the bbc worked that out in 2008 and spent the next four years running twelve real psychology experiments through its own website, with sample sizes in the hundreds |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Ktunnel 📖 2006 - 2016 on 18 august 2008 milliyet counted a proxy site at number 37 among the most visited sites in turkey, twenty places below the youtube it existed to reach. ktunnel was a cgi proxy run by a former computer repair shop owner from fairbanks, alaska, built for students behind school filters. a court order |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
iG (Internet Group) 📖 2000 - 2016 ig was the brazilian free-dial-up phenomenon of the early 2000s. internet group launched on 9 january 2000 from sao paulo, backed by gp investimentos and banco opportunity, with a model that gave away internet access through the telco line rental rather than charging a monthly subscription. it cross |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
dotCloud 📖 2011 - 2016 the shutdown landed on 29 february 2016, a date that only exists every four years. dotcloud was the platform solomon hykes started in paris and relaunched out of y combinator, and the internal tool it used to keep customer applications apart was open sourced in 2013 under the name docker. the compan |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Powa Technologies 📖 2007 - 2016 powa was a london fintech that claimed a $2.7 billion valuation and went into administration on 19 february 2016 with about $250,000 in the bank. its main product, powatag, was a mobile payment app that let you scan an ad to buy what was on it. most of the "240 retail partnerships" turned out to be |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Travel 📖 1997 - 2016 yahoo travel launched as a vertical in 1997. by january 2014 it was ranked the ninth-largest travel booking website in the world by hitwise. the same year yahoo relaunched it as a "digital magazine" under paula froelich's editorial direction, with original travel writing and tablet-style spreads. ma |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Offbeatr 📖 2012 - 2016 offbeatr opened on 9 august 2012, run by a los angeles outfit called extra lunch money, and the press called it kickstarter for porn because kickstarter would not carry the work. a pitch went to a community vote first and only opened for pledges if enough people said they wanted it made. the sums st |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Artizone 📖 2009 - 2016 dallas got it in 2011 and denver was still new when it ended. artizone was one website where roughly two hundred and twenty local butchers and bakers each kept a storefront, and one delivery operation carried the whole basket to the door. lior lavy, the chief executive, said afterwards that the mode |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
TTNET 📖 2006 - 2016 ttnet was türk telekom's retail internet arm, spun into its own company on 26 april 2006 because the wholesale line business and the shop that sold subscriptions on top of it were supposed to be kept apart. for ten years it was the default. if a turkish household had adsl, this was almost certainly |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Avea 📖 2004 - 2016 avea was turkey's third mobile operator, which in a market where two networks already had the country is a permanent position rather than a starting one. it was welded together in february 2004 out of aycell, the state operator's late entry, and aria, the one iş bankası built with telecom italia. it |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Google Code 📖 2005 - 2016 google code launched march 17, 2005 as a project-hosting service for open source code. it offered subversion, later mercurial and git, plus an issue tracker, a wiki, downloads, and a free quota that everyone used. its peak years coincided with sourceforge's collapse under ad bloat and github's rise. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Corbis 📖 1989 - 2016 bill gates started corbis in 1989 to buy the rights to photographs, on a theory that people would one day hang screens in their houses and want something to put on them. the screens took longer than expected, so the company spent twenty-five years as a stock agency instead, buying the bettmann archi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Cryptsy 📖 2013 - 2016 cryptsy was the altcoin exchange people used before coinbase listed anything but bitcoin. paul vernon (big vern) ran it out of florida from may 2013 to january 2016, when he blamed a july 2014 hack for the missing customer funds and moved to china. by 2022 the doj had indicted him for stealing the m |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Mobile by Sainsbury's 📖 2013 - 2016 a supermarket and a network operator could not agree how to carry their joint venture forward, so 150,000 phone customers got three months of notice and then nothing. mobile by sainsbury's ran from 24 july 2013 to 15 january 2016 on vodafone's uk network, and its whole pitch was double nectar points |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Madasafish 📖 1999 - 2016 madasafish sold internet access out of stornoway on the isle of lewis, which is about as far from london as a british isp could physically put itself. it launched in 1999 on free access and an animated goldfish, then spent the next sixteen years being handed from one owner to the next until it came |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Clinkle 📖 2011 - 2016 clinkle raised close to thirty million dollars on secrecy and anticipation and almost no product. lucas duplan started it as a stanford student with a plan to pay by phone using high-frequency sound. the money came before anything usable did, the staff walked out in protest, and by 2016 it was gone |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Bigfoot 📖 1995 - 2016 bigfoot sold a promise rather than a mailbox. you took a bigfoot.com address and pointed it at wherever your mail actually lived, so when your isp changed you moved the pointer instead of telling everyone you knew. it held up for about a decade. then the company was carved apart in the dot-com colla |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
BlikBook 📖 2010 - 2016 civitas learning of austin, texas announced the purchase on 21 july 2015 and let the name run for about another year. blikbook had come out of a research project between london business school and ucl, aimed at the student who is stuck on lecture material with no way to ask except by chasing a lectu |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Eyejot 📖 2007 - 2016 seattle, 2007: two founders demoed a way to record a video message in a browser window and send it like email, with nothing to download first. that was the whole product and it worked for nine years. by the end eyejot was one person, self-funded, never having raised money, keeping an automated servi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Sidecar 📖 2011 - 2015 sidecar was the original peer-to-peer rideshare app. sunil paul founded it in september 2011 with jahan khanna and adrian fortino, shipped before uberX existed. the model of pairing riders with everyday drivers in their own cars was sidecar's design. uber and lyft built billion-dollar businesses on |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Woogi World 📖 2008 - 2015 a non-profit called children's way built a browser world in 2008 whose entire reason for existing was to teach eight year olds how to behave on the internet, and gave it to elementary schools for nothing because donors covered the bill. woogi world had avatars, houses, clubs and a curriculum that ra |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Amazon Local 📖 2011 - 2015 amazon local was amazon's four-year attempt at the daily-deals business, launched in june 2011 first as a livingsocial-powered coupon feed and then as its own standalone site in 2012. it sold discounted restaurant meals, spa visits and event tickets in american cities, backed by amazon's checkout an |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Fuhu 📖 2008 - 2015 158,957 percent of three-year growth put this company at number one on the inc. 500 in 2013, and it went back to number one in 2014. the nabi was an android tablet in a thick rubber bumper with a locked-down interface a parent controlled, and for two christmases it was the thing to buy. foxconn buil |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Hawaii Health Connector 📖 2013 - 2015 two hundred and five million dollars in federal grants went into hawaii's own health insurance exchange and about one hundred and thirty million of it was spent. the site opened on 15 october 2013 and had enrolled 2,192 people by the end of december, the worst number in the country. the affordable c |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Docstoc 📖 2007 - 2015 docstoc opened in october 2007 as somewhere to upload a document and embed it in a blog post, and it filled up with the paperwork of running a small american business. contracts and model letters, mostly. by 2011 it held over twenty million user documents and had rebuilt itself as a store selling cu |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Flytenow 📖 2013 - 2015 the faa did not fine flytenow or raid it. it wrote a letter. in 2014 the agency's chief counsel decided that a private pilot posting a planned trip on a website was advertising to the general public, which made him a common carrier, which meant he needed the certification an airline needs. the same |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Fanhattan 📖 2011 - 2015 the remote had no buttons on it, only a touch surface and a shape you could find in the dark, and that remote is the part of fan tv anyone still describes. fanhattan started in 2011 as a search box for filmed entertainment, built by two people who had come out of the vuze torrent client, and it work |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Sosh 📖 2010 - 2015 san francisco got a concierge app in 2010 that read like a well-connected friend instead of a directory, and for five years that was worth sixteen million dollars of other people's money. the taste was made by people, and every new city meant hiring the whole operation again. postmates took eighteen |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
IndexMaster 📖 1998 - 2015 in 2000 the american association of law libraries handed its best new product of the year award to a website that sold you the index of a book instead of the book. the pitch was that a librarian spending a materials budget needed to see what was actually inside a treatise, and no publisher would sho |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Wuala 📖 2008 - 2015 wuala was a swiss encrypted cloud storage service launched in august 2008 by dominik grolimund and luzius meisser out of eth zurich. the early version was distributed peer-to-peer: you traded local disk space on your own machine for storage capacity on the wuala network. lacie acquired the company i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Ukash 📖 2005 - 2015 skrill bought it, folded it into the austrian competitor it had already bought a year earlier, and the last vouchers stopped working on 31 october 2015. what ukash did before that was turn physical cash into a 19-digit code you could spend online, which mattered enormously if you had no bank account |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Deathswitch 📖 2006 - 2015 david eagleman wrote a short piece for nature in 2006 about email that fires after you die, and then he went and built it. deathswitch asked you for a password on a schedule. miss enough prompts and it decided you were gone and delivered the encrypted messages you had left for other people. it ran n |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
OneDrive Groups 📖 2008 - 2015 a shared calendar and fifteen gigabytes of storage held in common by a list of people, launched on 2 december 2008 as windows live groups and renamed twice as the drive underneath it was renamed. microsoft quietly stopped letting anybody create one in may 2014 and announced nothing. the announcement |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Amazon Destinations 📖 2015 - 2015 amazon tried to sell you a hotel room for a weekend near home, booked the same way you bought everything else from them. it ran on travel.amazon.com and the amazon local app for about six months in 2015, aimed at a corner of the travel market that expedia and priceline already owned. then it closed |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Kanbox 📖 2011 - 2015 kanbox was the closest thing china had to dropbox, founded in beijing in 2011 and carrying more than fifteen million users when alibaba bought it in september 2013 for a reported sum under thirty million dollars. alibaba pushed free storage to ten terabytes per account and then, less than two years |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
HopStop 📖 2005 - 2015 hopstop was the canonical pre-google-maps-transit app in new york. you typed a from and a to, the site told you which subway line to take, where to walk, which transfer to make, and how long the whole trip would take. it launched in 2005 out of manhattan, expanded to about six hundred cities at peak |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Hellas Online 📖 1993 - 2015 athens, 1993: a company starts selling dial-up access to anybody who wants it, which in greece at that point almost nobody does. twenty-two years later hol had 531,563 unbundled lines, 3,500 kilometers of its own fiber and the second largest backbone in the country after the former state monopoly. v |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Endaga 📖 2014 - 2015 in a village in papua, indonesia, a box roughly the size of a microwave oven ran a cellular network that the village itself owned and charged for. endaga, the uc berkeley spinout that built the thing, announced on 5 october 2015 that its founders were joining facebook and the company was winding dow |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Open Cobalt 📖 2008 - 2015 the andrew w. mellon foundation and the national science foundation paid for a metaverse that needed no servers at all. julian lombardi and mark p. mccahill built it at duke on the croquet sdk that hewlett-packard had put out under an mit license, and the first public alpha landed in april 2010. it |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Club Nintendo 📖 2002 - 2015 club nintendo was the customer-loyalty program that asked you to punch the serial number off every nintendo game and console into a website. you got points back. you spent them on items that did not exist in stores. it ran for thirteen years across four regions and died in two installments in 2015. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
StarBand 📖 2000 - 2015 before starband, satellite internet meant a dish that could only receive. you downloaded from orbit and uploaded through a modem on the phone line, which is a sentence that should not have had to exist. starband put the uplink on the dish in november 2000 and sold it to farms and mountain towns wher |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Skillfeed 📖 2013 - 2015 shutterstock spent two years trying to sell lessons instead of pictures. skillfeed opened on 4 june 2013 with ten thousand videos and a nineteen dollar monthly pass, grew to ninety-four thousand tutorials from twelve hundred instructors, and was switched off on 30 september 2015. most of what it tau |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Quirky 📖 2009 - 2015 quirky was ben kaufman's crowdsourced invention platform. you submitted an idea, the community voted on it, and if it passed the bar the quirky team built and sold the product while the original contributors split a royalty. between 2009 and 2015 it raised about $185 million across four rounds and p |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Stypi 📖 2011 - 2015 google bought etherpad in december 2009, folded it into wave, and open-sourced the leftovers on the way out. eighteen months later jason chen and byron milligan shipped the same idea again under the name stypi, sold the company to salesforce inside a year, and kept the editor running for three more. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Starbright World 📖 1995 - 2015 on 8 november 1995 four american hospitals switched on a 3d virtual world built so that children with chronic illness could meet each other without leaving their rooms. steven spielberg chaired the foundation that paid for it and appeared inside it as e.t. the 3d version was too slow and was switche |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Lavaboom 📖 2014 - 2015 an insolvency filing in cologne ended lavaboom in august 2015, four months after its public beta finally opened. the premise was that lavabit's closure in 2013 had left a gap, and that german privacy law was the right jurisdiction to fill it from. about twelve thousand people had signed up by the en |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Rentboy.com 📖 1997 - 2015 rentboy was one of the longest-running gay male-escort classifieds sites on the open web, and it died on a summer tuesday in 2015 when homeland security investigations walked into its manhattan office. seven people were arrested. the ceo pleaded guilty to promoting prostitution and served six months |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Şehir Fırsatı 📖 2010 - 2015 a berlin clone factory started it and chicago closed it. şehir fırsatı launched in april 2010 as citydeal's turkish site, and groupon bought citydeal a month later, so it spent almost its whole life as groupon türkiye. at the end it had 3.6 million registered members and around a hundred people in t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Geoloqi 📖 2010 - 2015 amber case and aaron parecki built a platform in portland that let an application know when a phone crossed a line drawn on a map, without flattening the battery to find out. esri bought the company in october 2012 and rebuilt the technology as its own geotrigger service. the original geoloqi api wa |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Google Flu Trends 📖 2008 - 2015 google.org launched it in november 2008 on a genuinely good idea: people search for their symptoms before they see a doctor, so the queries arrive about two weeks ahead of the official numbers. nature published the method in 2009 and it looked close to solved. then it missed the 2009 swine flu entir |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Google Catalogs 📖 2011 - 2015 google catalogs launched on 16 august 2011 as an ipad app that reproduced the american mail-order catalog on a screen. nordstrom and l.l.bean shipped their seasonal books into it, page images intact, and you flipped through them with a thumb. google scanned thousands of them and charged the merchant |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
.an 📖 1993 - 2015 the netherlands antilles got two letters in the root zone in 1993 and stopped being a country on 10 october 2010. the domain outlived the state by nearly five years, because a country-code suffix cannot be switched off until the people using it have somewhere else to be. curaçao was given .cw and si |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Microsoft ActiveX 📖 1996 - 2015 activex was microsoft's bet that the web would run binary com components inside internet explorer with full local execution rights. it shipped in 1996 in ie 3.0, ran corporate intranets, banking sites, government portals, and pirated software installers for two decades. when edge launched on windows |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Internet America 📖 1995 - 2015 internet america sold dial-up in texas from january 1995 and answered the phone on 1-800-be-a-geek. it went public in december 1998 and spent 1999 buying five smaller isps. it came out of that year with 145,000 subscribers and a stock that doubled in a single day on no news at all. nasdaq delisted i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Entitle (eReatah) 📖 2013 - 2015 entitle was the ebook subscription that let you keep the books. two a month for ten dollars, up to four for twenty. launched as ereatah in 2013, rebranded to entitle a few months later, closed 21 july 2015 after burning through ~$5.4 million in venture money. no press event, no acquirer, just a redi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Leap Transit 📖 2013 - 2015 leap wanted to make the city bus feel like a startup office on wheels. refurbished coaches with leather seats and cold-pressed juice ran between san francisco neighborhoods for six dollars, more than twice the public fare. the problem was it never had the permits to run at all. california regulators |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Maps 📖 1996 - 2015 yahoo maps existed for almost twenty years and ended on the same day as yahoo pipes, in a quiet june 2015 announcement. it was a north america driving-directions overlay that never grew the api ubiquity google maps was riding on. by the time it shut down nobody was opening it on purpose. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Internet Public Library 📖 1995 - 2015 a graduate seminar at the university of michigan put its coursework on the web on 17 march 1995 and called it a public library. for twenty years library students kept the subject collections by hand and answered questions by email from anyone who wrote in, more than a hundred thousand of them. insti |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
ShopLocket 📖 2011 - 2015 toronto, 2011: katherine hague and andrew louis built an embeddable checkout for people who had exactly one thing to sell, and found their market among hardware startups taking pre-orders after a kickstarter. pch international bought it in january 2014 to put a storefront on the front of a supply ch |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
General Sentiment 📖 2008 - 2015 a letter to shareholders dated 24 june 2015 told them that general sentiment had terminated its half-dozen staff and suspended operations after failing to attract new capital. the brookville, new york company had taken 3.2 million dollars from canrock ventures, whose managing director mark fasciano |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Urbanspoon 📖 2006 - 2015 the slot-machine restaurant app for the early iphone. founded in 2006 in seattle by three ex-jobster engineers. iac bought it in 2009 and zomato bought it in january 2015. zomato turned the website off five months later and redirected the traffic to its own brand. the shake-to-spin ui was the part e |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Gitorious 📖 2008 - 2015 it launched in january 2008, months before github, and it hosted free software the way free software wanted to be hosted, fully open under the agpl. then github made hosting effortless and gitorious became the principled choice that almost nobody made. gitlab bought it in 2015 and switched it off by |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
SSL 3.0 📖 1996 - 2015 netscape shipped ssl 3.0 in november 1996 to replace a version that had been broken almost immediately, and it worked well enough that the web ran on it for the better part of two decades. in october 2014 three google researchers published poodle, an attack on the one part of the protocol that the m |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Blogilista.fi 📖 2005 - 2015 twelve thousand three hundred finnish blogs were on it when sanoma bought the thing in 2007, and it had started two years before that as a spin-off from another site. for a decade it was how you found a finnish blog and how a finnish blogger found readers. sanoma announced in april 2015 that it was |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Codehaus 📖 2003 - 2015 bob mcwhirter registered codehaus.org on 26 february 2003 and turned it into a home for java open-source projects that did not want to live on sourceforge. groovy was born there in october of that year, and jetty and xstream grew up alongside it. by 2013 the ad income no longer covered the hosting. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Kids' WB 📖 1995 - 2015 it died on the same date twice. the saturday morning block ended on 17 may 2008 when the network under it had already been merged away, and kidswb.com, the online-only afterlife that launched weeks before that, was broken up on 17 may 2015 into character sites. warner bros. decided children in 2015 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
oDesk 📖 2003 - 2015 odysseas tsatalos and stratis karamanlakis launched odesk in 2003 out of silicon valley as a remote-work bidding board with built-in time tracking. the platform spent the late 2000s and early 2010s catching elance, then merged with it on 18 december 2013 to form elance-odesk. on 5 may 2015 the combi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Wattage 📖 2014 - 2015 a year of development and $250,000 of friends-and-family money went into wattage, and the thing its founder is still complimented on is the pitch deck. it wanted to make electronics as publishable as a blog post, and it ran out of cash before finding out whether anybody wanted that. the failure writ |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Kalahari.com 📖 1998 - 2015 naspers pointed a bookshop at an entire country in 1998 and named it after the largest desert on the continent, because amazon had already taken the largest river. the first version was built in a month by people who had never done e-commerce and it failed about that fast. the relaunch took a decade |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Hiveminder 📖 2006 - 2015 on 4 july 2006 jesse vincent offered five beta accounts to the first five people who commented on his blog, and that was how hiveminder started. best practical, the company behind the rt ticket system, had built the shared to-do list it wanted for its own use and then rented it out to everyone else. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
JARING 📖 1992 - 2015 kuala lumpur got its first connection to the rest of the internet in 1992 over a 64 kbps satellite circuit to stockton, california, and the thing on the malaysian end of it was called jaring. the state built it, ran it for twenty years, then sold it in 2013 to a newspaper printing company for two mi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Google Helpouts 📖 2013 - 2015 google helpouts was a marketplace that connected paying users with experts for live video consultations through a hangout. it launched in november 2013 with a catalog of english-speaking providers across categories like cooking or homework help. it never grew. google closed it after seventeen months |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Google OpenID 2.0 📖 2008 - 2015 tom hughes opened the bug on 11 february 2015 with a title that was also the whole story: google is removing openid 2.0 support on 20th april. thousands of sites had wired their login button to one google endpoint, and on that monday the endpoint started answering with a static error page. the repla |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Carpooling.com 📖 2001 - 2015 carpooling.com started as a student project at TU munich in 2001 under the name mitfahrgelegenheit.de. by 2012 it was moving a million people a month across forty countries in europe. daimler put 10 million dollars into the company that year. blablacar bought it in april 2015 and folded the german b |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
LayerVault 📖 2011 - 2015 allan grinshtein and kelly sutton raised 535,000 dollars in august 2012 to give photoshop files a version history, something designers had asked for repeatedly and then, in the end, did not pay for. the notice went up on 11 march 2015 and gave customers exactly one month to pull their work out. the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Buttercoin 📖 2013 - 2015 april 2015 was a bad month to be a small bitcoin exchange. buttercoin had y combinator behind it, google ventures money, alexis ohanian on the cap table and about $1.6 million in the bank, and none of that could raise a next round once silicon valley lost interest in the asset. the notice gave a dat |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
CoralCDN 📖 2004 - 2015 michael freedman built a content distribution network at nyu, put it on planetlab in march 2004, and let anyone on earth use it for free by typing nine extra characters into a url. nyud.net stood for nyu distribution, and for about a decade it was how a small website survived being linked from slash |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Wiki Spot 📖 2006 - 2015 the people who built davis wiki, a town encyclopedia for davis, california, decided in 2006 that every town should have one and started giving the hosting away. wiki spot ran nine years as a 501(c)3 on donations, with no ads and no charge, on a wiki engine it had written itself. it switched off on 1 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Softcard 📖 2010 - 2015 the three biggest us carriers got together in 2010 and built a tap-to-pay nfc wallet inside a sim-based secure element. they called it isis. then isis became a different word in the news in 2014, the wallet got renamed softcard. five months later google bought the patents and shut the app off. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Multimap.com 📖 1996 - 2015 multimap was the UK online mapping site that defined "click this link to see the office on a map" between 1996 and the arrival of google maps in '05. founded in london by sean phelan and ed parsons, it was the first european consumer mapping service of any scale. microsoft acquired it for $50 millio |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Build-A-Bearville 📖 2007 - 2015 build-a-bearville was the online world for build-a-bear workshop, the mall chain where children assemble a stuffed animal at the counter. the bear you made in the store came with a code that unlocked a matching character in the browser world, where kids played minigames and decorated a house for in- |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Trovebox 📖 2011 - 2015 a kickstarter in december 2011 funded the idea that your photo library should not be hostage to the company hosting it. jaisen mathai and patrick santana shipped openphoto, renamed it trovebox in january 2013, and wired it so your pictures could sit in your own dropbox or your own s3 bucket while tr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Industrial Property Digital Library 📖 1999 - 2015 at ten in the evening on friday 20 march 2015 the japanese government switched off a free public search across ninety-eight million patent and trademark documents going back to the meiji era, and three days later put up a different one under a different name. a cabinet decision in december 2010 had |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Place My Past 📖 2013 - 2015 upload the family tree file your genealogy program exports and this thing would plot every event in it onto a map, then tell you what the place had been like at the time. the geography came out of freebase, google's open fact database. when google announced freebase was being retired, jonathan whiti |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Evolution 📖 2014 - 2015 evolution opened in january 2014 and spent a year being the most reliable market on tor. the site stayed up and the escrow held, which was rare enough to be the whole selling point. after operation onymous cleared out its competitors in late 2014 it became the largest market on the network. in march |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
BebaPay 📖 2013 - 2015 a prepaid nfc card for nairobi bus fare, launched on 30 april 2013 by google with equity bank, tapped against a conductor's android handset instead of handing over coins. it signed up hundreds of thousands of commuters and never signed up the conductors, who had their own reasons to keep the fare in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
CloudOn 📖 2012 - 2015 herzliya, 2012: a team streamed a real copy of microsoft word into an ipad browser, pointed it at your dropbox, and handed it over for free. for two years that was the only way to open a .doc on a tablet without mangling it, and nine million people registered. microsoft shipped office for ipad in ma |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
TheFind 📖 2006 - 2015 facebook announced the purchase and the closure in the same sentence on 13 march 2015. thefind had spent nine years building a shopping search engine that crawled 500 million products across half a million stores and ranked them on relevance rather than on who paid, which was the rare honest positio |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Nokia Mail 📖 2008 - 2015 the webmail nokia carried into the microsoft acquisition and did not carry out. it started as ovi mail beta on 13 august 2008 with over 9 million users at yahoo migration in 2011. microsoft bought nokia devices in april 2014 and shut the address down eleven months later. user data was destroyed with |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Zooomr 📖 2005 - 2015 zooomr was a photo sharing site launched in 2005 by kristopher tate, then 17, and michael van veen of bluebridge technologies group. it was pitched as flickr on steroids and shipped features like geotagging via a service called tagmap months before flickr added its own version. photographer thomas h |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Brand.com 📖 2009 - 2015 a philadelphia firm that sold the removal of bad search results, founded in 2009 as reputation changer and renamed after the 500,000 dollar domain it bought in 2013. the work underneath was publishing enough new material about a client to push the old material down, sold under names like google eras |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
DrivePop 📖 2012 - 2015 unlimited was the entire pitch, and in online backup that word has a habit of outliving the company that prints it. drivepop sold unlimited cloud backup on a flat subscription from 2012, with a wordpress site at the front and a billing panel behind it, and stopped answering in march 2015 without pos |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Sky Active 📖 1998 - 2015 for sixteen years a british television remote had a button that opened a shopping mall. sky active was the walled garden bolted onto sky digital, where you could bank with hsbc, put money on a race, read your email and pick your own camera angle at a football match, all through a set top box with a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Space Heroes Universe! 📖 2011 - 2015 the closing notice went up on 21 december 2014, which is a hard week to tell children anything. an australian studio called bubble gum interactive had built a flash galaxy that reached close to two million registered players, handed them missions and badges, then watched the audience move to tablets |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Berniaga.com 📖 2009 - 2015 701search, a joint venture between norwegian and singaporean media companies, launched berniaga in december 2009 and spent five years running second to tokobagus in indonesian classifieds. in november 2014 the two sets of owners stopped competing and merged instead, with naspers taking 64 percent an |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
AyosDito.ph 📖 2009 - 2015 it launched in march 2009 and the name is tagalog for "ok here". by 2013 it was the second largest classifieds site in the philippines, owned through 701search, a joint venture of singapore press holdings and schibsted. the merger with olx was announced on 13 november 2014 as part of a much larger d |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Tippr 📖 2010 - 2015 seattle had a daily deals company in 2010 that was really a patent company wearing a coupon site as a costume. martin tobias built tippr out of a startup called kashless, and the month it launched he also bought the patent portfolio of mercata, paul allen's failed 1999 group-buying venture, which he |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Right Media 📖 2003 - 2015 michael walrath founded right media in march 2003 with noah and jonah goodhart backing it, and built the right media exchange, an open marketplace where ad networks bid against each other in real time for inventory that used to get passed down a chain. yahoo took a stake in october 2006 and bought t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
CapGeek 📖 2009 - 2015 capgeek was a live public database of every nhl player contract that both team front offices and fans treated as authoritative, with the working press citing it constantly. matthew wuest started it in 2009 as salarycapcalculator.com out of stanley new brunswick, ran it alongside his day job at metro |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Amazon Wallet 📖 2014 - 2015 a phone app from amazon that held your gift cards and store loyalty cards in one place. the catch was that it could not do the one thing people wanted a wallet app for, which was pay with an actual credit or debit card. apple pay had just shown everyone what a real mobile wallet looked like, and ama |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Google Wallet (2011) 📖 2011 - 2015 the original google wallet was google guessing, correctly, that your phone would replace your cards, and then getting blocked at every gate that mattered. it launched in 2011 on exactly one phone on one carrier, because the other carriers were busy building their own thing to keep it out. it never g |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Chipknip 📖 1995 - 2015 chipknip was a chip on the back of every dutch bank card that held money instead of pointing at it. you loaded it at a machine with your pin, then spent it without one, and the shop paid a flat fee instead of a percentage. it started as a pilot in arnhem on 26 october 1995 and peaked in 2010 at 178 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Podcast Pickle 📖 2005 - 2015 gary leland launched podcast pickle in march 2005, back when finding a podcast meant somebody had listed it somewhere by hand. by march 2007 the directory carried more than twelve thousand feeds and time had already named it one of the fifty coolest sites on the web. then apple built a directory int |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Wimba 📖 1998 - 2014 founded in paris in 1998 to push voice into web pages for language teachers, merged into a new york company six years later, then sold to blackboard as half of a $116 million deal. the name came off every download and support contract on 31 december 2014. universities spent that autumn pulling their |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
nRelate 📖 2009 - 2014 iac decided it would rather use nrelate than sell it. the widget had been sitting under the last paragraph of more than a hundred thousand blogs since 2009, feeding the reader another article and feeding the publisher a cut of the ad next to it, and ask.com bought the company in july 2012 on the str |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
OpenSocial 📖 2007 - 2014 opensocial was a public api specification google announced november 1 2007, a set of common interfaces that let a single third-party application run unmodified across multiple social networks. the founding adopters were orkut, friendster, hi5, and myspace. linkedin and salesforce joined later, along |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
PeerIndex 📖 2009 - 2014 peerindex sold agencies a number that claimed to tell them who mattered on twitter. brandwatch bought it in december 2014 for cash and equity, folded the score into their monitoring dashboard, and the standalone peerindex product stopped existing. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Helium.com 📖 2002 - 2014 helium was the andover writing community where members wrote articles and rated each other's submissions head to head. mark ranalli launched it around 2002 and rr donnelley bought it in june 2011 for roughly seventy million dollars total. the panda update broke the search-traffic model that funded t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Nokia Sync 📖 2008 - 2014 microsoft finished buying nokia's phone business in april 2014 and switched off its contact sync service eight months later. ovi sync had launched in 2008 to put your phonebook somewhere other than the sim card, which on a series 40 handset was a genuinely useful offer. the closing notice put the re |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Tipo 📖 2003 - 2014 on 11 november 2003 two israeli founders opened a messenger community for adults and put an 18+ section on it. children arrived instead, and by the end of 2005 tipo had rewritten itself as the children and youth portal. it stayed the biggest one in the country until walla closed it on economic groun |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Netflix Public API 📖 2008 - 2014 thirty-five million american subscribers and twelve and a half million elsewhere: by 2014 netflix did not need anybody else's app to introduce it to an audience. the public api had opened on 1 october 2008 on the opposite theory, that a thousand outsiders would build the things netflix had not thoug |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Qwiki 📖 2010 - 2014 qwiki won techcrunch disrupt in september 2010 with an ipad app that turned wikipedia entries into narrated video montages. yahoo bought it for a reported fifty million in july 2013. announced the shutdown fourteen months later. site went dark on 1 november 2014. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
KidZui 📖 2008 - 2014 the idea was that a child's internet could be a list. kidzui shipped a firefox build in 2008 that could reach nothing except urls a paid reviewer had already looked at and approved, and by 2011 the list had five million things on it. it never found a way to charge for that. saban brands bought the c |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Maktoob 📖 1998 - 2014 the first arabic-language webmail anyone ran at scale. founded out of amman by samih toukan and hussam khoury in 1998. by 2009 it was the biggest arabic-language portal in the middle east and yahoo bought it for around 164 million dollars. yahoo kept the brand for a while, then folded the mail servi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Twitpic 📖 2008 - 2014 twitpic was the dominant photo host for twitter from 2008 to 2014, founded by noah everett as a stand-alone uploader before twitter had native images. at peak in may 2011 it carried close to half of all photos shared on twitter. the trademark fight with twitter, plus collapsing usage once twitter sh |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Amazon WebPay 📖 2007 - 2014 amazon webpay was a free peer to peer money transfer product that amazon launched in 2007 as a wing of amazon payments, the account layer for the amazon store. you could send or request money using an email address and no fee on either end. the pitch was a paypal alternative from a company that alre |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Wreckamovie 📖 2007 - 2014 a group of finnish filmmakers made a free star trek parody called star wreck: in the pirkinning in 2005 by recruiting help over the internet, and it traveled a long way further than its budget should have allowed. wreckamovie was the attempt to turn that method into a product, open from 1 february 2 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Sulia 📖 2009 - 2014 ten million dollars went into a service that tried to find the people worth reading about any given subject, first by filtering twitter's firehose for other apps and then, after twitter said it would do that itself, as a standalone site. the farewell page went up in the first days of october 2014 an |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
National Atlas of the United States 📖 1997 - 2014 in late 2013 mapping managers at the us geological survey decided to end the program, and the site they ended was getting three times the use of the site they kept. nationalatlas.gov had been online since 1997, the last edition of a federal atlas whose paper ancestors run back to 1874, and it was th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Stagecast Creator 📖 1998 - 2014 larry tesler left apple in 1997 holding the rights to a kids' programming system the company had built and renamed twice, and he spent the next sixteen years selling it. creator taught programming by demonstration: you showed a character what to do in a situation, and the rule got written for you. t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Petpet Park 📖 2008 - 2014 jumpstart games bought neopets in september 2014 and the spin-off did not survive the paperwork. petpet park went offline nine days after the sale closed, six years after neopets had advertised it with a whole site-wide plot. it inverted its parent: the petpet, which on neopets was an accessory your |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
AnimeNation 📖 1995 - 2014 the anime mail-order house out of clearwater florida. gene field opened it in 1995, ran it for twenty years, and shut the store in september 2014. the ask john column and the rentanime dvd-by-mail service were the part outsiders remember. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Slando 📖 2006 - 2014 michael pennington and simon crookall sold gumtree to ebay in 2005 and built slando next, a free classifieds site aimed at russia and ukraine with ebay itself among the backers. it grew to something like eleven million users across the region and became the ordinary noticeboard for ukrainian buying |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Wallbase 📖 2009 - 2014 on 8 september 2014, at 13:54 gmt, something wrote an empty file over wallbase's index page, and that was the entire announcement. the site had indexed close to three million wallpapers pulled off the imageboards, with a color search nothing else gave you for free. one person held the code and the s |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
TheSwizzle 📖 2012 - 2014 scott kurnit built about.com and sold it for $724 million. he spent the early 2010s on a free tool that folded your promotional email into one daily digest and offered to unsubscribe you from the rest. theswizzle was advertiser-supported in theory. the advertisers never came, and in september 2014 i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Pikimal 📖 2010 - 2014 thirteen people in pittsburgh built a search engine that refused to rank anything by popularity. you picked a category and then moved sliders to say how much each measurable fact mattered to you, and the ranking came back out of your own weights. then google shipped the panda update in february 2011 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Thaimail 📖 1997 - 2014 on 15 april 1997 a thai publishing company gave the country its first free email address, in thai, at a point when getting online in bangkok still meant a modem and a local access number. four million people registered one. arip announced the end on 27 june 2014 and closed the doors on 1 september, |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
GoInstant 📖 2011 - 2014 on 31 august 2014 a one-line notice replaced a company that had sold for a reported seventy million dollars two years earlier. four developers in halifax had built the thing that let two people drive one web page together and shipped it as a javascript library. it went from a disrupt stage to a sale |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
showModalDialog 📖 1997 - 2017 chrome 37 shipped on 26 august 2014 without the one javascript call that could stop a page dead and wait for an answer. microsoft had put it in internet explorer 4 in 1997 and every other browser copied it, because corporate web apps were built on the idea that the user could be made to deal with a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Campfire (37signals) 📖 2006 - 2014 campfire was 37signals's hosted chat room for teams, launched in 2006 before slack existed. simple enough to understand in a minute, persistent enough to scroll back across weeks. in 2014 the company stopped accepting new signups, leaving existing customers on a maintenance product while basecamp ab |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Digital Region 📖 2009 - 2014 four south yorkshire councils, a regional development agency and brussels put more than ninety million pounds into a broadband network almost nobody bought. digital region was formed in april 2009 to cover 1.3 million people, and at the end it had around three thousand customers against a business p |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Spickmich.de 📖 2007 - 2014 spickmich was the german teacher-rating site that three cologne students opened in spring 2007. registered pupils filled in their school and their teachers, then graded those teachers anonymously on a six-point scale across competence and motivation. the registered user count crossed 800,000 within |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Fotopedia 📖 2009 - 2014 fotopedia was the june 2009 paris photo platform built by five former apple engineers led by jean-marie hullot. members curated travel and wildlife photo essays in a wikipedia-shaped layer. the iphone and ipad apps drove most of the audience. the company hit three billion image views in late 2012 af |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Norton Zone 📖 2013 - 2014 symantec supplied the obituary itself: security is one of the company's strengths, file sharing is not, and norton zone was a late entry to the market. general release came on 14 may 2013 with 5 gb free and client-side encryption, the end was announced on 3 june 2014, access narrowed to desktop copy |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Patch-Tag 📖 2009 - 2014 git won, and over the following decade everything built for the alternatives went down behind it. patch-tag was thomas hartman's one-man answer to the question of where darcs users were supposed to keep their repositories. it opened on 21 january 2009, free for open source and priced for private rep |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Skype protocol 📖 2003 - 2014 for most of a decade the cheapest long distance call in the world was carried by other people's computers. skype's protocol was undocumented and almost impossible to block, and it worked because any machine with a good connection could be promoted to a supernode and start relaying traffic for strang |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Ubuntu One 📖 2009 - 2014 ubuntu one was canonical's own dropbox. shipped alongside ubuntu 9.04 in may 2009 with 5 gb free storage and a linux-native sync client. added a music store and mobile streaming on the way up. shut down on 31 july 2014 after canonical decided it could not compete with dropbox or google drive on pric |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Shortmail 📖 2011 - 2014 five hundred characters and no attachments. that was the entire product. 410 labs built shortmail in baltimore in 2011 on the theory that most email is too long because the medium lets it be, and that a hard limit would make people say the thing and stop. it raised $750,000 and got written up as twi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
LearnStreet 📖 2012 - 2014 vinod khosla put a million dollars into learnstreet in 2012 and it was gone inside two years with no reason ever given. the only record of the shutdown is a user pasting the notification email into hacker news on 4 july 2014 and asking whether anybody knew anything, which nobody did. the blog had al |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Topica 📖 1998 - 2014 topica was a place to run an email list without a server of your own. it started in 1998, swallowed the old liszt list directory in 1999, and at its peak carried something like sixty million subscribers across a hundred thousand groups. it also became known as somewhere spam went to live, which mean |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Pixorial 📖 2007 - 2014 the domain still resolves, and it lands you on the product's own wikipedia article, which is a quieter epitaph than most companies manage to arrange for themselves. before that it was a colorado business that began by converting people's videotapes into files and grew into a video editor that ran in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Encyclopedia of Taiwan 📖 2005 - 2014 five hundred and twenty million new taiwan dollars was the budget, and the original plan was a twenty-volume printed encyclopedia. what it turned into was a website with two halves, one written by commissioned experts and one written by whoever turned up, with every public entry going through review |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Sify Mail 📖 2000 - 2014 by august 2003 the company behind this inbox had over a thousand cybercafes open across india, which is the part of it worth remembering. satyam infoway was the first private isp in the country and the first indian internet company to list on nasdaq, and sify.com was the portal it assembled on top o |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Google Baraza 📖 2010 - 2014 on 25 october 2010 google launched a question and answer site for africa and named it with the swahili word for council. it ran on points: you earned them by answering and spent them by asking, and the answers were wired back into google search results. google closed it on 23 june 2014 and left a pu |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Code Spaces 📖 2007 - 2014 on 17 june 2014 a stranger holding the keys to code spaces' amazon console asked for money to stop a ddos attack. the coventry company tried to lock the account down instead, and the intruder, who had already set up spare logins, spent twelve hours deleting every snapshot and machine image the busin |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Willcom 📖 1995 - 2014 japan built a second mobile phone system alongside the real one, cheap and short ranged, and willcom was the operator that outlived the idea. it sold unlimited data on a handset in 2005 when everywhere else was still charging by the packet, which made it the network of choice for people who wanted a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Editorially 📖 2013 - 2014 editorially was the collaborative writing tool built by the designers who had built typekit and a book apart. markdown editing with threaded revision history in every paragraph, aimed at longform writers rather than google-docs offices. it opened in public september 2013 and shut down on 30 may 2014 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection 📖 2005 - 2014 nintendo wi-fi connection was nintendo's first real consumer online service. it launched with mario kart ds in november 2005 and ran on gamespy infrastructure underneath. when glu mobile bought gamespy and shut the matchmaking servers in 2014, nintendo killed the wi-fi connection along with most of |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Loom 📖 2013 - 2014 twenty-nine days is the gap between the acquisition notice and the shutdown. dropbox bought loom on 17 april 2014, one week after launching carousel, a photo app of its own doing much the same job, and the purchase was plainly for the people rather than the product. loom's users were exported to car |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
RubyForge 📖 2003 - 2014 ruby central needed somewhere to put open source ruby projects, so in july 2003 a small consultancy stood up a fork of sourceforge and called it rubyforge. when rubygems arrived it kept its packages on the same servers, which quietly turned a volunteer project host into the package infrastructure fo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
EditGrid 📖 2006 - 2014 a web spreadsheet out of a small hong kong company that, by most accounts, was better than google's: live data feeds and a real api, collaborative in the browser back in 2006. apple acqui-hired the team in 2008 for its iwork.com effort, and editgrid stopped growing that year. it sat frozen and read- |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Square Wallet 📖 2011 - 2014 square wallet let you pay at a cafe by giving your name. no phone out, no tap, your face and your name were the checkout. for the people who had it, it felt like the future arriving early. but the economics never worked and every merchant was a manual sign-up, so square pulled it in 2014 and pushed |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Appetas 📖 2012 - 2014 a twenty five thousand dollar hackathon prize in 2012 paid two ex-microsoft engineers to go and build restaurant websites, and two years later google bought the company and switched the product off. appetas took a restaurant name and a city and produced a finished site in seconds, menu included, wir |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
5min.com 📖 2007 - 2014 5min was a short instructional video network founded in tel aviv in 2007 by ran harnevo. by 2010 it was syndicating short how-to clips across a wide partner network of us publisher sites. aol bought it that september for 65 million dollars in cash. harnevo became aol's president of video. the brand |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
BerliOS 📖 2000 - 2014 the fraunhofer institute opened berlios in january 2000 so that german and european open source work would have somewhere to live that was not a californian company's website. it ran the same kind of forge sourceforge ran, and by 2011 it held over four thousand seven hundred projects for around fift |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Slidecast 📖 2007 - 2014 seven years after slideshare invented it, the slidecast was switched off in two stages during 2014: you could no longer make one after 28 february, and on 30 april every existing one was flattened back into a silent deck. the pitch had been that a presentation without its presenter is half a documen |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
OpenNI 📖 2010 - 2014 apple paid around $360 million for primesense on 24 november 2013, and primesense was the member holding the openni consortium together. openni.org went offline on 23 april 2014 and took the download archive with it. what it had been was the only cross-platform way to pull depth and skeleton data of |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
TelexFree 📖 2012 - 2014 telexfree pretended to sell voip calling cards. about two percent of the revenue came from selling cards. the other ninety-eight percent came from recruiting new members who paid to recruit more new members. brazilian courts shut down the brazilian operation in june 2013. the us sec froze the assets |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Kerpoof 📖 2006 - 2014 four engineers in boulder put fifty thousand dollars of their own money into a drawing program for small children and agreed to take no salary for a year. kerpoof let a six year old drag a pirate into a scene or spell a word to make an object appear, and two national science foundation grants paid f |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Farecast 📖 2003 - 2014 it answered one question, which was whether to buy the ticket today or wait, and it attached a confidence figure so you could argue with it. behind that sat billions of observed airfares and a model built out of university research, which in 2006 was one of the first times an ordinary person got han |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
IntoNow 📖 2011 - 2014 adam cahan's team shipped intonow at the end of january 2011 as a shazam-for-television app. hold your phone up to any show and it told you what was on. yahoo bought them twelve weeks later for around twenty million, folded the team into the mobile group, and in early 2014 pulled the app from the st |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Diesel eBooks 📖 2004 - 2014 diesel sold ebooks in epub for a decade, which meant it sold to everyone except kindle owners and was therefore fighting over the smaller half of a market amazon already owned. the agency pricing deals the big publishers signed in 2010 took away the one lever an independent store had left, since nob |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
SecondSync 📖 2011 - 2014 every tweet sent at a british television show passed through a small company in london and bristol for about three years, and the league table it produced is how the broadcast industry first learned to talk about the second screen. twitter bought the team on 31 march 2014, on the same day it bought |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
NHS Direct 📖 1998 - 2014 england had one number for the question you could not quite justify an ambulance over. 0845 46 47 reached a nurse at any hour of any day, from march 1998 onward, and over sixteen years it became the thing people did before deciding whether to go to hospital. then nhs direct bid to run the contracts |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Distill 📖 2012 - 2014 yahoo announced the purchase on 13 february 2014 and what it had bought was seven engineers. the product they had spent two years on, a video call with a shared code editor inside it for running technical interviews, was given six more weeks and switched off on 30 march. gild then bought the code se |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Sparktop 📖 2003 - 2014 a free website for eight to twelve year olds with dyslexia and other learning differences, put online in october 2003 by the charles and helen schwab foundation through its schwab learning unit. charles schwab is dyslexic himself and the money came from that fact rather than from any market opportun |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
BookLamp 📖 2007 - 2014 boise, idaho is not where book recommendation engines come from, which is part of why aaron stanton had to fly to california and wait outside google's offices to get anyone to listen. seven years later his software was reading tens of thousands of novels a week and measuring their pacing. apple boug |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
TextDrive 📖 2004 - 2014 two hundred people paid two hundred dollars each in 2004 to buy the hardware a hosting company would run on, and dean allen called them the vc200. the promise attached to that money was as long as we exist, which held until joyent bought the company and then tried to end those accounts in 2012. alle |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Hunch 📖 2009 - 2014 hunch launched in 2009 as a question game that tried to predict what you would like, from movies to gadgets, out of a taste graph built from your answers. caterina fake, who had co-founded flickr, was behind it with chris dixon. ebay bought it in 2011 for around eighty million dollars, mostly for th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Google Offers 📖 2011 - 2014 google tried to buy groupon for around six billion dollars in december 2010 and got turned down, so it built its own. google offers opened on 26 may 2011 with a deal of the day and a voucher that stayed valid no matter how many people bought it, which was the one honest improvement over the model it |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Wildfire Interactive 📖 2008 - 2014 a $250,000 grant from the facebook fund in 2008 turned into a company that ran the promotions behind half the brand pages on facebook, and google bought it on 31 july 2012 for a price the press put at $250 million. twenty months later google told those customers there would be no new features and no |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
GreenXchange 📖 2010 - 2014 davos, january 2010: nike used its slot at the world economic forum to launch a marketplace where a company could publish a patent with a standing license attached, so another company could build a greener product on top of it without a negotiation. over four hundred nike patents went in. creative c |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Facebook Email 📖 2010 - 2014 in 2010 facebook decided everyone needed a facebook.com email address and gave one to every user without asking. in 2012 it changed the address listed on your profile to that one, also without asking. in 2014 it shut the whole thing down because nobody had used it. the whole arc was three years of a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Utopia 📖 2014 - 2014 utopia opened on 3 february 2014, put together by people connected to black market reloaded, and dutch police took it off the network eight days later. undercover officers bought mdma and cocaine from the listings, and then somebody on the site offered one of them a down payment to carry out a killi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
McWorld 📖 2008 - 2014 a code printed on a happy meal box was the currency of this one. mcdonald's launched mcworld on happymeal.com in 2008, a flash virtual world where children decorated a treehouse, dressed an avatar called an mpal and worked through themed areas full of minigames. the mccodes that bought the furniture |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
ValueClick 📖 1998 - 2014 valueclick was one of the original dot-com era online ad networks, founded in 1998 in westlake village, california by brian coryat and built around the then-novel cost-per-click pricing model. through the 2000s it absorbed commission junction, mediaplex, dotomi, greystripe and a few smaller properti |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Jajah 📖 2005 - 2014 jajah was a small austrian voip company that built a clever trick. you typed your own phone number and the other person's phone number into a web form, the site rang both ends, and the call connected over the internet without anyone installing software. that was rare in 2005. telefónica bought the c |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Manymoon 📖 2009 - 2014 manymoon was a shared task-and-project tracker from 2009 that got big by being one of the first hits in google's apps marketplace, sitting right next to gmail. more than fifty thousand businesses signed on. salesforce bought it in 2011 for tens of millions and renamed the whole thing do.com, a troph |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Google Notifier 📖 2005 - 2014 for nine years the fastest way to learn you had mail was a small envelope in the corner of your screen, put there by a program whose only job was watching one inbox. google shipped it in 2005, when webmail sat in a tab you had to remember to go and look at. the phone in your pocket made it unnecessa |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Outbox 📖 2012 - 2014 outbox tried to digitize the us physical mail stream. drivers picked up envelopes from a customer's mailbox three days a week, scanned the contents at a central facility, and sent the images to an app. it cost $4.99 a month. the usps blocked the model by refusing to allow mail forwarding at scale, a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! omg! 📖 2007 - 2014 yahoo omg was the celebrity gossip property yahoo built in 2007, when celebrity gossip was a thing portals built whole verticals around. it pulled from access hollywood, reuters, and ap, sold an exclamation mark and a lower-case name, and hit 32 million monthly visitors at its peak. then yahoo decid |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Everloop 📖 2011 - 2014 everloop was a social network for eight to thirteen year olds, built to be legal under coppa during the years when every american parent had just worked out that their kid was already on facebook. it started in 2010 as a girls-only site called girl ambition and relaunched under the everloop name in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Impermium 📖 2010 - 2014 1.5 million websites were paying impermium to decide which of their new signups were real people, tumblr and disqus among them. in january 2014 google bought the company, merged the team into its own abuse group, and the api those sites were calling stopped being a product. three ex-yahoo spam engin |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Postini 📖 1999 - 2013 postini was the cloud spam filter that sat in front of fortune-500 mail servers in the 2000s, before "cloud" was the word for it. google bought it in 2007 for 625 million dollars in cash. in 2011 google announced the brand would die into google apps. the final postini service shut down by the end of |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Gawab 📖 1999 - 2013 gawab was arabic-language webmail run out of alexandria in egypt from 1999, and for most of the 2000s it was the mail service a large part of the arabic-reading internet actually used. the interface was a single-page ajax client that worked properly right to left, which put it technically ahead of t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Vdio 📖 2013 - 2013 a video store bolted onto a music subscription, built by one of the people who made skype. it opened on 2 april 2013 with twenty five dollars of credit for every rdio subscriber and films from most of the major studios. it lasted eight months and twenty five days. when it closed it paid people back |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Yandex.Otkrytki 📖 2000 - 2013 27 december 2013, four days before the single busiest greeting night in russia. yandex closed открытки with no announcement and no stated reason, after thirteen years of letting people send a picture with a tune attached to it. in 2000 that was a whole category and every portal on earth ran one. by |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Google Trader 📖 2009 - 2013 kampala got it before anyone else. google trader started in june 2009 inside google sms in uganda, a classifieds market you worked by texting a shortcode, built with mtn uganda and the grameen foundation for people whose only computer was a handset with no data on it. a website followed that novembe |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Japan Encyclopedia 📖 2008 - 2013 one hundred and thirty thousand entries out of shogakukan's nipponica went online for nothing on 27 november 2008 and came back off on 3 december 2013. yahoo! japan never removed the beta label in five years, which turned out to be the most accurate thing on the page. the articles carried the names |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Sheep Marketplace 📖 2013 - 2013 sheep opened in march 2013 as one of dozens of small tor markets and became one of the largest by accident, when the fbi took silk road off the network in october and its sellers needed somewhere to stand. six weeks later a vendor found a hole in the withdrawal code and pulled about 5,400 bitcoin ou |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
GeoURL 📖 2002 - 2013 a meta tag with two numbers in it was the whole protocol. geourl read the coordinates off your page and told you which other pages sat near it, which in 2002 was a new thing to be able to ask. joshua schachter ran the prototype until 2004 and ask bjørn hansen rebuilt it and relaunched in february 20 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
HipGeo 📖 2011 - 2013 the founders had sold a company to yahoo in 1999 and watched it get folded into geocities, so they knew exactly what happens to a place people keep their memories in. hipgeo recorded your trip without being asked: no check-in and no button, just the route and the photos assembled into a journal afte |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Google Checkout 📖 2006 - 2013 google's attempt to own the checkout button the way paypal already did. it launched in 2006 with cheap processing and the whole search empire behind it, and ebay treated it as enough of a threat to ban it outright. it never became the default anywhere. in 2013 google folded it into wallet and the st |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Jumptap 📖 2005 - 2013 jumptap.com answers 404 today, and the error page it serves is titled Yahoo. that single fact contains the whole corporate lineage: millennial media bought jumptap in 2013, aol bought millennial media in 2015, verizon bought aol and yahoo and poured them into the same holding company, and the domain |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Everpix 📖 2011 - 2013 everpix was a photo backup service that vacuumed up every image from your phone and your social feeds, deduped them, and showed you a clean scrollable timeline that surfaced forgotten shots on their anniversaries. it launched in public in may 2012 after a private beta the year before, run by pierre- |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Twitscoop 📖 2008 - 2013 philippe breuils shipped this in may 2008, and a year later half a million people were watching a tag cloud that grew a word only when that word started appearing more often than it usually did. tweetdeck wired its trend column into twitscoop's api, which made a small french company load-bearing for |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Black Market Reloaded 📖 2011 - 2013 the market that inherited silk road's traffic and decided it could not carry it. black market reloaded ran on tor from 2011 and allowed what silk road refused, weapons included. after the fbi seizure in october 2013 the refugees arrived all at once, and again in november when sheep marketplace colla |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Kindernet 📖 1988 - 2013 a finnish producer who thought children's cartoons had turned too violent put kindernet on a satellite on 1 march 1988, beaming into the netherlands from luxembourg because dutch law still banned commercial television at home. it ran mornings, paid for by a forty-cent levy on cable subscribers, and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
NexTView 📖 1995 - 2013 october 2013 is when the last transmitter stopped, and by then there was only one left. nextview was a program guide that european television manufacturers agreed on in 1995 and hid inside the teletext signal, so a set could assemble a searchable week of listings out of the picture it was already re |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Qype 📖 2006 - 2013 a german answer to yelp, built city by city because that is the only way a review site gets built. hamburg first, then everywhere in western europe that would hold still long enough. twenty million people a month were reading it when yelp bought the company for fifty million dollars in october 2012. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Amazon AskVille 📖 2006 - 2013 askville was amazon's user driven question and answer community that ran from december 2006 to october 2013. members earned experience points and a virtual currency called quest coins for good answers. the whole model was closer to yahoo answers with a gamified layer on top than to stack overflow. a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Silk Road 📖 2011 - 2013 the first anonymous market at real scale. it proved that tor and bitcoin could move actual money for actual contraband, and it proved the fbi would find you anyway. ross ulbricht ran it as dread pirate roberts until a login trail put him in a san francisco library with the laptop open and logged in. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Nirvanix 📖 2007 - 2013 a letter dated 16 september 2013 gave nirvanix customers until the end of that month to get their data out. some of them were storing petabytes. the company had raised seventy million dollars and held a five year oem contract with ibm, and it filed for chapter 11 on 1 october. what the industry kept |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
WebTV / MSN TV 📖 1996 - 2013 the set-top box that connected a normal TV to the internet via a phone line and a hand-held remote keyboard. launched as webtv in 1996. bought by microsoft in 1997 for 425 million. rebranded msn tv in 2001. peaked around 1.1 million subscribers in the early 2000s. shut down on 30 september 2013, eig |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Facebook Credits 📖 2009 - 2013 facebook spent four years pretending its own coupon would beat the dollar. ten credits per dollar, facebook took thirty percent, zynga took the rest. by 2013 the only people still buying credits were people farmville had not finished with yet. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Cookie Jar TV 📖 2006 - 2013 on 21 september 2013 cbs aired a saturday morning cartoon block for the last time. it had carried three different names in seven years, and every one of them named a business partner rather than a show: an aol kids portal, a greeting card company, then the canadian firm that had bought dic's back ca |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Tutorspree 📖 2011 - 2013 eighty percent of tutorspree's traffic went away in march 2013, inside a single google panda update, and virtually all of its customers had been arriving from search. the founders kept going for six more months on an $800,000 round raised a month before the drop, then posted a thank-you note at 11:1 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Atlantis 📖 2013 - 2013 atlantis opened in march 2013 and spent six months doing the one thing nobody else in this category attempted, which was advertising. it put a cartoon commercial on youtube and undercut silk road's fees, then took questions about both in a reddit ama. in september it posted a notice blaming security |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
The Plant List 📖 2010 - 2013 kew and the missouri botanical garden merged their checklists and published one working list of every plant species anybody had ever named, because 193 governments had signed a target saying somebody should. version 1.1 arrived in september 2013 carrying 1,293,685 names, of which 350,699 were accept |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Mobcaster 📖 2011 - 2013 aubrey levy was an actor and writer who watched a pilot of his own go through round after round of network notes and then never air. mobcaster was his answer: pitch the show to the audience instead of to a network, and keep your own intellectual property when they fund it. it launched in 2011 out of |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
WeSeed 📖 2007 - 2013 autumn 2008 was a strange season to launch a website that made the stock market look approachable. weseed handed you fake money and a search engine that turned the brands in your kitchen into ticker symbols, the whole thing built on peter lynch's line about investing in what you know. apple made the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Points 📖 2005 - 2013 the virtual currency for xbox live and zune that almost nobody could convert in their head. 80 points to the dollar was the joke, except 79 also showed up next to it. microsoft killed it on the same software update that gave the xbox a local price tag back. nobody cried. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Google Latitude 📖 2009 - 2013 google latitude was google maps' location-sharing layer from 2009 to 2013. you opted in, and your friends saw a small dot on the map wherever you were. that was the entire product. latitude was also google's quiet replacement for dodgeball, which it had bought in 2005 and let stagnate until the foun |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Silent Mail 📖 2012 - 2013 jon callas wrote the notice himself and the striking line in it was that nothing had happened yet. no subpoena and no warrant from anybody. lavabit had folded hours earlier rather than hand over its keys, and silent circle looked at what email actually leaks even when the body is encrypted and decid |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Lavabit 📖 2004 - 2013 lavabit was a small encrypted email service that ended up with one very famous customer, edward snowden. in 2013 the federal government demanded the private keys that protected every account, not just his, and ladar levison decided he would rather close the whole thing than hand them over. he shut i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Freedom Hosting 📖 2008 - 2013 the fbi took the servers in the first days of august 2013 and then left them switched on, which is the part that changed things. anyone loading a page on the largest tor host in the world got a piece of javascript that reported their real address to a machine in virginia. eric eoin marques had run t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Tor Mail 📖 2010 - 2013 one raid took it out and the raid was not even aimed at the mail. tor mail had run since about 2010 as a hidden service on freedom hosting, promising that no message and no personal data ever sat on a machine its operators controlled. on 4 august 2013 the fbi took freedom hosting over the arrest of |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Windows Live Home 📖 2007 - 2013 outlook.com killed it by not having a front door. windows live home was the dashboard microsoft put at home.live.com in october 2007 to hold hotmail and messenger in one view, and the company counted 330 million people on it. the page changed color with the time of day and it would show you the weat |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Voxeo 📖 1999 - 2013 aspect software closed its purchase on 26 july 2013 and a fourteen year old telephony company went inside somebody else's product catalog. voxeo's whole argument was that a phone call should be as programmable as a web page, and its free developer tier proved the point by handing out real phone numb |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Snapjoy 📖 2011 - 2013 six months after dropbox acquired the team, a post went up on the snapjoy blog saying imports were off as of that morning and every photo would be deleted on july 24. the product was a library that filed your whole archive by itself, which is the part dropbox wanted. dropbox got the part it wanted. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
1-800-FREE-411 📖 2005 - 2013 in october 2006 the chief executive said out loud that the company lost about five cents on every call it answered, and then raised thirty million dollars from goldman sachs and hearst anyway. the pitch was that directory assistance should be paid for by advertisers rather than by the person who nee |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
ThinkQuest 📖 1996 - 2013 allan h. weis built a web-design contest for schoolchildren in 1996 and paid for it out of the nonprofit he had left over from selling a piece of the early internet backbone. the oracle education foundation took it over in 2002 and ran it for another eleven years. teachers found out it was finished |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Nextel iDEN Network 📖 1994 - 2013 nextel was the us push-to-talk carrier built on motorola's iden protocol. its defining sound was the chirp: a half-second beep that meant the person on the other end of your handset had their finger off the button. construction crews, delivery dispatch, sales teams, nascar pit lanes. sprint bought i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
WiiConnect24 📖 2006 - 2013 wiiconnect24 was nintendo's always-on backbone for the wii. it kept the console phoning home in standby, drawing about 9.6 watts instead of 1.3, so animal crossing villagers could deliver mail at night and the forecast channel could refresh by morning. nintendo killed it on 28 june 2013 and seven ch |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Google Base 📖 2005 - 2013 google base was google's attempt to run a general-purpose structured-data database in 2005, where anyone could upload xml or excel or csv about anything (a used car, a job listing, a recipe, a housing listing) and the data would show up in google search and shopping results. it never became the sema |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
LendInk 📖 2011 - 2013 amazon let a kindle owner lend a book once, for fourteen days, if the author had chosen the royalty rate that allowed it. dale porter built a site where somebody with a lendable copy could find somebody who wanted to borrow one. it stored no files and made no income. in august 2012 a writer looked a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Webosaurs 📖 2009 - 2013 reel fx made animation for shrek and kung fu panda and open season, and in 2009 it built itself a virtual world for five to ten year olds where everyone was a dinosaur. the hook was that the extinction had missed one island. moderated chat, a cave you decorated, coins you could donate to real enviro |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Mail Classic 📖 1997 - 2013 marissa mayer's redesign shipped in december 2012 and six months later the old interface was switched off for everyone still on it. leaving classic behind meant accepting a new communications terms of service that permitted automated scanning of your messages, with no way to decline and keep the acc |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Another.com 📖 2000 - 2013 6,596 domain names in may 2000, more than 12,000 by the autumn of 2001, and every single one of them a .co.uk. another.com sold the idea that your email address should be a joke you picked yourself, free at first and then for a subscription. the company behind it drifted into domain broking and host |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Liberty Reserve 📖 2006 - 2013 a costa rica shell company that ran a currency. you signed up with a name and an email. you bought "lr dollars" and sent them to anyone. the us treasury called it the largest international money laundering case in history and turned the front page into a seizure notice in 2013. the founder got twent |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
MiniMonos 📖 2009 - 2013 melissa clark-reynolds built minimonos in new zealand from 2009, an island where children six and over made a monkey and played mini games about recycling trash and keeping the water clean. it went from beta to a full launch on 1 april 2011, put membership cards in sainsbury's, and had close to a mi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Hotmail 📖 1996 - 2013 the first webmail that worked. you got an @hotmail.com address, you logged in from any computer in the world, and your email was there. microsoft bought it in 1997, renamed it Windows Live Mail, then renamed it Outlook, then quietly killed the hotmail.com login in 2013. the address i used as a thirt |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Summly 📖 2011 - 2013 a london teenager built a mobile news summarizer with yoko ono and ashton kutcher on the cap table. he then sold the whole thing to yahoo for around thirty million dollars at the age of seventeen. the app was pulled from the app store within weeks of the deal closing. the technology went into yahoo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Wavii 📖 2008 - 2013 wavii used natural language processing to summarize the news into short structured updates you could follow by topic. seattle-founded, in stealth for four years, out of stealth for one, acquired by google late april 2013 for reported figures north of thirty million. the app went dark the day the dea |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Máquina de Quadrinhos 📖 2009 - 2013 mauricio de sousa produções opened the máquina de quadrinhos on 11 september 2009, a browser toy that assembled a turma da mônica strip out of ready-made characters and backgrounds. fifty eight million strips went through it, and the ones the moderators picked were printed in the official comics wit |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Handmark 📖 2000 - 2013 kansas city, about twenty miles north of sprint's headquarters in overland park, which turns out to be the whole ending. handmark spent thirteen years selling software for handhelds, palm os first and then whatever came next, and its pocket express subscription put news and scores in front of more t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Punchfork 📖 2011 - 2013 pinterest made its first acquisition on 3 january 2013 and the thing it bought was a one-man recipe search engine built on twenty thousand dollars of the founder's own money. punchfork did not host a single recipe. it watched which ones the social web was passing around, scored them, and sent you to |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Intrade 📖 1999 - 2013 john delaney died fifty meters below the summit of everest in may 2011, with a daughter born while he was on the mountain, and the prediction market he had run since 2003 kept trading for two more years without him. intrade priced elections and indictments and hurricanes as contracts between zero an |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Twitter @Anywhere 📖 2010 - 2013 the javascript file is still there. platform.twitter.com/anywhere.js answers today, and what it returns is a function that writes three warnings into your browser console explaining that @anywhere has been retired, then points you at two documentation pages that stopped existing years ago. evan will |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Suite101.com 📖 1996 - 2013 suite101 was a vancouver-based contributor-written content platform that paid writers a share of ad revenue. the site peaked around 2009-2010 with 4 million monthly visitors and a comscore mention as a top-10 fastest-growing US site by traffic growth. google panda february 23 2011 cut its traffic by |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Mocality 📖 2009 - 2013 mocality was kenya's largest online business directory built between 2009 and 2013 by stefan magdalinski for naspers. it paid kenyan agents through m-pesa to verify listings in person, one address at a time. at peak it held around one hundred and seventy thousand verified businesses. it made interna |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Amplicate 📖 2009 - 2013 four hundred and fifty million opinions, filed under more than a million topics, each one sorted into love or hate and nothing in between. juan alvarez started amplicate in 2009 and sold it in early 2013, and the farewell post said the site was evolving and merging efforts with a complimentary proje |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Memolane 📖 2010 - 2013 twenty four hours was the whole notice. memolane had spent two and a bit years building an internet time machine, a scrollable lane that pulled your old tweets and facebook posts back into one page, and on 21 february 2013 it posted that accounts and content would be deleted the next day. five peopl |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
1up.com 📖 2003 - 2013 ziff davis gaming media on the web. heavy podcast network, opinionated editorial, 2003 launch out of the egm + computer gaming world magazine staff. ugo and hearst took it over in 2009. ziff davis bought the brand back, then announced in february 2013 that 1up would wind down with gamespy and ugo.co |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Live Mesh 📖 2008 - 2013 live mesh was the consumer face of ray ozzie's vision for microsoft. you ran an agent on each of your pcs, picked folders to keep in sync across them and into a small cloud share, and could remote-desktop into any of them through a browser. the brand survived four and a half years before microsoft f |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Windows Live Mesh 📖 2008 - 2013 microsoft's answer to dropbox synced up to 200 folders across your machines and pushed 5 gb to the cloud on the side. it also did remote desktop over the internet, back when that felt like magic. skydrive absorbed the storage half and dropped the pc-to-pc half, which was the actual reason to use mes |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
TamaTown 📖 2006 - 2013 tamatown was the website your tamagotchi went to. from 2006 the connection versions produced a short code on their own tiny screen, you typed it into a flash town in a browser, played there, then typed the reward code back into the toy on the way out. bandai ran english versions for north america an |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1895-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Nortel Networks 📖 1895 - 2013 nortel was the canadian telecom-equipment giant that built dms switches and meridian pbx systems and the optical long-haul gear that the dot-com fiber buildout was supposed to run on. it peaked in september 2000 at C$398 billion market cap, the single largest company on the toronto stock exchange, t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Fire Eagle 📖 2008 - 2013 fire eagle was yahoo's location-broker api, built inside the brickhouse skunkworks in 2007, opened to the public in march 2008, killed in february 2013. you updated your location once with fire eagle and authorized apps could read it through oauth. an early model for everything modern location-shari |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
AdBrite 📖 2002 - 2013 adbrite put a price tag on the corner of a web page. you clicked Your Ad Here, saw what a week on that site cost, paid it and your banner went up without a salesperson ever being involved. it grew into an independent ad exchange reaching a hundred and sixty million americans a month, raised forty mi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Narod.ru 📖 2000 - 2013 narod.ru launched in 2000 as a free web hosting service operated by yandex, offering a domain on the narod.ru subdomain, unlimited storage, and ftp access. it became the second-largest free hosting platform on the russian-speaking internet, behind only ucoz. by december 2010 the service was hosting |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Blogs of Note 📖 2001 - 2013 for twelve years somebody at blogger picked a blog a day and put it on a list, and for a lot of small sites that single line was the biggest traffic day they would ever have. the last pick went up on 22 august 2012 and the blog itself went quiet five months later with a post telling everyone to foll |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
COTOJE.CZ 📖 2002 - 2013 on 3 january 2013 a czech portal switched off the digitized text of fifty-six encyclopedia volumes, about half a million entries and thirty thousand pictures. cotoje.cz had charged for the full text since 2002 and given away the first few characters of each entry as a sample. the notice it posted sa |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
WAP 📖 1999 - 2013 wap was the mobile web before the mobile web worked. a stripped-down standard from 1999 that served wml pages to tiny phone screens over a slow, metered cellular link, mostly inside the carrier's own portal. it was slow and it was priced by the kilobyte, and people put up with it because for a few y |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
NabiscoWorld 📖 1999 - 2013 nabisco opened a games portal in 1999 and filled it with free flash games in which the product was the level. by 2004 it carried games for seventeen brands and it had spent years absorbing criticism for aiming cookie and candy advertising at children who thought they were only playing. the games cam |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
BeatThatQuote.com 📖 2005 - 2013 7 march 2011 is the day google paid 37.7 million pounds for a british price comparison site. 8 march is the day google pushed that same site off the front page of its own search results for buying links. the penalty came off two weeks later and went straight back on. the site stopped serving at the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Daylife 📖 2006 - 2013 a billion api calls a month, and almost nobody outside a newsroom had heard the name. daylife sold the machinery behind topic pages and photo galleries to publishers, raised either twelve or fifteen million dollars depending on which source you trust, and counted getty images among its investors. ne |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Ty Girlz 📖 2007 - 2013 a plush doll with a code sewn onto its tag, sold in american toy aisles from april 2007, and the code unlocked a room in a 3d world at ty-girlz.ty.com. ty inc. had run the collectible trick before with beanie babies, and webkinz had already shown that bolting a website onto a soft toy worked. the do |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
GeneTree 📖 1997 - 2013 terrence carmichael finished a masters in molecular genetics in 1995 and started genetree two years later, selling dna tests whose results you could hang on a family tree. the sorenson molecular genealogy foundation bought the assets in 2001 and ran it as a nonprofit for a decade. ancestry.com took |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
PrivateSky 📖 2011 - 2013 a division of gchq asked for the keys at the end of 2012, and the company decided the cheapest answer was to switch the product off. privatesky was a british encrypted mail service with an outlook plugin and paid tiers, and it stopped selling subscriptions in january 2013 without publishing a word a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
1000Memories 📖 2010 - 2013 it started as a place to put someone after they died. a free page with a photo wall on it, and somewhere for the people who knew them to write things down. there was no business in that, so it turned into a phone app that scanned old prints, and ancestry bought the company for the app. the pages wen |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Elluminate 📖 2000 - 2012 calgary built the virtual classroom that most of the english-speaking education world sat in before anyone had heard of zoom. elluminate opened in 2000, and elluminate live! rented schools a room with a whiteboard, a hand-raise button and audio that survived bad connections. by 2010 it had about 140 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Planet Cazmo 📖 2007 - 2012 skate parks and a personal spaceship, plus more than fifty virtual concerts in 2010 alone. planet cazmo ran from 2007 out of a small company whose president had been shipping games since lucasfilm in 1991. the flash world was still serving its main movie file on 1 november 2012, and by the middle of |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Rikunabi 📖 2004 - 2012 recruit had the listings and yahoo japan had the audience, so in april 2004 they put both behind a single brand and pointed every yahoo user at it. the career-change board and the part-time boards all lived on a yahoo address for eight years. the new-graduate side walked out first, in october 2009, |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Fictionwise 📖 2000 - 2012 the multi-format ebook store that predated the kindle by seven years. founded on 5 june 2000 by brothers steve and scott pendergrast, it sold titles in ereader, mobipocket, palm, epub, and pdf formats, sometimes drm-free. peak sales around 1.5 million ebooks in 2008. barnes & noble bought it in marc |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Tungle.me 📖 2006 - 2012 tungle was a scheduling tool that sat on top of whatever calendar you already had and let other people book time with you without the email back-and-forth. it came out of montreal in 2006, showed at demo in 2007, and by 2011 it was in use across hundreds of universities and most of the fortune 1000. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Paxfire 📖 2004 - 2012 in august 2011 berkeley researchers published proof that a set of american isps were routing their subscribers' yahoo and bing searches through a middlebox that sold the traffic on to affiliate programs. the box came from a reston, virginia company that had been selling typo monetization to provider |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
EveryScape 📖 2007 - 2012 waltham, massachusetts spent a decade on the idea that a city should be walkable from a browser, and not from the middle of the road. everyscape stitched ordinary photographs into places you could move through, and its whole pitch was that it took you through the front door and into the dining room. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
vWorker (Rent A Coder) 📖 2001 - 2012 a marketplace for programming work, opened by ian ippolito in tampa in 2001 under the name rent a coder. you posted a job, coders bid on it blind without seeing each other's numbers, and the money sat in escrow until the work landed. the arbitration desk is what people actually remember, because it |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Life with PlayStation 📖 2008 - 2012 life with playstation was the ps3 application sony wrapped around the folding@home client, putting stanford's protein simulations behind a spinning globe that also carried news headlines and weather. it went live on 18 september 2008 and ran until 6 november 2012, when system software 4.30 took it a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
co.cc 📖 2007 - 2012 13,551,191 domains on its own counter in october 2012, and a month later none of them resolved. co.cc was a company in goyang, south korea that owned one .cc domain and handed out names under it, two per person for free or fifteen thousand for a thousand dollars. the bulk buyers were spammers and ph |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Web Intents 📖 2010 - 2012 greg billock mailed the obituary to a w3c list at 11:47 on the morning of 1 november 2012, in one paragraph, and nobody argued with him. web intents was google's attempt to give a web page the thing an android app already had: a way to say "something needs editing here" without knowing in advance wh |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Megite 📖 2006 - 2012 by early 2006 the tech blogosphere had a handful of crawlers fighting over the same job, which was working out what everyone was arguing about that morning. megite was the two-person entry, run part time by a software engineer named matthew chen, and it was the first of them to let you hand over you |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1974-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Ceefax 📖 1974 - 2012 ceefax was the bbc's teletext service. it ran for thirty-eight years inside the vertical blanking interval of the analog tv signal, the unused lines between frames. you typed a three-digit page number on your remote and waited for the carousel to come back around. news on the 100s, sport on the 300s |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
The Locker Project 📖 2010 - 2012 jeremie miller had already written the protocol behind jabber when he opened this repository in december 2010. the idea was a program you ran yourself that went out and collected your own data back from the services holding it: your photos off flickr, your mail straight off an imap server. singly, t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Directgov 📖 2004 - 2012 britain's attempt at one website for the whole state, live on 1 april 2004 to replace ukonline.gov.uk. you went to it for a car tax question or a passport form instead of hunting through whichever department happened to own that particular piece of paper. by 2008 it was taking fifteen million visits |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Ya.com 📖 1999 - 2012 ya.com was spain's number-two web portal, spun up in 1999 by martin varsavsky and a group of people who had just walked out of terra. it was the second-biggest thing on the spanish web almost immediately, and then it became an asset. deutsche telekom bought it in 2000 and turned the portal into an a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
JS-Kit Echo 📖 2006 - 2012 a cisco security engineer wrote a comment widget as a side project in 2006 and it grew into a company that bought haloscan. js-kit renamed itself echo in december 2009, told the free haloscan crowd to pay or export, then switched the old hardware off on 19 february 2010. two and a half years later e |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
CIA.vc 📖 2003 - 2012 a hosting provider deleted the database, nobody had a backup, and the commit messages of ten thousand open source repositories stopped arriving in their irc channels on 26 september 2012. micah dowty had built cia as a side project around 2003 and handed it on in 2011. the people who inherited it pu |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Rypple 📖 2008 - 2012 rypple set out to kill the annual performance review and replace it with small amounts of feedback all year round. two founders in toronto who had already sold one company built it and got bought by salesforce inside four years. peter thiel was among the investors. on 19 september 2012 the name came |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Gist 📖 2008 - 2012 t.a. mccann left microsoft's exchange group to build the thing exchange never did: an address book that filled itself in. gist read your mail, worked out who you actually talked to, and then went and found the news about each of them. rim bought it in february 2011 for the blackberry address book an |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Wunderkit 📖 2012 - 2012 four hundred thousand people signed up in seven months and it was still the one berlin killed. 6wunderkinder had a hit in wunderlist and wanted a platform underneath it, so in february 2012 it shipped wunderkit, a workspace you invited other people into rather than a list you ticked off alone. on 6 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
AtomFilms 📖 1998 - 2012 late-90s short-film portal out of seattle. independent shorts, animated content, the official star wars fan film awards in partnership with lucasfilm starting 2000. mtv networks acquired atom entertainment for around $200 million in 2006 and parked it next to shockwave.com and addicting games. the b |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
VizWoz 📖 2008 - 2012 doug richard, two series into dragons' den, chaired a birmingham startup building a 3d hangout for eleven-year-olds. it launched on a friday in march 2008 and had a cinema showing paramount and disney films by may. 335,000 logins later the money ran out, and administrators went in on 6 august 2010. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Pacific Fibre 📖 2010 - 2012 a funding gap of four hundred million new zealand dollars is what killed pacific fibre, a company that spent two and a half years trying to put a second cable between auckland and los angeles and end the southern cross monopoly on new zealand's traffic to the rest of the world. sam morgan of trade m |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
TOC protocol 📖 1998 - 2012 aol published this one on purpose. toc was a plain ascii wrapper that sat in front of the closed oscar protocol and translated for anybody writing their own client, which is how gaim got onto aim without a lawsuit. support ended around 19 august 2005 and the toc2 servers were left answering for anot |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Thinkfuse 📖 2010 - 2012 salesforce bought two engineers on 25 june 2012 and switched off their product thirty days later. thinkfuse had taken the weekly status report, the most reliably ignored document in any office, and tried to turn it into something searchable that a manager would actually open. it came out of the firs |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Token Ring 📖 1985 - 2012 ibm was right about the technology and it did not help. a station only transmits when it holds the token, so there are no collisions and the worst-case delay is a number you can calculate, which is more than early ethernet could promise anyone. then 10base-t arrived on the ordinary telephone-grade c |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
GirlSense 📖 2007 - 2012 g-cents stopped being applicable on 18 july 2012, which is how the farewell notice put it. girlsense was a flash site where teenage girls drew clothing and ran storefronts, built by an israeli startup called starnet interactive and sold to iac in the spring of 2008. iac's mindspark division held it |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Kodak Gallery 📖 1999 - 2012 ofoto launched in 1999 as a website that would print your digital photos and ship them to your door. kodak bought it in 2001 and rebranded it as kodak gallery. shutterfly picked up the assets in the 2012 kodak bankruptcy and shut the site down on 2 july 2012. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
AboveNet 📖 1993 - 2012 abovenet sold the wire itself. it started in 1993 renting out co-location space and guaranteed bandwidth next to the big california peering points, got bought by metromedia in 1999, and then spent three years wearing the name metromedia fiber network before the debt caught up with it. chapter 11 in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
ScriptLance 📖 2001 - 2012 freelancer.com announced the purchase on 9 july 2012 and the domain was pointing at a freelancer marketing page before the month was out. what it bought was 360,000 accounts, 600,000 finished projects and eleven years of reverse auctions started by a twenty year old in canada. the founder left, the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Apple iDisk 📖 2000 - 2012 idisk was apple's pre-icloud answer to "where does a mac put files online." it started free at 20mb in 2000 with itools and turned into a paid feature of.mac and mobileme, with quotas climbing to 20gb over a decade. when icloud launched in 2011 it had no idisk equivalent. apple shut the old service |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Minitel 📖 1980 - 2012 the french national online network. you got a small terminal for free from the post office. you typed 3615 plus a service code and you were online, doing your banking, booking a train, reading the news, chatting on adult services. it ran from 1980 to 30 june 2012. peak was about 25 million users in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
MobileMe 📖 2008 - 2012 mobileme was apple's $99/year cloud-sync service that nobody outside the apple universe paid for. it launched the same week as the iphone 3g and broke immediately, and steve jobs gave the team a famous internal yelling about it. four years later apple dropped the price to zero and renamed it icloud. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1976-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
X.25 📖 1976 - 2012 the standard that made data networks national before anyone could afford to make them global. the ccitt finished it in 1976 and the state phone monopolies built their packet networks on top of it, which is how a bank terminal in one city reached a mainframe in another and got billed for the privileg |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1978-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Transpac 📖 1978 - 2012 france opened a public packet network in december 1978 with fifteen hundred connections available, built on a standard that french engineers had helped write two years earlier. it grew into the largest public packet network on earth, and the reason was minitel. the state handed out terminals for not |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Summify 📖 2010 - 2012 two romanian engineers in vancouver built the thing every feed reader needed and nobody had shipped: not everything, just the handful of stories your own network actually cared about, delivered once a day as an email. twitter bought the company on 19 january 2012 for the two of them. new signups clo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
XHTML+Voice 📖 2001 - 2012 opera 12 shipped on 14 june 2012 with a line in its changelog saying voice was gone because the third party vendor no longer supported the speech library. the vendor was ibm, and ibm had co-written the specification. x+v spent its whole life as a w3c note the w3c publicly declined to endorse, implem |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Jump On It 📖 2009 - 2012 before it sold a single voucher, jump on it built facebook pages called i love sydney and i love melbourne and waited for people to join them. selling local deals into that audience took it to 1.2 million subscribers and made it the biggest group-buying site in australia. livingsocial paid five mill |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Backpack 📖 2005 - 2012 37signals built backpack in 2005 as a calm little organizer for your own pages and lists, part of the argument that software could be simple on purpose. in 2012 the company stopped taking new customers and threw everything behind basecamp. existing accounts lingered for years on legacy life support. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
QOOP 📖 2005 - 2012 three founders in mill valley started a print-on-demand outfit in 2005 and wired it into flickr the same year, so the photographs already sitting in your account could come back as a book or a calendar. the better story is the one nobody planned. from 2006 qoop printed the paper editions of rice uni |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
ZumoDrive 📖 2009 - 2012 zumodrive came out of zecter, a y combinator startup, and went into private beta in january 2009 with an idea dropbox did not have. instead of syncing a folder onto your disk it mounted the cloud as a drive and streamed files down only when you opened them, which mattered enormously on a netbook wit |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
FBML (Facebook Markup Language) 📖 2007 - 2012 in 2007 facebook decided the html the rest of the web ran on was not enough for it, and shipped a dialect of its own. you wrote an fb:name tag with a user id inside it, and facebook's servers came back with the right person's name and the right link, privacy rules already applied. that was the price |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Babel Fish 📖 1997 - 2012 babel fish was the first time a normal web user could paste a paragraph in spanish and read it back in something resembling english, for free, without installing anything. altavista hosted the systran engine from december 1997 onward. yahoo inherited it through the overture acquisition in 2003, and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Tabblo 📖 2006 - 2012 tabblo was a bay-area photo-storytelling site that let you drop pictures into printable poster layouts. hp bought it in march 2007, mostly for the underlying print-web technology, and kept the consumer product idling on a shelf for five years. it went dark on 30 may 2012 with about a week of warning |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Ta-da List 📖 2005 - 2012 ta-da list was 37signals' first free web app, a to-do list you kept in your browser and shared with a link. it launched in january 2005, built on ruby on rails, the framework the same team had pulled out of basecamp, and it was a small public proof that the framework worked. they retired it in may 2 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
UpMyStreet 📖 1998 - 2012 upmystreet let you type a british postcode into a box and get back what living there was actually like: house prices, school results, recorded crime, council performance and the acorn demographic classification that market research firms sold to companies. it launched in 1998, went into administrati |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Windows Marketplace for Mobile 📖 2009 - 2012 windows marketplace for mobile was microsoft's app store for windows mobile 6.x devices. launched 6 october 2009 with 246 apps and a 70/30 developer revenue split, plus a 24-hour return window for buyers. it existed for the awkward two and a half years between microsoft killing symbian-era windows m |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Glancee 📖 2010 - 2012 three thousand daily users and not a dollar of outside funding, and facebook bought the whole thing in may 2012 and switched it off the same week. glancee was an ambient discovery app built by three engineers in san francisco, and it was one of the handful of apps everyone at sxsw 2012 swore were ab |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Microsoft TerraServer 📖 1998 - 2012 terraserver launched june 24, 1998 as a research-microsoft project led by jim gray and tom barclay, conceived as a public stress test of sql server holding terabytes of usgs aerial imagery and topographic maps. it covered roughly 97 percent of the continental united states in black-and-white aerial |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
PostRank 📖 2007 - 2012 postrank was a social-engagement analytics service that scored blog posts by how much chatter they generated across twitter, digg, facebook, delicious, on-site comments, feed subscriptions. ilya grigorik founded it in waterloo ontario as aiderss in july 2007 and renamed it postrank in october 2008. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
AOL Latino 📖 2003 - 2012 aol latino was the spanish-language portal aol launched on october 1 2003 for the us hispanic audience. the service bundled a localized aol experience with prepaid 7-eleven cards sold under the internet prepagado name. the brand folded into huffington post's voces vertical on may 1 2012 when aol con |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Zoombu 📖 2009 - 2012 zoombu was a UK door-to-door travel search engine that let you enter a home address and a destination and got back a full multi-modal route: flights, trains, ferries, ground transfer. skyscanner acquired it in january 2011 for the rail integration. the consumer site was quietly wound down over the f |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Road Runner 📖 1996 - 2012 time warner cable switched it on in akron in september 1996 and named it after a warner bros cartoon bird, because a bird that outruns everything explained bandwidth better than a number did. for fifteen years it was how the east coast got online. the mascot went first, in 2011, and the name followe |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Google Wave 📖 2009 - 2012 Google's attempt at "email if it had been invented today." it was email plus chat plus collaborative document, all merged into one ui. it confused everyone who tried it. the demos at google IO 2009 were impressive. nobody used it in real life. google killed it in august 2010, 11 months after launch. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Office Live Small Business 📖 2007 - 2012 microsoft office live small business was the free version of office that microsoft handed out to mom-and-pop companies between november 2007 and april 30 2012. you got an email address on your own domain and a no-code website builder, all for nothing. then microsoft killed it and told you to migrate |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Fwix 📖 2008 - 2012 darian shirazi had been facebook's first intern, and he left to build a news site for every city at once. fwix raised 6.75 million dollars and sold its local feed to media companies, a market that turned out not to pay. on 24 april 2012 the brand was retired and the same company reappeared as radius |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Google One Pass 📖 2011 - 2012 apple announced app store subscriptions on 15 february 2011 and kept thirty percent. the next morning eric schmidt stood up at humboldt university in berlin and announced one pass, which kept ten and handed the publisher the subscriber's details as well. newspapers said warm things about it in press |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
LibertySurf 📖 1999 - 2012 an internet account that cost nothing to open, because the money came off your phone bill instead. kingfisher and bernard arnault's internet holding put around 700 million francs behind it in 1999 and floated it in march 2000, at the exact top of the market. eleven months later they sold it to tisca |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Nature Precedings 📖 2007 - 2012 in june 2007 nature publishing group opened a place where biologists could post work before anyone had reviewed it. physics had had exactly that since 1991, and the scope here was drawn to stay out of its way. thousands of manuscripts and posters went up over five years, and then nature decided the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Cramster 📖 2003 - 2012 cramster sold the answers. not the odd-numbered ones printed in the back of the book, all of them, worked through step by step, for a monthly fee. it started in a pasadena apartment in 2002 and went public the year after, and by 2008 it had a hundred thousand active users plus a facebook app four ti |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Revolution Health 📖 2005 - 2012 steve case put more than two hundred million dollars of his own money and his friends' money into a free health website meant to take webmd's audience away from it. it half worked. by july 2008 revolutionhealth.com was the third largest health site in america and growing faster than either of the tw |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
The Farmer's Market 📖 2006 - 2012 the farmer's market sold drugs online for six years before bitcoin was a usable currency, which meant every order it filled left a receipt somewhere. it began as adamflowers around 2006 and moved onto tor in 2010, but the money still traveled by paypal and western union. the dea spent two years pull |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Writeboard 📖 2005 - 2012 chicago, october 2005: 37signals shipped a writing tool with no signup screen. you set a password and mailed the url to whoever needed to read it, and every save left a version you could compare against the last one. a few years later writeboards moved inside basecamp classic and backpack, which is |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Personal Digital Cellular 📖 1993 - 2012 japan wrote its own 2g standard in april 1991 and switched it on in march 1993, and at its height it carried nearly eighty million people. the radio design traded call quality for small handsets, which is why japanese phones of that era were tiny and also why they gave up inside elevators. it carrie |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Nokia Money 📖 2009 - 2012 nokia money was nokia's mobile-payments push into unbanked emerging markets, launched in india in august 2009 as a partnership with obopay (nokia was obopay's lead investor after a $70M round in spring 2009) and later with yes bank and union bank of india. by late 2011 it was rolled out nationwide a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Google Friend Connect 📖 2008 - 2012 google friend connect was google's pre-google-plus attempt to put a portable social layer on any website. you copied a snippet of javascript into your page, and visitors who signed in with a google or yahoo or aim account suddenly had a profile sidebar plus comments plus invite-your-friends widgets |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
coComment 📖 2006 - 2012 cocomment was a bookmarklet plus a hosted dashboard. you commented on any blog or news site, it logged the thread, then it pinged you when someone replied underneath you. peak was about 1.3 million signed-up users in july 2008. swisscom funded it as a research project, never figured out the revenue |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Solvate 📖 2009 - 2012 $6.3 million went into a freelance marketplace that lasted about thirty months. solvate launched in 2009 out of new york with a model that sat between a job board and a staffing agency: it vetted the talent, made the introduction, then handled the invoicing so neither side had to chase the other for |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Betavine 📖 2007 - 2012 vodafone built a developer community and vodafone quietly absorbed it. betavine launched in 2007 out of the group's research arm, hosted alpha and beta mobile apps for anyone who wanted to upload one, and ran a gforge instance called betavine forge for the open-source side. the site was still servin |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Be-Bratz.com 📖 2007 - 2012 the login was a plastic necklace. mga entertainment shipped it inside three bratz dolls at $29.99 in august 2007, and plugging it into a usb port was the only way into be-bratz.com, a moderated virtual world for girls aged six and up. the site ran four and a half years through the worst of its paren |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
TeachStreet 📖 2008 - 2012 seattle, april 2008: dave schappell opened a site where you could find a local class and where the person teaching it could run their listings without owning a website. google's panda update in 2011 took away a large share of the search traffic the model depended on. in february 2012 amazon hired th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
LEGO Design byME 📖 2005 - 2012 lego let you design your own set in a free cad program, upload it, put your own picture on the box, and receive the exact bricks in the mail. it ran for seven years under two names. lego killed it in january 2012 and gave a reason companies almost never give out loud, which is that the thing they bu |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
National Biological Information Infrastructure 📖 1994 - 2012 a 1993 national research council report asked for one front door to everything the united states knew about its own living things. the door got built and then spent a decade underfunded, and a budget line disappearing switched it off on a sunday in january 2012. the data survived because librarians |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Scitopia 📖 2007 - 2012 twenty-one learned societies agreed to let one search box look inside all of their libraries at once, which took more diplomacy than engineering. the box went live in june 2007 and was switched off on 5 january 2012 with a two-sentence apology and a list of links back to the twenty-one societies, ea |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
HiGear 📖 2011 - 2012 four cars, taken by a criminal ring with stolen identities and stolen credit cards, ended a company six months after it launched. higear rented out other people's bmws and teslas by the day, and the average car listed on it was worth seventy thousand dollars. ali moiz and murtaza hussain told their |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Google Health 📖 2008 - 2012 google health let you store medical records in a google account and share them with hospitals or pharmacies that had api hooks. it ran from '08 to '12 and never got adopted outside the pilot programs. 1 january '12 was the shutdown date, with a year of data export grace afterward. microsoft healthva |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
O2 Active 📖 2002 - 2012 o2 active was the mobile portal that o2 uk (plus ireland germany and the netherlands) put on the front page of every wap-capable phone from 2002 to about 2012. it started life as bt cellnet's genie portal, got rebranded when mmo2 spun off from bt in may 2002, and slowly stopped mattering once the ip |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Orange World 📖 2003 - 2012 orange world was france telecom's carrier portal, launched october 2003 as a revamped wap homepage for orange-branded handsets across france the uk poland romania and about a dozen other markets. content was ringtones java games news sports weather, all carrier-billed. by 2012 the walled-garden bran |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
MSN Direct 📖 2004 - 2012 msn direct was microsoft's attempt at ambient wireless data over the fm radio band. bill gates announced it at comdex 2002 and hardware shipped in 2004. microsoft killed it at the stroke of midnight on new year's day 2012. it delivered weather to your watch and traffic to your gps by piggybacking on |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
New.net 📖 2001 - 2012 new.net sold names in about two dozen top level domains that icann had never approved, .shop and .mp3 among them. the catch was that nobody could reach those names without a windows plugin that wedged itself into the winsock stack, or an internet provider that had agreed to answer for them on its ow |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
NoseRub 📖 2007 - 2012 a german developer named dirk olbertz spent five years writing a federated social network in php and mysql, released it under the mit license, and got it as far as version 0.8.2. noserub asked the question the fediverse would later answer with activitypub: what if your profile lived on your own serv |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
SoftHome 📖 1996 - 2012 you will not have to change your address ever again, not even when you change isps. that sentence sat in softhome.net's page description from 1996 onward and it was the entire product, an email address that belonged to you instead of to whichever dial-up company you were paying that year. the free t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Pravkniga.ru 📖 2006 - 2012 two moscow publishing houses spent six years building a bibliography nobody was paying them to build: every orthodox book printed in russia across two centuries, with the publishers and the libraries that held them, given away for free. thirteen thousand editions were described by the end. in 2012 t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Apture 📖 2007 - 2011 three founders built a layer that sat above a publisher's page, so that a link could open a video or a definition without taking you anywhere else. the washington post ran it and so did the economist. google bought the company on 10 november 2011 and switched the scripts off on 20 december, which ga |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Russian Trading System 📖 1995 - 2011 moscow ran two stock exchanges against each other for sixteen years, one quoting in rubles and one quoting in dollars. on 19 december 2011 the opening bell rang for a single merged exchange and the dollar one stopped existing as a company. its index is still calculated every trading day under the ol |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Thoora 📖 2009 - 2011 two years of private beta bought thoora thirteen weeks of public life. the toronto company unveiled a real-time news discovery service at techcrunch50 in september 2009, took seed money from rogers communications, and then spent until september 2011 getting the thing out of the login screen. by the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Afrigator 📖 2007 - 2011 afrigator was a directory and a traffic ranking for the african blogosphere, built in johannesburg in april 2007 and majority-bought by naspers eighteen months later. at its size it indexed thousands of blogs across the continent and told you which of them anybody was actually reading. the ad networ |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
360networks 📖 1998 - 2011 a canadian construction family worked out that the hard part of building a fiber network was not the fiber, it was permission to dig. so they made a deal with the railway and built a machine that trenched and laid conduit from a moving flatcar. it worked well enough to reach a c$20 billion valuation |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
StyleFeeder 📖 2005 - 2011 philip jacob started it in january 2005 out of a consultancy in the boston area and opened it to the public on 16 october that year. stylefeeder let you clip a product from any store on the web into a shared list, then fed the clips through a collaborative filter and told you what people with your t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Teleplace 📖 2007 - 2011 alan kay's croquet research went commercial in 2007, when a palo alto startup called qwaq shipped it as an office you walked around in instead of dialing into. chevron ran meetings in there. the navy bought seats. by may 2011 the company had renamed itself teleplace, released the entire codebase as |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
SecFinex 📖 2000 - 2011 nyse euronext closed secfinex in december 2011 while saying it still believed central counterparty clearing would matter in stock lending one day. the london platform had spent eleven years trying to turn securities borrowing from a phone call between two desks into a cleared electronic market. the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Critical Metrics 📖 2007 - 2011 joey anuff co-founded suck.com in 1995 and then spent 2007 building the opposite of a popularity contest. critical metrics read over 150 music publications, counted the positive citations with methods borrowed from bibliometrics, and published a chart that no listener had voted on. a los angeles tim |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Site Explorer 📖 2005 - 2011 site explorer was the public window into yahoo's web index. for any url you typed in, you got the list of pages on that domain plus the list of backlinks pointing at it. seos used it for six years to read competitor link graphs. the microsoft search deal closed it in november 2011 and folded the sur |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
BuyWithMe 📖 2009 - 2011 buywithme ran the groupon mechanic seven months behind groupon: one discount a day in one city, unlocked once enough people bought in. it raised thirty million dollars and spent much of it buying six smaller deal companies in under a year, on the theory that the business was really just a mailing li |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Geomium 📖 2010 - 2011 london, september 2010. ben dowling and michael fergusson launched an iphone app that refused the thing everyone else in location was doing: no badges and no mayorships. it showed you where your friends actually were at that second and what was happening around them, pulling places and events off ye |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Threadsy 📖 2009 - 2011 rob goldman's pitch at techcrunch50 in september 2009 was that your messages should arrive in one place regardless of which company carried them. two years later the service closed, the technology went to a people-search company, and the team went to facebook. the login page stayed up for months aft |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Global Crossing 📖 1997 - 2011 founded march 1997 by gary winnick, a former drexel burnham bond trader who decided telecom was the next bond market. global crossing laid roughly 100,000 miles of undersea fiber on the bet that internet traffic would absorb it. valued at forty-seven billion dollars in 1999 without ever booking a pr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Map24 📖 2001 - 2011 map24 was a european web mapping service run out of germany by mapsolute gmbh from 2001. peak reach of 150 million monthly page views and five million users in germany alone. its proprietary maptp engine did interactive 3d route visualization years before google maps had 3d anything. navteq bought m |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
EveryDNS 📖 2001 - 2011 december 2, 2010, ten at night eastern time, is when most people heard the name. everydns had given wikileaks.org its 24 hours and then pulled the record, on the argument that the attacks on one domain were putting the other half million at risk. david ulevitch had started it in may 2001 on the theo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Ribbit 📖 2006 - 2011 ribbit was a silicon valley startup selling voice as a programmable developer feature. british telecom bought it in july 2008 for $105 million on the theory that a stiff UK carrier could learn developer culture from an acquired API team. three years later BT closed the external product and pulled th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Chobots 📖 2008 - 2011 somebody got hold of a developer login sometime in 2010, the source tree leaked, and within a year the cheating was unfixable. the closing notice said the world had taken technical damage that could not be eliminated, which is an unusually honest cause of death for a children's game. chobots was ukr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Microsoft My Phone 📖 2009 - 2011 barcelona, 16 february 2009: steve ballmer announced a free service that would copy everything on a windows mobile handset up to a web page you could log into, and for a while it worked in twenty five languages. two and a half years later windows mobile was a dead platform and windows phone 7 could |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Google Image Swirl 📖 2009 - 2011 a google labs experiment that took an image search and sorted the results by what the pictures actually looked like, then drew the groups as a cluster of thumbnails you opened one branch at a time. it existed for the ambiguous words, the ones where jaguar is an animal and also a car. google announce |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Socialwok 📖 2009 - 2011 sixteen days of notice, a disabled signup form and a letter that admits the funding ran out and the developers were no longer available. socialwok won a techcrunch50 award in september 2009 for putting a company news feed on top of google apps, and in july 2011 mindjet bought whatever was left of it |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Web Services Enhancements 📖 2002 - 2011 microsoft shipped three versions of wse in three years, made none of them compatible with the last, then replaced the whole thing with wcf. the final version was never tested or supported on windows vista or anything after it, which means it was functionally finished in 2007 and formally alive until |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Egg 📖 1998 - 2011 egg opened on 11 october 1998 as prudential's attempt at a bank with no branches, and the launch rate was high enough that over six billion pounds of other people's money arrived inside ten months. the egg card followed, the first uk credit card to offer zero percent on purchases as well as transfer |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Intute 📖 2006 - 2011 intute was the british academic web, cataloged by hand. eight subject gateways were merged into one service in july 2006, paid for by jisc, and every entry in it had been read by an academic who then wrote a review of it. by july 2010 there were 123,519 records and the funding had been cut. the serv |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
netLibrary 📖 1998 - 2011 netlibrary sold libraries electronic books on the terms libraries already understood: one copy out on loan to one reader, with a clock on it. it raised something like $130 million out of boulder, reached a $450 million valuation in early 2000, and filed for chapter 11 on 19 november 2001 with more t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
FaceCash 📖 2010 - 2011 sacramento killed this one. the california money transmission act of 2010 pulled mobile payment startups into a licensing regime written for wire-transfer businesses, and in april 2011 the state's department of financial institutions told aaron greenspan that facecash needed a license it could not q |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
TeraGrid 📖 2004 - 2011 eleven american supercomputing centers spent seven years pretending to be one machine. the national science foundation paid roughly a quarter of a billion dollars for the pretense and about four thousand researchers at two hundred universities got accounts, which they applied for by writing a propos |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
BarbieGirls.com 📖 2007 - 2011 barbiegirls.com was mattel's online virtual world for young girls, opened on april 24 2007. three million players signed up in the first two months, which had mattel calling it the fastest growing virtual world in history. you made a barbie avatar, dressed her up, and chatted in a locked-down b chat |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
MyRealBox 📖 1999 - 2011 novell needed somewhere to run new builds of its netmail mail server against real traffic, so from 1999 it handed out free accounts at myrealbox.com and let the public be the load test. the accounts had proper imap and pop access at a time when the big free webmail services were rationing both. new |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Pixetell 📖 2009 - 2011 ten dollars a month bought a screen recorder that could drop a narrated video of your own desktop inside an email, at a time when the alternative was booking a conference bridge and hoping everyone turned up. ontier was acquired in the spring of 2011 and told its customers the online service would s |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Nokia Ovi 📖 2007 - 2011 ovi was nokia's services umbrella, announced in london on 29 august 2007 as the door (ovi means door in finnish) to a brand that would sit above symbian and series 40 the way itunes sat above osx. it tried to be maps, music store, app store, mail and desktop sync all under one logo. on 16 may 2011 n |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Qwerly 📖 2010 - 2011 thirty million lookups a month were going through the api and about fifty thousand people were visiting the website, so max niederhofer closed the website. qwerly turned an email address or a twitter handle into every other profile that person had, which is a useful plumbing layer and a deeply uncom |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Jott 📖 2006 - 2011 jott was a us voice-to-text service that ran from april 2006 to may 2011. you called a toll-free number, spoke for up to thirty seconds, and jott transcribed the recording using a mix of speech recognition software and human transcribers before pushing it to email or sms. john pollard and shreedhar |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Going.com 📖 2007 - 2011 a boston startup that wanted to be the thing you checked before you went out, back when checking meant sitting at a desktop. it listed nightlife and events across around thirty us cities and let you rsvp. aol bought it in 2009 to feed its local-content push, then shut the site in 2011 and moved the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Baidu Youa 📖 2008 - 2011 taobao had already won by october 2008 and baidu built a consumer marketplace anyway. youa opened in beta on the 18th and to everyone ten days later, with baidu's own escrow wallet, baifubao, standing in for alipay. the wallet never got a payment license and the shops never got a reason to move. on |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Google Hotpot 📖 2010 - 2011 five months is how long the name lasted. google needed a pile of restaurant ratings it owned outright after the yelp purchase fell apart, so on 15 november 2010 it launched hotpot and asked you to rate places for your friends. the ratings kept coming. on 8 april 2011 google took the feature, kept ev |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
TokBox 📖 2007 - 2011 tokbox let you make a video call by sending someone a link, with no download and no account required, which in 2007 felt like a small miracle. it ran in the browser at a time when video chat meant installing something heavy first. the problem was money, so the company turned the same technology into |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1976-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
PhotoWorks 📖 1976 - 2011 photoworks began in 1976 as seattle filmworks, a mail-order lab that sold respooled motion picture film and developed it by post. every envelope came back with prints and a free replacement roll, which kept the loop turning for twenty years. from the mid nineties it scanned your negatives to floppy |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Qwest 📖 1996 - 2011 a railroad right of way is a thin strip of land that already runs between every city in the country, and philip anschutz owned one. qwest was the company that put fiber in it, sold the capacity, and in 2000 used the resulting share price to buy a baby bell four times its size. the revenue behind tha |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
HanseNet 📖 1995 - 2011 hamburg's electricity company started an internet provider in 1995 because it already owned ducts under the city. an italian broadband firm bought most of it in 2000 and telecom italia took the rest by 2003. the german product ended up with an italian name and an italian model on its billboards. han |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
smart.fm 📖 2007 - 2011 1,000 yen a month was the number that ended it. cerego japan opened the site in october 2007 as iknow!, a japanese-only drill for people learning english, running a spaced repetition engine off real memory research. in november 2008 it went multilingual and in march 2009 it took the name smart.fm, a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Revolution Money 📖 2007 - 2011 american express agreed to buy revolution money in november 2009 for around three hundred million dollars and closed the deal that january. fourteen months later the card was switched off. what amex had actually bought was a payments platform it could relaunch under a name of its own, which it did i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Dimdim 📖 2006 - 2011 salesforce bought dimdim on 6 january 2011 for thirty one million dollars, and the notices went out almost immediately: free accounts would stop working on 15 march, and the open source edition would no longer be supported. that was the whole plan. dimdim's pitch had been a meeting you joined by cli |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Djangy 📖 2010 - 2011 two founders spent about seven months building a push-to-deploy host for django apps, got as far as a private beta with an email waiting list, and then decided they did not want to spend the next five years fighting everyone else building exactly the same product. the final newsletter went out on 27 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Playhouse Disney 📖 1999 - 2011 at 8:55 on the morning of 13 february 2011 a preschool block signed off with a short episode of handy manny's school for tools, and the following day the same hours returned as disney junior with most of the same programs still in them. playhouse disney had held that slot since 1 february 1999 and t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Vinismo 📖 2007 - 2011 vinismo was an encyclopedia of wine running on mediawiki, started in montreal by evan prodromou after wikitravel and licensed so that anybody could copy the whole database and republish it. it was the first site anywhere to use the form extension to mediawiki, which meant contributors filled in fiel |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
SideStep 📖 1999 - 2011 sidestep launched in 1999 as a browser plugin that searched airline and hotel sites from inside internet explorer. through the 2000s it became one of the largest travel meta-search engines on the US-anglo web, with roughly a third of the category by 2006. kayak acquired it in december '07 for around |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
UK Online 📖 1994 - 2011 sky bought easynet in 2005 and inherited a dial-up isp from 1994 that had spent the previous year embarrassing the entire british broadband market with an 8mb line for forty pounds a month. it ran the brand alongside its own for five more years, quietly stopped taking new orders in 2009, and closed |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Wik.is 📖 2007 - 2011 mindtouch forked mediawiki in 2006, threw out wiki markup in favor of xhtml and a wysiwyg editor, then gave the result away as free hosting on a two-letter domain. you typed a name into a red box and got yourname.wik.is, with a paid tier if you wanted your own domain. on 5 january 2011 the company d |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Blipville 📖 2005 - 2011 twelve was the average age of a blipville user, which tells you most of what the site was. tv4 ran a virtual town on a fictional caribbean island called s:t blip, with at least 200,000 registered swedish kids in it and about 90,000 turning up every month around 2007. the moderators were unpaid teena |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Postopia 📖 2001 - 2011 post cereals put a games portal on the web in february 2001 and ran it for ten years, mascot worlds and flash games built by an outfit called skyworks. the currency was postokens and the codes came printed inside boxes of pebbles or honeycomb, so seeing all of it meant buying groceries in america. b |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Open Source Cinema 📖 2007 - 2011 a montreal filmmaker put his raw footage on the web under a creative commons license, built an editor into the browser, and told anyone who showed up to cut it however they liked. the good cuts went into the finished film. that film, rip: a remix manifesto, argued that copyright had turned into a ta |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Shkolny Portal 📖 2007 - 2011 13,950,000 rubles of federal money bought a link directory, a borrowed mail service and a forum on off-the-shelf software, presented to the education minister on 21 december 2007 and taken down three days later for repairs. the search filter it shipped with let pornography through on any phrase with |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
U.B. Funkeys 📖 2007 - 2011 a white plastic dock sat next to the family pc, and whichever little vinyl figure you clipped onto it became your character in a windows world called terrapinia. mattel sold the starter kit at $19.99 in 2007 and the extra figures at $4.99 each, forty-two of them in the first collection. the toy line |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Millsberry 📖 2004 - 2010 general mills built an entire virtual town to sell breakfast cereal to children. you walked a small cartoon buddy around metro park, golden valley, ravenwood and lakeview, played a slalom game, fed the buddy a bowl of lucky charms to keep its health bar full, and read the in-town newspaper for fresh |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Dizzywood 📖 2007 - 2010 a san francisco studio with money from a cnet co-founder built a browser world for eight to fourteen year olds, and built it around quests rather than around a shopping mall. players cleaned up pollution and repaired machines wrecked by a villain named emperor withering. it grew fast, passed four hu |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Nanovor 📖 2009 - 2010 jordan weisman created battletech and shadowrun, then raised $29 million to make a card battler for american ten-year-olds. nanovor went into public beta in may 2009 with a handheld accessory and game cards on the shelf at best buy. the browser-only relaunch shipped for the 2010 holidays, the discon |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Glubble 📖 2007 - 2010 a firefox add-on that let a parent hand over the family computer without handing over the whole web. glaxstar shipped glubble for families on 18 june 2007 with 350 pre-approved sites and a button a child could press to ask for anything else. by january 2010 it had grown a family timeline and an ipho |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
BBC Switch 📖 2007 - 2010 the bbc had children's television and it had radio 1, and between them sat an age group with nothing addressed to it. switch was the answer, a saturday afternoon block on bbc two with a sunday night radio strand and a website holding it together. the bbc trust signed off on closing it in july 2010 a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
WebSocket draft-hixie-76 📖 2010 - 2010 on 8 december 2010 two browsers turned off a feature they had already shipped. adam barth had shown that the handshake in ian hickson's -76 draft could be read by a transparent proxy as an ordinary http request and used to poison its cache, which made it the protocol's problem rather than any vendor |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
backstage.bbc.co.uk 📖 2005 - 2010 in 2005 the bbc opened a pile of its own feeds to anybody who asked for them and put a motto on the front page: use our stuff to build your stuff. news headlines went out next to television listings in the tv-anytime format, all of it free and all of it under a license whose one real condition was t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
GOOG-411 📖 2007 - 2010 goog-411 was a phone number, 1-800-goog-411, that let you speak the name of a business and have google find it and connect the call, for free. it launched in april 2007 as an alternative to the pricey 411 directory lines. the real purpose showed up later. google was collecting recorded voices to tra |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
JXTA 📖 2001 - 2010 sun's answer to the peer-to-peer moment was not an application but a set of open protocols meant to let anything with a processor find anything else and hold a conversation with it, whatever the platform underneath. bill joy put his name on the launch in april 2001 and the specification was genuinel |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Gnutella 📖 2000 - 2010 dormant two nullsoft engineers released a file-sharing network with nothing in the middle of it, and aol took the download off the site inside twenty-four hours. too late, thousands of copies were already out. for a decade it was the machine under limewire and bearshare, past three million nodes at its peak |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Nokia Ovi Files 📖 2008 - 2010 a nokia cloud service that shipped two years before nokia had a cloud strategy. ovi files let you mirror your windows or mac desktop to your phone and open documents remotely. it was based on the avvenu acquisition from december 2007, went free in july 2009, closed 15 october 2010. dropbox launched |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Zenbe 📖 2006 - 2010 zenbe was a webmail service out of new york that tried to make email into something more than a stack of messages. its odd idea was the zenpage, a shared space you could build around a thread and invite other people into, with a task list and a calendar sitting right next to the mail. it launched ar |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Massive Incorporated 📖 2002 - 2010 the billboards in burnout paradise carried an obama campaign ad in october 2008, across eighteen games in ten early-voting states, and this is the company that served them. microsoft bought it in may 2006 for a price it never confirmed and the press put between 200 and 400 million dollars. it closed |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Quattro Wireless 📖 2006 - 2010 apple wanted admob, google paid $750 million for admob, and apple bought the runner-up instead. quattro wireless changed hands in january 2010 for $275 million after steve jobs talked andy miller down from the $325 million they had already shaken on. the network itself was never the point: it served |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Polar Rose 📖 2004 - 2010 fourteen days is the whole story here. polar rose switched off its face recognition service on 6 september 2010, saying it was becoming a licensing business, and on about the 20th apple bought the company for a figure the press put near $29 million. the product had been a browser plugin out of malmö |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Nedstat 📖 1996 - 2010 nedstat was an amsterdam web-counter and stats service launched in early 1996 by michiel berger with hans veldhuizen. the free counter became a ubiquitous european widget through the late 1990s and early 2000s, on every personal homepage that wanted a public visit number. by 2004 the company had ten |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Covad 📖 1996 - 2010 covad put its own dsl equipment inside the phone company's exchanges and sold the resulting lines wholesale, so the broadband you bought from earthlink or from aol was very often covad underneath. it existed because american regulators had ordered the incumbents to share their copper, and it spent i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Wesabe 📖 2006 - 2010 wesabe was the personal finance startup that launched before mint and shut down after it. marc hedlund and jason knight founded it in late 2005, the site went live in november 2006 with a community-oriented budgeting approach and a privacy-first stance on bank data. mint launched in september 2007 w |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Bing Cashback 📖 2008 - 2010 bing cashback was microsoft's attempt to bribe shoppers into searching through its engine instead of google's. money back on purchases at participating retailers, paid out of microsoft's share of the ad take. it scaled to over a thousand merchants and never got close to the user base it needed. micr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Personals 📖 1997 - 2010 yahoo personals was the dating service yahoo ran from 1997 until they gave up and outsourced the whole thing to match.com in 2010. at peak it was one of the largest online dating products in the english-speaking web, riding on top of yahoo portal traffic. when yahoo decided dating was not its busine |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
1 vs. 100 📖 2009 - 2010 1 vs. 100 was the only thing microsoft ever shipped on xbox live primetime, a service built to run actual game shows on a schedule rather than games you start whenever you feel like it. episodes went out live at fixed times with a paid human host reading the questions. one player was the one and a h |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
SourceOECD 📖 2001 - 2010 the oecd's own library, sold by subscription to institutions rather than to people. it launched in 2001 with around 250 books a year and 82 statistical databases you could query straight in the browser, which was not a normal thing for a research platform to offer that early. every publication carri |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Office Live Workspace 📖 2007 - 2010 microsoft tried to put office documents in the cloud before the cloud was a word people used. you could upload a docx and share a link, and other people could view it in the browser. you could not edit it in the browser. that single missing feature ended the product. in may 2010 microsoft announced |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
mMode 📖 2002 - 2010 the advertising shipped months before the product did. att wireless spent the january and february of 2002 on unbranded teasers for something called mlife, revealed it at the super bowl, got sued by metlife over the name, and only then put mmode on sale on 16 april. what you bought was japan's i-mod |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Amapedia 📖 2006 - 2010 in 2006 amazon decided the best description of a product might come from the people who already owned one, and opened a wiki where any customer could write and edit pages about anything in the catalog. it launched as productwiki, took the amapedia name in early 2007, and ran on volunteer contributio |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
SpinVox 📖 2003 - 2010 in july 2009 a bbc technology correspondent asked a plain question about spinvox: who is actually typing this. the answer was call center workers in south africa and the philippines rather than the automated engine the company kept calling the brain. nuance bought what was left for 102.5 million dol |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Publisher Network 📖 2005 - 2010 ypn was yahoo's adsense. cost-per-click contextual ads next to your blog post, monthly check in the mail, us tax id required at signup. it stayed in beta for the full five years, never opened past us publishers, and shut down with yahoo telling its remaining people to go set up an account at chitika |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
AT&T WorldNet 📖 1996 - 2010 at&t worldnet launched in march 1996 as ma bell's direct counter to aol. the pitch was flat-rate consumer dial-up at $19.95 a month with unmetered hours, undercutting aol's $9.95 for five hours tariff at the time. it peaked around 1.5 million subscribers in 1999 then bled out steadily as cable broad |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
SpyLOG 📖 1999 - 2010 a small graphic in the footer of a russian web page, counting you. spylog opened its tracker in november 1999, had more than fifty thousand sites registered by the following summer, and from that pile of counters built the thing that actually mattered: a rolling measurement of how many people were o |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
.yu 📖 1989 - 2010 a country code is a political fact wearing technical clothes, and .yu is what happens when the politics move and the code does not. it was delegated on 15 june 1989 to a yugoslavia with two and a half years left, kept running from slovenia after slovenia had left, handed to belgrade by jon postel in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Nicktropolis 📖 2007 - 2010 nicktropolis was nickelodeon's browser virtual world on nick.com, a flash city where kids made a little avatar and wandered themed areas built around the channel's shows. it opened to everyone in january 2007 and passed seven million registered users inside eighteen months. nickelodeon discontinued |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
OpenMicroBlogging 📖 2008 - 2010 evan prodromou wrote the spec in july 2008, five days after launching identi.ca, and waived every right he had over it in the copyright line. it was twenty months old when statusnet 0.9.0 replaced it with ostatus, which replaced it so completely that the fediverse's own genealogy usually starts one |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Haloscan 📖 2002 - 2010 haloscan was the third-party comment widget that lived underneath every blogspot post for most of the 2000s, in the long stretch before blogger.com shipped native comment threads. you pasted a script tag into your template and got a popup window with a counter that read "comments (0)". the company w |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! HotJobs 📖 1996 - 2010 yahoo hotjobs was a us labor market product. turkish jobs ran through kariyer.net and yenibiris and later linkedin. yahoo paid 436 million for hotjobs in 2002. eight years later it sold the asset to monster for 225 million, and the brand folded into monster.com inside a year. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Yoonew 📖 2004 - 2010 two mit sloan students turned the price of a world series ticket into a derivatives problem and then sold the answer to sports fans. you bought a contract on a team in october, and if that team reached the final you got a real seat for a fraction of the february price. the model ran for five champio |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Forterra Systems 📖 1998 - 2010 a defense contractor bought the technology on 1 february 2010, took about twelve of the engineers with it, and that was the end of the company. forterra had started in 1998 as there, inc., spun the consumer world there.com out from under itself, and gone looking for customers who would actually pay: |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Nokia Mobile Web Server 📖 2007 - 2010 nokia research center ported apache to symbian, called the project raccoon, and in june 2007 put the result out through beta labs so an ordinary n95 could serve its own website. the server was the easy half. no carrier gives a handset a public address, so nokia also ran a gateway at mymobilesite.net |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
rssCloud 📖 2001 - 2010 dave winer registered the domain in july 2009 and wrote on the front page, great domain name, don't you think. the idea was older than that: the cloud element had been sitting unused in rss since 2001. for about six months it looked like it might win, because wordpress.com switched it on for 7.5 mil |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Nokia MOSH 📖 2007 - 2010 mosh was nokia's pre-ovi attempt at a user-driven mobile content hub. audio, images, games, java midlets, videos, all uploaded by users with no screening. it never left beta and filled up with copyright-infringing files. by 2010 nokia had rolled it into ovi store and switched off the standalone site |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Pipex 📖 1990 - 2010 peter dawe started pipex in 1990 as the public ip exchange, selling internet access to british companies at a point when the academic network was the only serious pipe in the country. by 1992 it was running a leased line across the atlantic and demon internet was a customer before it was a competito |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
nARTBOX (엔아트박스) 📖 2000 - 2010 a korean stationery chain spent the first decade of the 2000s running a website where you sent animated greeting cards starring the characters printed on its notebooks, and played flash games about hitting people with rubber shoes. the archive has the card engine still answering in april 2010. by ju |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Freesurf 📖 1999 - 2010 claranet paid one symbolic euro for freesurf on 4 june 2007 and had the company dissolved within a year. the service had opened on 19 april 1999 as the french arm of free uk, with no subscription fee and no credit card asked. its evening flat rate of 100 francs drew the heaviest users in france and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Symantec Online Backup 📖 2008 - 2010 february 2008 to january 2010, and no announcement at either end of the second date. symantec launched a business backup service on its protection network platform, then paid $123 million in june 2008 for swapdrive, the company whose technology sat underneath it. sales stopped less than two years la |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
easyInternetCafé 📖 1999 - 2009 easyinternetcafe was stelios haji-ioannou's bet that the internet cafe would become a high-street utility, the same way easyjet had become a low-cost airline. it opened in june '99 on tottenham court road as easyeverything, scaled to about 75 outlets at peak including an 800-terminal warehouse on ti |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1976-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
DATAPAC 📖 1976 - 2009 canada switched on the first public data network designed from the start for x.25 in 1976, and then kept it running for thirty three years. it was supposed to be obsolete by the mid nineties, and in one sense it was, because nobody new was buying it. it stayed up anyway, because the debit terminal o |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
WorldSpace 📖 1999 - 2009 noah samara spent the early 1990s persuading the international telecommunication union to invent a radio band, and in 1999 he used it to point two satellites at the parts of the world that terrestrial broadcasting had skipped. worldspace put 62 digital channels over africa and asia, sold receivers t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
XHTML 2.0 📖 2002 - 2009 for seven years the w3c drafted a version of html that would not run in any browser built for the previous one. xhtml 2.0 dropped backward compatibility on purpose: html forms were replaced wholesale by xforms, and the heading elements collapsed into a single tag whose level came from how deeply it |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Teletext (UK) 📖 1993 - 2009 teletext ltd was the commercial side of the uk teletext signal. it ran on itv and channel 4 from 1 january 1993, after taking the franchise from oracle which had held it since 1975. holiday booking on page 200 was the whole business model for the back half of its life. ofcom revoked the licence on 2 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
POWDER 📖 2007 - 2009 eighty four days separate the publication of powder as a w3c recommendation from the closing of the group that wrote it. the spec was supposed to be how a website described itself to a filter, and the one organization running a filter built on labels switched its engine off thirteen months later. th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
BubbleShare 📖 2005 - 2009 bubbleshare was a toronto photo-sharing site with a voice-caption gimmick and one of the smoother AJAX zoom widgets of the era. kaboose bought it in early 2007. disney bought most of kaboose in april 2009. seven months later disney posted a shutdown notice and wiped every photo on the servers on 15 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
GoPets 📖 2005 - 2009 a seoul studio spent four years on a virtual pet that lived on your desktop rather than in a browser tab, and that could travel to a stranger's machine in another country and let itself in. it ran on seashells and fortune cookies, with a picture language invented so that players with no shared alpha |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
chello 📖 1999 - 2009 upc launched chello in march 1999 across five countries on the same day, and for a lot of europe it was the first internet connection that was simply on. fifty thousand subscribers by the end of that year, around 1.3 million at its widest. then it was dismantled market by market rather than shut dow |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Windows Meeting Space 📖 2007 - 2009 a peer-to-peer meeting tool microsoft put inside windows vista to replace netmeeting, able to share a desktop or a file with up to ten people and able to build its own ad hoc wireless network when there was no connection to build on. it needed ipv6 in 2007 and it needed everyone in the meeting to be |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Sphere 📖 2005 - 2009 aol bought sphere in april 2008 for a price reported at upward of twenty five million dollars, renamed the engine surphace eighteen months later, then briefly decided that aol news should be called sphere instead. the second idea was reversed almost at once and sphere.com was pointed at aol news, wh |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Vodafone live! 📖 2002 - 2009 vodafone live! was the operator-portal that vodafone bolted onto every handset in its network starting in october 2002. it was the european answer to japan's i-mode. news, mms, ringtones, java games, wallpapers, all carrier-billed. it hit 1.5 million subscribers by may 2003. once the iphone landed i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Facebook Beacon 📖 2007 - 2009 beacon was the moment facebook decided that what you bought on overstock or fandango should show up on your wall by default. it lasted twenty-two months. zuckerberg apologized in writing within four weeks. the class action that followed ran for almost two years and produced the cleanest legal preced |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
GrandCentral 📖 2005 - 2009 the fremont startup that gave you one phone number for life and rang every device you owned when somebody called it. google bought it for ninety five million dollars in 2007 and ran the brand for eighteen months. relaunched as google voice in march 2009. the grandcentral name came off the maps on se |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Google Web APIs 📖 2002 - 2009 one developer key, five hundred queries a day, later a thousand. that was the entire offer google made in april 2002, and for four years it was the only sanctioned way to ask google a question with a program instead of a browser. nelson minar wrote it in soap and wsdl because that is what 2002 belie |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
AppleTalk 📖 1985 - 2009 appletalk was how apple computers found each other before the internet made everyone speak the same language. released in 1985, it let a room full of macs and laserwriters form a working network with no server and no setup, which in the 1980s felt close to magic. tcp/ip won the wider war through the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Blyk 📖 2007 - 2009 blyk was an advertising-funded mobile virtual network operator launched in the united kingdom in october 2007 by former nokia president pekka ala-pietilä and antti öhrling. it gave users aged 16 to 24 free texts and capped voice minutes each month in exchange for up to six targeted sms ads a day. it |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Riya 📖 2004 - 2009 riya was the face-recognition photo tagger that arrived years before facebook could reliably do the same thing. the founders realized nobody would pay for tagging their own photos, so they pointed the same computer vision at visual product search and became like.com. the consumer photo product wound |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
ConSentry Networks 📖 2003 - 2009 mario nemirovsky, founder and chief scientist, told network world on 20 august 2009 that his company was going out of business effective that day. staff had been told that morning and were clearing their desks. nobody else on the management team picked up the phone, and the main line had no receptio |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Snaptalent 📖 2007 - 2009 two years of runway were still sitting in the bank when snaptalent quit. four founders started it in 2007 and took it through y combinator's winter 2008 batch with an idea about putting recruitment ads on the sites people already read instead of on job boards. it won an industry award and never work |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Arcor 📖 1996 - 2009 arcor was germany's second phone company, assembled in 1996 out of mannesmann money and the fiber deutsche bahn had running beside its railway tracks. it spent more than a decade as the only real alternative to deutsche telekom with a network of its own rather than a rented one, and by 2008 it carri |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Gallery 📖 2006 - 2009 at o'reilly's etech conference in march 2006 yahoo opened four more apis to outside developers and put up a directory where anyone could find what got built with them. gallery.yahoo.com carried a beta badge for its entire life. by december 2008 the maps section alone listed 300 applications from 101 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Ireland On-Line 📖 1992 - 2009 barry flanagan started an internet company in galway in 1992, two years before most of the country knew what one was, and in january 1994 it became ireland's first mass-market internet service. an post paid ir£2.5m for it in 1997 and esat paid ir£115m two years later, which tells you how fast a nati |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1969-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
CompuServe 📖 1969 - 2009 the first big commercial online service in the US. text only for most of its life. its user IDs were long numeric strings that looked like 71234,5678. it ran for forty years before AOL absorbed it and finally turned it off in 2009. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Bix 📖 2006 - 2009 bix was a sunnyvale startup launched in july 2006 by stewart bonn and the speiser brothers, a website that let users enter video karaoke and photo contests and vote on each other's entries. yahoo acquired it on november 16 2006 for an undisclosed amount. at its 2007 peak the site logged roughly one |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Flowgram 📖 2008 - 2009 on 12 june 2009 abhay parekh wrote to his users that flowgram would be gone by the end of the month. the product let you talk over real web pages while they scrolled and loaded underneath you, which made it feel less like a screencast and more like someone driving your browser for you. the investor |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Maven Networks 📖 2002 - 2009 maven networks was the 2002-2009 cambridge ma online-video platform that powered the embedded video players for fox news, sony bmg, cbs sports, the new york times and around thirty other major media partners. yahoo acquired it for $160m in cash on 12 february 2008, folded the technology into the yah |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Jumpcut 📖 2005 - 2009 jumpcut was the browser video editor that landed early enough to matter and late enough to get bought by yahoo before it could grow. you cut and remixed clips inside a flash frame in your browser, three years before html5 video was really a thing. yahoo acquired it in september 2006, restricted new |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Jaxtr 📖 2005 - 2009 jaxtr was a calling service wrapped in a social network, founded in menlo park in 2005. you put a small widget on your blog or profile and people could call you through it without ever seeing your real number, and it undercut the price of international calls on top of that. it claimed ten million us |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Club-Internet 📖 1995 - 2009 club-internet was one of the companies that put france online. it launched in 1995 out of the lagardère group, a dial-up service and portal that gave a generation of french households their first modem connection and their first email address. it passed into deutsche telekom's t-online in 2000 and w |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
dMarc Broadcasting 📖 2002 - 2009 dmarc broadcasting was a radio-ad automation platform founded by chad and ryan steelberg in newport beach in 2002. google bought it in january 2006 for 102 million in cash plus an earnout up to 1.1 billion that famously did not vest because radio stations refused to give google the inventory it need |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Vidoop 📖 2006 - 2009 vidoop replaced the password with a grid of pictures. you chose a few categories when you signed up, and at every login the grid came back with a letter printed on each image, and your password was the letters sitting on the images that matched your categories. the images were advertising inventory, |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
SWX Europe 📖 1995 - 2009 on 21 september 1995 three people who had left the london stock exchange opened a rival to it, the first in two hundred years, and almost nobody traded there. the swiss bought in, moved their own blue chips to london to get away from a domestic stamp duty, and renamed the thing twice. at its best it |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
e-gold 📖 1996 - 2009 e-gold was a gold-backed digital currency that ran from 1996 to 2009 out of melbourne florida. douglas jackson, a radiation oncologist, founded it with barry downey, an attorney. balances were denominated in grams of gold held in a vault, settlement was final and irreversible. that last property mad |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Location View 📖 2007 - 2009 a tokyo company put street-level imagery of japanese cities online on 14 may 2007, more than a year before google street view arrived in japan. the footage came from retired taxi drivers driving camera cars through some of the densest streets in the world, and it ran at a high enough frame rate that |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Coollist 📖 1997 - 2009 onelist and egroups took the free mailing list market in 1998 and yahoo bought the survivor. coollist was already there, one of the also-rans nobody wrote about, and it kept running anyway. its homepage barely moved between 2002 and 2009, the same yellow envelope logo over a category directory that |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Habbo Japan 📖 2003 - 2009 the japanese localization of habbo hotel never took hold. sulake opened it in february 2003 as one of the first overseas hotels, alongside the early english-language launches. japan already had its own pixel-art and avatar-chat culture, and habbo's room-and-furni model did not migrate cleanly. by ap |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
FlashMail 📖 1998 - 2009 an internet provider in corvallis, oregon, with a few thousand customers in the willamette valley, ended up owning one of the last survivors of the 1998 free-webmail wave. on 13 april 2009 it deleted every flashmail account that had not agreed to pay twenty-four dollars a year. the service had been |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
HP Upline 📖 2008 - 2009 hewlett-packard sold unlimited online backup for a few dollars a month, broke it three weeks after launch and closed it eleven months later. the backups stopped on 26 february 2009, with the restore button left working until 31 march so customers could pull their files back out again. the official e |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Briefcase 📖 1999 - 2009 yahoo briefcase was thirty free megabytes of online storage with a yahoo id, ten years before "the cloud" was a marketing phrase. you uploaded a doc or a few photos and sent the link to whoever needed it. when yahoo retired it on march 30, 2009, photos got pushed toward flickr and everyone moved to |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Yahoo FareChase 📖 1999 - 2009 farechase was a travel meta-search engine built in israel in 1999. yahoo paid around 20 million dollars for it in july 2004 to compete with sidestep and the early kayak. five years later the travelocity holdout was still unresolved, kayak had run away with the segment, and carol bartz's first round |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Lookybook 📖 2007 - 2009 craig frazier had run a design studio in california since 1980, and in november 2007 he opened lookybook so that a parent could turn every page of a picture book on screen before paying for it. time put it on its list of the 50 best websites of 2008. it held about 550 books and drew 55,000 users a m |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
WiMedia Alliance 📖 2002 - 2009 a deadlocked committee did this one. the ieee task group working on high-rate ultra-wideband narrowed twenty-three proposals down to two radios that could not talk to each other, and neither side could reach the supermajority the rules required. in january 2006 the group voted to withdraw its own pr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Swurl 📖 2008 - 2009 two guys built swurl in the evenings, and when their day jobs got heavier they wrote that down and stopped. it pulled nineteen services into one illustrated timeline of your life online, photos and videos included, back when a single feed of everything you did felt like the obvious next thing the we |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Coghead 📖 2003 - 2009 coghead sold a promise that keeps coming back and keeps not working: build real business software without a programmer. from 2003 it let people assemble hosted database apps in a browser, no code required. when the 2009 credit freeze cut off its funding it could not raise more, and it closed in febr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Solipsis 📖 2002 - 2009 joaquin keller and gwendal simon designed solipsis inside france télécom's research division as a shared virtual world with no servers in it, where every participant's machine held a piece of the space and found its neighbors over udp. the code was lgpl and the reference navigator drew everything in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Unicel 📖 1990 - 2009 unicel was the brand on rural cellular corporation, a company that forty small minnesota telephone companies put together in 1990 by pooling five cellular licenses nobody larger had wanted. it grew into fifteen states and about 716,000 customers, almost all of them in places the national carriers ha |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Alltel 📖 1983 - 2009 alltel was the fifth largest wireless carrier in america and most of the country could not have told you what its logo looked like. it ran the biggest network in the united states by land area, which meant it owned the places the national carriers had costed out and skipped, and it sold that with a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
MAE-East 📖 1992 - 2009 mae-east was the place where the networks that made up the american internet agreed to pass each other packets, and through the middle of the nineties it was the only serious place to do it. it started in 1992 as a few virginia providers running ethernet between their equipment in one office buildin |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Xohm 📖 2007 - 2009 sprint spent 2007 and 2008 building a fourth generation network and a brand name to sell it under. the name was xohm, it rhymed with home, and it went live in baltimore on 29 september 2008 with no contracts and month to month pricing that looked nothing like an american carrier. nine weeks later sp |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
PC Card (PCMCIA) 📖 1990 - 2009 every laptop had the slot, usually two of them stacked, with a spring-loaded eject button beside it and a plastic blank wedged in to keep the dust out. the pcmcia consortium formed in september 1989 to standardize memory cards for palmtop computers and accidentally invented the way laptops got every |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
TurboNick 📖 2005 - 2009 nickelodeon put full episodes on the open web in july 2005, free and with no cable login, and called it turbonick. it ran for four years on the theory that broadband video was a separate thing from television and needed its own address. by 2009 that theory was dead, so nick folded the video back int |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Net Detours 📖 1995 - 2009 james cook spent the back half of the nineties writing a weekly column about the useless parts of the web, with a fake professor of netology and a hardboiled internet detective as recurring characters. the column stopped around 1999 and cook left the whole thing online, eventually retitling it when |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Adventure Rock 📖 2008 - 2009 the strange thing about the bbc's virtual world for children is that there was nobody else in it. adventure rock gave a six to twelve year old an island to explore with a floating robot called cody for company, and no chat of any kind, so two children in the same world could not see each other or sa |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1969-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Airhitch 📖 1969 - 2009 robert segelbaum started it in 1969 and the deal never really changed. you bought a window of dates and then showed up at an airport to take whatever empty space a transatlantic flight had that week. offices ran from seattle to rome, and after the move online the whole operation lived in an aim chat |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
AOL Pictures 📖 2000 - 2008 aol pictures was the photo-storage and online-print arm of aol's consumer portal, descended from the 1997 you've got pictures kodak deal that scanned film rolls and dropped them into a subscriber's aol mailbox. aol announced on july 25 2008 that it would shut pictures, xdrive and bluestring to refoc |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Google Lively 📖 2008 - 2008 google lively was a web-based virtual environment built as a 20 percent project by niniane wang and her team. you installed a windows plugin and picked an avatar, then walked into a small flash-rendered room that could be embedded as an iframe on any web page. it opened in beta on 8 july 2008 and wa |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Xdrive 📖 1999 - 2008 xdrive was an online file storage service founded in 1999 in santa monica. aol acquired it on 4 august 2005 for around 30 million dollars and rolled it out as a free 5 gb drive for any aol screenname plus a 50 gb paid plan at 9.95 a month. on 24 october 2008 aol announced the closure of xdrive in th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
VideoCipher 📖 1983 - 2008 videocipher was the analog scrambling system that closed off american satellite television. linkabit built it in 1983 and hbo switched it on full time on 15 january 1986, which turned every backyard dish in the country from a free window into a subscription form. it was pirated almost immediately an |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
SearchMash 📖 2006 - 2008 the logo was the experiment. google built a search site in october 2006 with its own name removed from every corner of it, on the theory that people rate an interface more honestly when they do not know whose interface it is. searchmash spent two years testing things google search would not risk, in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
EstDomains 📖 2004 - 2008 icann does not often terminate a registrar, and in october 2008 it terminated this one over a single clause about convicted officers. estdomains was a delaware corporation run out of tartu, estonia, holding 281,000 domain names and a reputation as the registrar you went to when you needed a name tha |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Windows Marketplace 📖 2004 - 2008 windows marketplace was microsoft's first attempt at a centralized software store for windows, launched 12 october 2004 with 93,000 products and a digital-locker tied to windows live id. it was a browser storefront, not an installed app store, and it worked mainly as a directory pointing at third-pa |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
GameZnFlix 📖 2004 - 2008 franklin, kentucky is where somebody decided to fight netflix and gamefly at the same time, on postage, with a public shell listed at fractions of a cent. the mailers were the whole business and the mailers cost too much. revenue fell from $3.6 million to $931,000 in a single year and the front page |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Digital Railroad 📖 2003 - 2008 on 28 october 2008 digital railroad told its members the company had shut down and they had around twenty four hours to get their images out. the servers limped a little longer than that, and the final notice, dated 31 october, named midnight as the end. about three thousand professional photographe |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
BlogRush 📖 2007 - 2008 3.4 billion blog post headlines went through it in twelve months, which is a number that belongs to a successful product. john reese launched blogrush in september 2007 as a widget that traded post titles between blogs: you lent it space on your page, and in exchange your own headlines turned up on |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Google Web Accelerator 📖 2005 - 2008 a free program you installed to make web pages load faster, back when a lot of them still crawled. it compressed data and guessed which links you would click next so it could fetch them early, all routed through google's own cache. it also had a habit of prefetching things it should not have and pas |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Ciudad Internet 📖 1996 - 2008 argentina's biggest newspaper decided in 1996 that the phone line was worth owning, and put its name on a dial-up service and a portal at the same address. it worked better than it had any right to, with 140,000 subscribers and more of the market than either telephone company by 2004. then broadband |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
MatMice 📖 2000 - 2008 emily boyd wrote the software when she was sixteen and her two younger sisters did the graphics. what they made was geocities for children: a page builder simple enough for a nine year old with enough raw html underneath to teach one. 1,758,660 kids signed up. it closed in september 2008 because the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
SunCom Wireless 📖 1999 - 2008 suncom started in january 1999 as triton pcs, holding spectrum that at&t wireless had handed over across the carolinas and down into georgia, and selling service under a brand with somebody else's network name attached to it. it was a regional carrier back when the united states still had those, run |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Helio 📖 2005 - 2010 helio was the sk telecom joint venture that tried to import the korean handset-and-service combo into the american MVNO market between 2006 and 2008. the ocean dual-slider and the samsung drift were rebranded korean phones with sprint EV-DO underneath. the company peaked at around 170k subscribers, |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Teleflip 📖 2004 - 2008 "we've gone as far as we can with our financial resources, and the piggy bank is empty." that was the chief executive writing to subscribers on 12 august 2008. teleflip had spent four years making every phone in north america reachable at its own number followed by @teleflip.com, which was a real pr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Streamload 📖 1998 - 2008 streamload was the 1998 cloud-storage pioneer steve iverson built out of his data-compression thesis work. the service got rebranded mediamax at demofall 05, then split into nirvanix and the consumer mediamax in july 2007. june 15 2007 a sysadmin script wiped roughly 3.5 million former accounts incl |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
e-Bullion 📖 2001 - 2008 e-bullion let you hold a balance in grams of gold and wire it to anybody with an account, ten years before bitcoin made that idea sound modern. it grew to more than a million accounts backed by around fifty thousand ounces of metal in vaults in los angeles and perth. it did not die of a hack or a ba |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Windows Live Expo 📖 2006 - 2008 codenamed fremont, this was microsoft's attempt to beat craigslist by adding the one thing craigslist had deliberately refused to build, which was a social graph. every listing was tagged to a zip code and could be narrowed down to people already on your messenger contact list, on the theory that yo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Omnidrive 📖 2005 - 2008 nik cubrilovic started omnidrive in wollongong in late 2004 and had twenty thousand private beta users across seventy countries before dropbox opened its own beta. it mounted as a drive on your desktop instead of living in a browser tab, which was the part nobody else had gotten right, and michael a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Monitor110 📖 2003 - 2008 jeff stewart started it in 2003 to sell wall street an early warning system built out of blogs and message boards. twenty million dollars later it had a product five months old, a hundred trial clients and no next round, and on 15 july 2008 the chief executive wrote to say the business was ceasing o |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Apple iCards 📖 2000 - 2008 apple introduced icards on january 5, 2000 as one of the launch features of itools, the free @mac.com bundle steve jobs unveiled at macworld san francisco. it let you send a glossy photographic e-greeting to anyone with an email address, picked from apple's stock library, signed in your handwriting |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Usenet (the ISP-bundled era) 📖 1980 - 2008 dormant the original distributed discussion network. text-only newsgroups about every possible topic. for thirty years you got nntp access free with your isp account. starting in 2008 the major US isps stopped bundling it, mostly because of legal pressure over binary newsgroups carrying pirated content. the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Planet Internet 📖 1995 - 2008 for about a decade there was a species of company that sold you a dial-up line and also employed journalists to tell you what had happened that day. planet was the dutch one and it committed harder than most, running what its own trade press called the oldest independent internet news desk in the ne |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Aluka 📖 2003 - 2008 aluka was an ithaka harbors project, started in 2003 on mellon and hewlett money, to scan the scholarly record of africa and put it back within reach of the continent it came from. by the public release in february 2007 it held over 300,000 items in ninety collections, from herbarium type specimens |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Mondex 📖 1990 - 2008 mondex was a smart card stored value cash system invented at natwest in the uk in 1990 by tim jones and graham higgins. mastercard bought a fifty one percent stake in november 1996 and the rest in june 2001. trials ran from swindon to manhattan to hong kong to taiwan. none of them crossed from trial |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Open Content Alliance 📖 2005 - 2008 the open content alliance was announced in october 2005 by yahoo and the internet archive with a row of university libraries behind them, as the open answer to google book search. it asked permission before scanning anything, where google scanned first and removed on request. microsoft joined and pa |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Brijit 📖 2007 - 2008 nearly sixteen thousand abstracts in seven months, every one of them a long magazine article cut to about a hundred words by a freelancer who got paid for the cut. jeremy brosowsky built it after a night of staring at a stack of unread new yorkers in his own living room. the investors pulled out in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Marshallese Wikipedia 📖 2004 - 2008 the closure proposal opened in august 2007 with an inventory: one real article, and one translated prayer. eight months of voting followed, thirteen in favor against five opposed, and a steward closed the marshall islands' wikipedia on 4 may 2008 at 20:13 utc. the content was moved to the incubator, |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
iFilm 📖 1997 - 2008 pre-youtube viral video destination. founded 1997 by raphael raphael as a filmmaker think tank, became one of the primary places where viral videos lived from roughly 2002 to 2005. viacom bought it for $49 million in october 2005, hoping to assemble a youtube competitor. merged with spiketv.com in q |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
ihug 📖 1994 - 2008 nick and tim wood opened an internet company in auckland in 1994 with eight thousand dollars borrowed from their father john. ihug sold the first flat rate account in the country a year later, was putting satellite dishes on roofs by 1997, and was the largest isp in new zealand before 2000. iinet bo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Canadian Health Network 📖 1999 - 2008 a national health information service run by the public health agency of canada from 1999, in both official languages, with 26 affiliated organizations producing and vetting what went on it. it answered health questions without selling anything, which is why libraries and clinics pointed people at i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
TU-KA 📖 1994 - 2008 4,018,200 contracts at the end of june 2001, and the company that held them decided not to bid for a third generation license. tu-ka stayed on the old japanese digital standard in three cities while everyone around it moved to 3g. kddi absorbed it in october 2005 and spent two and a half years walki |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Ricochet 📖 1994 - 2008 metricom put spread-spectrum radios on lampposts across silicon valley in 1994 and sold subscribers the first taste of always-on wireless internet at a real broadband rate. by july 2001 it was in chapter 11 with a billion in debt. aerie networks bought the assets and kept a quiet version of ricochet |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Pay By Touch 📖 2002 - 2008 pay by touch bolted fingerprint readers onto supermarket checkouts across america and enrolled around three million people who liked the idea of leaving the wallet in the car. it raised more than $340 million on that pitch. the company came apart during 2007 around its own founder, filed chapter 11 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
JotSpot 📖 2004 - 2008 jotspot was a hosted wiki built by joe kraus and graham spencer, the excite founders coming back for a second round with google money floating around. google bought it in october 2006, sat on it for sixteen months while the team was integrated in mountain view, and relaunched it on 27 february 2008 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Sony ImageStation 📖 1997 - 2008 imagestation was sony's online photo service. it launched in november 1997 with photonet as a joint venture, ran for a decade as sony's flickr-and-prints competitor, and never escaped the orbit of cybershot owners who had ended up there because the digital camera box said to. sony announced the shut |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
ScribbleWiki 📖 2007 - 2008 simon koldyk was nineteen when he started scribblewiki in a vancouver bedroom in june 2007 and funded it out of the proceeds of a previous site. eighteen months later it was hosting fourteen thousand wikis and a hundred paying corporate customers, and it was ranked sixteenth on the city's startup in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Disney Mobile (US) 📖 2006 - 2007 disney mobile us was a family-mvno on sprint that disney ran for around 18 months. the pitch was parental controls and a child-safe phone for the under-12 demographic, with a $25 to $60 monthly plan and family-locator gps as the marquee feature. disney could not get the subscriber numbers to make th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
BidPay 📖 1999 - 2007 bidpay solved the 1999 problem of paying a stranger for something you won in an auction, and it solved it with the post office. you handed over your card details on a web page and bidpay put a western union money order in an envelope addressed to the seller. paypal solved the same problem without th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Quigo 📖 2000 - 2007 yaron galai and oded itzhak started quigo in israel in 2000 and built adsonar, a contextual ad engine that read a page and matched an ad to what was on it. it also told the publisher exactly which advertiser had bought which slot, and that was the whole pitch, because google would not. aol paid thre |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
KOL (AOL Kids Online) 📖 2003 - 2007 kol was the aol kids portal that launched in september 2003 as a rebrand of the older kids only channel, designed for six to twelve year olds and bundled free with aol 9.0 optimized. the headline feature was radio kol, a live afternoon stream hosted by rick adams that ran weekdays from 3 to 7 pm eas |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Siberian Wikipedia 📖 2006 - 2007 yaroslav zolotaryov, a businessman in tomsk, spent 2005 building a siberian language out of old settler dialects with tatar roots stirred through it, and in october 2006 the wikimedia foundation let him open a wikipedia in it. the second application succeeded where the first failed because it descri |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Geosign 📖 2001 - 2007 $160 million went into a company in Guelph, Ontario in March 2007, the largest venture investment made in canada that year, and eight months later there was no company left to spend it. geosign bought cheap clicks from google and sold expensive clicks back to google, and the margin between those two |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Findory 📖 2004 - 2007 greg linden came out of amazon, where he worked on the recommendation engine, and spent the next four years in seattle on findory, a news front page that rearranged itself around whatever you clicked. there was no login and no settings screen. one click was enough for the page to start changing, whi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Opsware 📖 1999 - 2007 loudcloud opened on 9 september 1999 selling managed internet infrastructure by the month, which is close to what amazon would sell as a web service seven years later. it went public on 9 march 2001 at six dollars a share, into a market that had stopped wanting anything at all. in 2002 it sold the h |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Photos 📖 2000 - 2007 yahoo photos launched on march 28 2000 as the photo tab inside yahoo mail, with unlimited storage at a time when one megabyte felt heroic. for the first half of the decade it was the default photo destination of yahoo's logged-in audience, which was most of the web. yahoo bought flickr in march 2005 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
TimesSelect 📖 2005 - 2007 timesselect was the new york times' first big paywall. on september 19 2005 it locked the opinion columnists, the archive, and early sunday access behind $49.95 a year. by 2007 the experiment had 227,000 paying subscribers and a list of columnists whose google footprint had collapsed by 70 to 80 per |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
San Francisco Municipal Wireless 📖 2004 - 2007 on 6 november 2007 san francisco voted for free citywide wifi by 86,451 to 52,428, and the network it was voting for had been dead for eight weeks already. gavin newsom proposed it in 2004, and earthlink won the contract with google in april 2006, google paying to be anchor tenant on a free 300 kbit |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Oddpost 📖 2002 - 2007 oddpost was the four-dollar-a-month webmail that taught yahoo what mail could look like in a browser. it launched in april 2002 with ajax techniques and a three-pane outlook layout, sold to yahoo in july 2004, and became the foundation of the yahoo mail rewrite that shipped in beta in september 2005 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Sichuan Yi Wikipedia 📖 2004 - 2007 a closure proposal went up on 10 july 2007 saying this wikipedia had never had activity beyond account registration and bots. the only objection anyone filed was a line of yi syllables copied off the main page, which the proposer checked and called gibberish. the request was closed at 14:13 utc on 2 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Herero Wikipedia 📖 2004 - 2007 zero. that is what hz.wikipedia.org reports when you ask it how many articles it has, and it is the only one of the seven language editions shut in 2007 that finished on that number. the herero wikipedia opened on 29 august 2004, four hours after the marshallese one, and most of what ever got writte |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
SunRocket 📖 2004 - 2007 the offer was a year of unlimited home telephone for a hundred and ninety nine dollars, paid up front. that is a wonderful price for the customer and a loan from the customer to the company, and it works right up until the day new signups stop covering last year's promises. sunrocket raised around e |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Muscogee Wikipedia 📖 2004 - 2007 in june 2007 an editor called philip j opened a page on meta-wiki proposing that the muscogee wikipedia be closed, and the case was arithmetic rather than politics: thirteen pages in total, most of them empty or in english, a main page without one word of the language, and nobody around to fix any o |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Choctaw Wikipedia 📖 2004 - 2007 johannes rohr spent six months protecting pages on a wiki almost nobody was writing in, then took it to meta himself on 21 may 2007 and asked for it to be closed. he used the word stillborn. there were two or three real articles at the time. the request carried in seven days, the wiki was locked on |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Moviso 📖 1993 - 2007 most of the north american mobile content market ran through one company, and almost nobody knew its name, because moviso built other people's storefronts rather than its own brand. infospace paid $25 million for it in 2003 and sold it to funmobility four years later. the consumer site went dark in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
magnet 📖 1996 - 2007 the n was for ntt and the s was for sanrio, and sanrio's president said he picked the name because a magnet has an n pole and an s pole. from november 1996 japanese children built houses in a virtual town, sent each other mail through illustrated templates, and watched garbage pile up outside if the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Auctions 📖 1998 - 2007 yahoo auctions launched on september 14, 1998 as yahoo's answer to ebay. its main differentiator was free listings, with revenue coming from advertising instead of seller fees. that approach pulled real volume for a window but never crossed the network gravity ebay had already built. yahoo closed th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
LinkExchange 📖 1996 - 2007 linkexchange started in march 1996 as a banner-exchange cooperative for small personal and small-business websites that did not have ad budgets. you joined by putting a small linkexchange banner on your homepage, in return the network served your own banner on other member sites at a ratio of two-fo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Amp'd Mobile 📖 2005 - 2007 amp'd mobile was the youth-targeted MVNO that mtv and universal music funded between 2005 and 2007 to sell ringtones and short-form video to 18-to-35-year-olds on top of the verizon ev-do network. the company raised more than $360 million, signed 175k subscribers, found out around 80k of them were n |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Freeserve 📖 1998 - 2007 freeserve invented the uk free-isp model, sold at the peak of the dot-com bubble for one point six five billion pounds, then got passed through wanadoo and orange until the brand was quietly retired in 2007. the ajaz ahmed thing where a dixons employee proposed giving away isp accounts to sell more |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
1mdc 📖 2001 - 2007 1mdc was digital gold that held no gold. you sent it e-gold and it credited you the same weight in its own units. because it was storing nothing itself, it could charge you nothing to store. that was the entire business and it ran for six years. on 27 april 2007 a us court ordered e-gold to freeze t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Peppercoin 📖 2001 - 2007 peppercoin was an mit-spinout micropayment company silvio micali and ron rivest set up in waltham massachusetts in late 2001. the system batched small purchases by randomly selecting one transaction at a time to charge in full, bringing the per-dollar cost from twenty-seven cents to under a dime. ch |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Telsim 📖 1994 - 2007 telsim was the other number. turkcell was 0532 and telsim was 0542, and for most of the 1990s that prefix was the whole of what anybody knew about somebody else's phone. the family that owned it borrowed around two billion dollars from motorola and nokia against equipment and then did not pay it bac |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
BBC Jam 📖 2006 - 2007 the bbc built a free online curriculum for every school-age child in the country and spent ninety six million pounds of license fee money getting it there. commercial education publishers told the european commission that a state broadcaster giving this away was not what a public service remit was f |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Micropal 📖 1985 - 2007 christopher poll started micropal in london in 1985 with six other people and a question nobody was answering properly, which was whether a given mutual fund had actually done well or had merely been in a good year. by the mid-1990s the answer to that question ran through fifteen offices and was the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
NTL 📖 1992 - 2007 ntl started in 1992 as an american company called international cabletel, buying up the fragmented british cable franchises one region at a time until it held most of the country. the debt it took on to do that reached seventeen billion dollars and put the company into chapter 11 on 8 may 2002, the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Telewest 📖 1992 - 2007 telewest was the other british cable company, the one holding the half of the country ntl did not. it started as a croydon franchise in 1984 and spent the nineties buying up its neighbors on borrowed money, then spent 2003 and 2004 handing the company to its bondholders to survive the bill. its broa |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Farallon Computing 📖 1986 - 2007 a berkeley user group built a kit in 1986 that ran appletalk down ordinary telephone wire, and reese jones turned it into a company. phonenet and timbuktu both came out of that building. by 1997 the apple association had become a liability, so the company renamed itself after its router line and spe |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Virgin.net 📖 1996 - 2007 ntl and richard branson's group opened an internet provider together in november 1996 and put the virgin name on the front, which in britain was worth more than whatever network was behind it. it went from 145,000 users at the end of 1998 to around 600,000 dial-up subscribers by 2001, most of them a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
BitPass 📖 2002 - 2007 bitpass was a mountain view micropayment startup kurt huang and gyuchang jun founded in 2002. the service let users prefund an account by credit card or paypal and then spend it across digital content priced from a quarter up. mperia the indie music store was the marquee customer. january 19 2007 th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Cingular Wireless 📖 2000 - 2007 cingular wireless was formed in april 2000 as a joint venture between sbc communications and bellsouth out of their respective wireless properties. it acquired at&t wireless on october 26 2004 in a forty-one billion dollar deal that made it the largest us wireless carrier. when sbc acquired at&t cor |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Amazon zShops 📖 1999 - 2007 amazon zshops was bezos's second attempt at being more than a bookstore. it ran from september 1999 to roughly 2007 as a fixed-price third-party marketplace inside amazon.com. the structural skeleton survived: amazon marketplace, launched in november 2000, swallowed the idea and shipped it back bett |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Bonus.com 📖 1997 - 2007 bonus.com opened in january 1997 with five hundred games and one idea: wrap the whole site in a fake browser so a child could not click their way out of it. it was built by the internet arm of a hungarian game studio working out of mountain view, and it was paid for by the banner ads on the walls th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Server.com 📖 1996 - 2007 sean brunnock put a personal information manager on the web in september 1996 and spent the next six years adding to it, a threaded message board service one year, a web-based mailing list manager the next. he called the things webapps, which is where the word came from. traffic reached 100 million |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Club Nokia 📖 1997 - 2007 club nokia was a handset manufacturer trying to sell you things directly, which the mobile operators were never going to allow. it started in 1997 as a product support site and grew into a shop for ringtones and game content, paid for with credits you bought from an authorized nokia dealer. by novem |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
X.400 📖 1984 - 2007 dormant x.400 was the telecommunication union's design for electronic mail, published in 1984 and meant to be how the whole planet sent messages. it had message recall and delivery receipts years before internet mail did. it also had addresses that read like c=no; admd=; prmd=uninett; o=uninett; s=alvestran |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Abilene Network 📖 1999 - 2007 the abilene project started in april 1998, run by the university corporation for advanced internet development on fiber donated by qwest, with the operations center at indiana university. it came up coast to coast in january 1999 at 2.5 gigabits per second and eventually connected more than 230 inst |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
IBM Workplace 📖 2003 - 2007 mike rhodin stood up at lotusphere in january 2007 and said the quiet part out loud: ibm had been confusing the hell out of its own customers. workplace was announced in 2003 as the java rewrite that would succeed lotus notes, a browser and rich-client suite sitting on top of websphere portal, and f |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Mobile ESPN 📖 2005 - 2006 mobile espn was disney's MVNO experiment for the american sports-broadcast audience, live for around ten months in 2006 on the sprint ev-do network. the proposition was a single sanyo handset bundled with a $34.95 to $64.95 plan and unlimited espn scores and clips. the projection was 240k subscriber |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
BowieNet 📖 1998 - 2006 bowienet was a real internet service provider owned by a rock musician. twenty dollars a month bought you dial-up access and an @davidbowie.com email address, plus chat rooms that bowie himself turned up in under the handle sailor. it peaked near a hundred thousand subscribers and guinness recorded |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Connexion by Boeing 📖 2004 - 2006 connexion by boeing put a steerable ku-band antenna on the roof of a widebody and gave passengers real broadband at cruising altitude, four years before anyone else managed it. lufthansa flew the first commercial service on 17 may 2004 from munich to los angeles. american carriers had walked away af |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Lucent Technologies 📖 1996 - 2006 lucent was the equipment half of at&t, cut loose in 1996 with the western electric factories and bell labs attached, and for four years it was the most widely held stock in america. the fiber boom made it worth around 258 billion dollars. on 6 january 2000 it warned that it had missed a quarter, the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Novell Hula 📖 2005 - 2006 novell announced hula on 15 february 2005 at linuxworld in boston and dropped roughly two hundred thousand lines of its netmail code into the open under the gpl. the pitch was a mail and calendar server people would actually want to use, instead of one that managers want to deploy. twenty one months |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Spectrum Information Technologies 📖 1983 - 2006 john sculley took this job five days after leaving apple and called it a little gem that fell in his lap. four months later he resigned and sued the chairman. underneath the scandal was a company that had genuinely built the first cellular modem in 1984, the thing your phone now does with a toggle s |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Writely 📖 2005 - 2006 writely was a browser-based word processor built by three people at upstartle in 2005, launched in august of that year with almost no marketing. it was one of the earliest working proofs that a real word processor could live inside a browser tab. google bought upstartle on 9 march 2006 for a rumored |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Kiko 📖 2005 - 2006 $258,100 was the winning bid. google calendar shipped in april 2006 and kiko's signups stopped inside a season, so justin kan and emmett shear listed the whole company on ebay rather than post a quiet farewell, and tucows took the code and the domain in august. the two of them paid their investors b |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1952-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Adelphia Communications 📖 1952 - 2006 founded 1952 by gus and john rigas in coudersport pennsylvania after they bought a small cable franchise for three hundred dollars. by 1998 adelphia had more than two million subscribers and was the fifth-largest cable operator in the country. in march 2002 the family disclosed two-point-three billi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
FastTrack 📖 2001 - 2006 a small estonian team wrote a file-sharing protocol that hid the index inside the users themselves, and for about three years it moved more music than napster ever had. the protocol could not be sued. the clients on top of it were companies with addresses, and those could. by the time sharman networ |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Bulldog Broadband 📖 2000 - 2006 bulldog put its own equipment inside bt exchanges in central london and sold people a line that did not run on bt wholesale terms, which in 2004 made it the fastest consumer broadband in britain. cable and wireless paid 18.6 million pounds for it in may 2004 and spent two years learning that unbundl |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
6bone 📖 1996 - 2006 6bone was a practice internet, a second network stitched on top of the real one so engineers could test ipv6 before anybody's life depended on it. it started in 1996 as a mesh of tunnels using addresses that began with 3ffe, a prefix that meant not-for-real-yet. for about ten years it was where the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Wanadoo 📖 1996 - 2006 wanadoo was france telecom's consumer internet brand, launched in may 1996. it grew into the largest french isp, bought freeserve in 2000 to become the largest uk isp overnight, and operated under the same name in thirteen countries at peak. france telecom folded the brand into orange on 1 june 2006 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Blogdex 📖 2001 - 2006 a graduate student at the media lab pointed a crawler at every weblog he could find and counted which links they were handing to each other. the front page was that count, sorted by how fast a link was spreading rather than by how many people had it. every trending list that came afterward is a desc |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
NIFTY-Serve 📖 1987 - 2006 nifty-serve sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. it was the japanese answer to compuserve, started 1987 by fujitsu and nissho iwai. peaked around 1.6 million subscribers in the mid-90s. forums closed in 2005. the rest of the service closed in march 200 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
AOL Brasil 📖 1999 - 2006 aol brasil was the brazilian arm of aol latin america, the joint venture between aol time warner and venezuelan grupo cisneros with banco itau holding a minority stake. it opened in november 1999 with the same cd-mailing playbook that had built aol in the us. the launch hit 50,000 subscribers in thr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1851-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Western Union Telegram 📖 1851 - 2006 the telegram was the first message that could arrive without anyone carrying it, and western union ran that business in america for a century and a half. in 1929 it moved two hundred million of them in a year. in 2005 it moved twenty thousand, by which point the company was a money transfer business |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1897-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Marconi 📖 1897 - 2006 a hundred year old name and £2.6 billion in cash, spent inside eighteen months on two american equipment makers at the peak of the telecoms bubble. gec renamed itself marconi in 1999 and suspended its own shares in july 2001. the debt-for-equity swap of 2003 left the original owners with half of one |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
UDDI Business Registry 📖 2001 - 2006 the uddi business registry was a public directory where any company could publish a machine-readable description of its web services and any other company could look them up. ibm and microsoft turned it on in may 2001 and ran it alongside other operator nodes for five years, replicating fifty thousa |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
OzEmail 📖 1992 - 2006 ozemail started in 1992 as an email service with eight staff and became the loudest name in australian dial-up. it was the first australian technology stock to list on nasdaq, on 28 may 1996, and worldcom paid around 520 million us dollars for it three years later. when worldcom collapsed the austra |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Thrunet 📖 1996 - 2006 in 1998 a korean household could buy roughly a megabit over cable television wiring while most of the world was still listening to a modem negotiate. thrunet built that, out of a joint venture between trigem computer and the national power company, over fiber already strung along the electricity gri |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
바로타 (BAROTA) 📖 2000 - 2006 korea's railway agency did not have enough computers in 2000. rather than make everyone queue behind one overloaded website, it stood up a second one at barota.com and handed it to the people who had paid to join the railway membership scheme. seat reservations to begin with, and from 2001 electroni |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Patagon.com 📖 1997 - 2005 patagon was the first major online brokerage built for the latin american retail investor. wenceslao casares started it in buenos aires in 1997. on 9 march 2000, three days into the nasdaq peak, banco santander central hispano paid $548 million for 75 percent of the company. by may 2002 santander ha |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Danmønt 📖 1992 - 2005 denmark built a prepaid chip card for the payments too small to be worth a debit card, and put readers in railway ticket machines and payphones. you bought one at a bank or a post office and spent it down to zero, with no pin and no bank in the loop at the moment of payment. it peaked at 7.3 million |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
SoapCity 📖 1998 - 2005 sony pictures built soapcity as the web half of a soap opera cable channel that never launched, beaten to air by disney's soapnet and blocked by contracts nbc and cbs would not move on. what stayed was the website, which ran the official pages for four network soaps at once and sold episode download |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Klingon Wikipedia 📖 2004 - 2005 brion vibber sent four lines to the wikipedia-l mailing list on 7 august 2005. he had locked tlh.wikipedia.org at jimmy's request, it stayed readable but was no longer editable, and perhaps it could be moved to wikicities. that was the entire obituary. the klingon edition had opened in june 2004 dur |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Cellular Digital Packet Data 📖 1993 - 2005 cdpd was a way of moving data over a phone network built for voice. it hunted for the channels nobody was talking on and pushed packets through them at 19.2 kilobits, which in practice meant about half of that. police cruisers and telemetry boxes ran on it for years. gprs came along and did the same |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
MyOwnEmail 📖 1997 - 2005 two hundred domain names and a mascot called m.o.e. were the whole product, and in 1997 that was enough to let you be somebody at an address nobody else had. it absorbed star mail and pc postal on the way up and ran for most of a decade. then it stopped. the login page answered normally on 28 june 2 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
TV Tome 📖 2000 - 2005 john nestoriak iii opened tv tome on 11 july 2000 and gave the work away to volunteers, one editor per show, writing episode guides for american television back when the networks themselves kept nothing online. by 2005 it held complete guides for around twenty five hundred series and partial ones fo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1969-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Telerate 📖 1969 - 2005 a 21 year old named neil hirsch worked out in 1969 that bond prices lived inside telephone calls and could live on a screen instead. for two decades telerate was where the price came from, and its page 3750 carried the number that a large share of the world's loans were written against. then bloombe |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Groove Networks 📖 1997 - 2005 ray ozzie decided in the late nineties that the file server was the problem, and built a collaboration tool with no server in it at all. the workspace lived on the machines of the people in it and reconciled itself whenever two of them could see each other. it was very good engineering pointed at cu |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Media Lab Europe 📖 2000 - 2005 january 2005 is when the irish government and mit stopped being able to agree on a second funding model, and the board of media lab europe put the lab into voluntary liquidation on a friday. four and a half years in a disused brewery warehouse in the liberties produced 142 refereed papers and almost |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
UUNET 📖 1987 - 2005 uunet ran the wires that the early commercial internet sat on. it started as a usenet feed for unix sysadmins, became the largest us isp by traffic in the mid 90s, then disappeared through a chain of acquisitions ending at mfs, then worldcom, then mci, then verizon. by the time verizon owned it the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! PayDirect 📖 2000 - 2004 yahoo paydirect was yahoo's attempt at a person-to-person payment service during the paypal era. it launched in march 2000 with cibc national bank as the back-end and switched to hsbc in november 2001. it ran for four years, never got near paypal's user base, and yahoo killed it on 22 november 2004 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
ShadowCrew 📖 2002 - 2004 around four thousand accounts on a forum where stolen card numbers were sold in batches and a designated reviewer tested a sample before the seller was allowed to advertise. that review system is the reason this grave exists at all. shadowcrew solved the problem of getting strangers to trade when ev |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Palm.net 📖 1999 - 2004 in may 1999 palm shipped a handheld with an aerial you flipped up to reach the internet, two years before anyone here could do the equivalent with a phone. what came down that aerial was not the web. it was a few hundred bytes of the web, stripped to plain fields by a proxy and then billed by the ki |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
WEP 📖 1997 - 2004 wep shipped inside the original 802.11 standard in 1997 and its name was the entire promise: not strong encryption, just as private as a cable. it ran rc4 with a 24-bit initialization vector, which on a busy network starts repeating after a few thousand packets, and in august 2001 three cryptographe |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Microsoft bCentral 📖 1999 - 2004 redmond paid 265 million dollars for linkexchange in november 1998 and needed somewhere to put it. bcentral opened in september 1999 as microsoft's small-business web suite: hosting, banner trading, bulk email, a directory listing, all sold as a bundle. it is where linkexchange and listbot were sent |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Broadband Networking 📖 2002 - 2004 in july 2002 microsoft said out loud that home networking was too hard to use, and then did the microsoft thing about it: built the hardware itself. base stations, usb adapters and pc cards under the mn- numbers, on shelves from september 2002. by january 2003 it was the second best selling wi-fi br |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1971-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Tymnet 📖 1971 - 2004 tymnet was the road underneath a lot of things people remember better than the road. it started inside tymshare in 1971 as a way to get customers onto a time-sharing machine without paying for a long distance call, and it grew into a public network of roughly five thousand nodes across thirty countr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Millicent 📖 1995 - 2004 micropayments for the web, designed at digital equipment in the mid nineties by people who understood that credit card fees would never let you charge a tenth of a cent for a news article. the protocol worked. nobody wanted it. compaq bought dec, hp bought compaq, and the research group was gone bef |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Planet Hot Wheels 📖 2001 - 2004 planet hot wheels was mattel's online racing world, launched in 2001 for windows and mac. you raced for credits and spent them on cars and parts, and specially marked hot wheels packages carried codes that unlocked the same model on screen, which put a toy aisle purchase and a game account on one le |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
c2it 📖 2000 - 2003 the largest consumer bank in the world decided in 2000 that payments between two people were a bank's business and that paypal was a passing condition. it built c2it, put it on aol's front page and later on microsoft's, and by 2002 gartner was finding one percent of americans using it against thirty |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
J-Sky 📖 1999 - 2003 j-sky was the mobile internet service j-phone launched in december 1999, ten months after docomo's i-mode and into a market that already had two walled gardens in it. it never had the subscriber numbers of the leader. what it had instead was sha-mail, the picture messaging service that arrived in no |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
J-Phone 📖 1999 - 2003 j-phone was the third carrier in japan and it won the one argument that mattered outside japan. in november 2000 it shipped a handset from sharp with a camera in the back of it. the service built around that camera was called sha-mail, and it was a household word inside a year. docomo had i-mode and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
MCI Mail 📖 1983 - 2003 the first commercial american email service. launched in 1983 by mci to attach a mailbox to a long-distance phone bill. lived twenty years, killed by free webmail and by fax machines getting faster. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
election.com 📖 1999 - 2003 election.com ran the arizona democratic presidential primary in march 2000, which let registered democrats cast a real ballot from a browser and had it counted. around forty thousand people did it. that september icann picked the same company to run its worldwide board election. accenture bought the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1973-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Dow Jones News/Retrieval 📖 1973 - 2003 dow jones put the wall street journal on a wire in 1973 and charged by the minute to read it, which worked because the person reading was on the clock anyway and the bill went to a firm. eleven thousand subscribers in 1981 became two hundred and five thousand in 1986. the web made per-minute pricing |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
eBituaries 📖 2000 - 2003 a hosting company switched the domain off in june 2003, and that was the end of ebituaries, which had spent three years selling people a web page for someone they had lost. it charged a publishing fee instead of carrying advertising, on the stated grounds that ads on a memorial would be like billboa |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Billpoint 📖 1998 - 2003 billpoint was ebay's own payment service, bought in 1999 and relaunched in 2000 as a joint venture with wells fargo, sitting on the buttons of the largest auction site in the world. paypal had none of that and won anyway, because it settled a quarter of its payments straight out of bank accounts ins |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
PlaceWare 📖 1996 - 2003 in march 1997, when most people's connection to the internet was a modem making a noise, placeware shipped a product that put several hundred people into one browser window to watch a slide deck and ask the presenter questions. the founders came out of xerox parc and one of them, pavel curtis, had b |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
TWICS 📖 1982 - 2003 in 1993 a nonprofit language school in tokyo leased a line from a small american company and became the first place in japan where an ordinary person could buy access to the internet. before that it had spent eleven years as an online community on a vax, running participate conferencing for a mixed |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Fathom.com 📖 2000 - 2003 twenty five million dollars of columbia university money went into fathom, and by some accounts closer to thirty. sixty five thousand people made an account and almost none of them bought anything. the pitch was that a columbia login, backed by the london school of economics and the british library, |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
PGPfone 📖 1995 - 2003 on 23 january 2003 a network manager at mit opened a word processor, typed two sentences saying the software was no longer being distributed and probably would not run anyway, and saved the file over the page that had advertised it for seven years. that was the end of pgpfone, phil zimmermann's encr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
HomeRF 📖 1998 - 2003 more than a hundred companies signed up in 1998 to a radio standard for the house, one that carried voice and data on the same link so a cordless phone and a pc could share it. proxim made the only chipset, which meant every other member bought silicon from a competitor. intel left in march 2001 and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
ClarkNet 📖 1993 - 2003 a cow barn on a farm in howard county, maryland held the machines for the first internet provider the baltimore area ever had. jamie clark was deaf and so were most of the people he hired first, and by the middle of the nineties clark.net was carrying twenty thousand dial-up accounts and two thousan |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Lovemail 📖 1998 - 2003 a cartoon heart with wings, and the word lovemail under it. the site opened in 1998 promising free postcards with poems written specially for it, became a free webmail service the year after, and spent its good years handing out addresses alongside chat rooms and perl games. the mail was switched of |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Iobox 📖 1999 - 2002 jari ovaskainen sold his car to put the first hundred and twenty thousand dollars into a finnish startup that put email and a portal onto wap phones. nineteen months later telefonica's mobile arm paid two hundred and thirty million euros in cash for all of it, the biggest venture exit finland had se |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Quam 📖 2001 - 2002 16.45 billion marks bought a german 3G license in august 2000. the company that paid it, a joint venture between telefonica and sonera trading as quam, launched a gsm service on somebody else's network on 22 november 2001 and stopped selling eight months later with roughly 200,000 customers. the net |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
AOL TV 📖 2000 - 2002 webtv already existed and was already not working, and that did not stop aol from shipping its own version in june 2000. aol tv was a philips set-top box running liberate middleware, and it put email and instant messaging onto the television for $21.95 a month, or a small increase on the bill if you |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Teledesic 📖 1994 - 2003 teledesic was announced in march 1994 as the internet-in-the-sky company. bill gates and craig mccaw each put five million dollars in. the plan was 840 low-orbit satellites blanketing the earth, giving every point on the ground broadband access from space by 2001. it never launched more than one dem |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
VoiceStream Wireless 📖 1994 - 2002 voicestream was the american carrier that bet on gsm while the rest of the country was split between cdma and tdma. that bet is the whole reason deutsche telekom paid about thirty-five billion dollars for it in 2001, because a german operator cannot buy a network it has no equipment for. the name la |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Apple iTools 📖 2000 - 2002 itools was apple's first bundled online service, introduced by steve jobs at macworld san francisco in january 2000. it gave mac users a free mac.com email address, twenty megabytes of idisk storage, a basic homepage builder, an icards greeting-card service, a curated kidsafe directory, and an irevi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Ebone 📖 1992 - 2002 europe's national research networks agreed a shared backbone at a ripe meeting in geneva in 1991 and had it running the next year on 256 kbit/s links. ten years later it moved a quarter of the continent's traffic and belonged to kpnqwest, a joint venture that had booked capacity swaps as revenue unt |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Netscape Online 📖 1999 - 2002 aol bought netscape in 1999 and used the name in britain to run a free isp against freeserve. there was no subscription, because the phone company handed the isp a share of the per minute call charge instead. inside two years it was one of the ten largest isps in the country. then unmetered access a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Security First Network Bank 📖 1995 - 2002 security first network bank opened on 18 october 1995 with a web page and nothing else. the office of thrift supervision had never chartered a bank that existed only on the internet, and every bank in america watched to see what the regulator would allow. what it allowed took in about 55 million dol |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
KPNQwest 📖 1999 - 2002 kpn and qwest set up a company in 1999 to lay fiber rings across europe and sell capacity on them. by 2000 the network was reckoned to be carrying more than half of the continent's ip traffic, and part of the revenue behind that came from operators selling each other capacity nobody used and booking |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Dingo Blue 📖 1999 - 2002 a gas company that had been lighting sydney since 1837 bought an internet and telephone brand in december 2000 for 22 million dollars, on the theory that a household already getting one monthly bill would take another. dingo blue had been optus's cheap second brand since july 1999, with one price pl |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Hailstorm 📖 2001 - 2002 hailstorm was bill gates pitching, in march 2001, a microsoft-run cloud that would hold your contacts, calendar, mail and notifications, with passport as the only key. partners refused to let microsoft sit in the middle of their customer data, privacy groups refused to let microsoft sit in the middl |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
SceneOne 📖 1999 - 2002 flextech built an entertainment listings service in february 1999 and then spent three years pushing it through every screen a cable company could reach. the open web had it, and so did telewest subscribers browsing with a remote control inside the set top box. there was a television channel for nin |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
CAPTAIN 📖 1984 - 2002 nippon telegraph and telephone's videotex system, announced in 1978 and on sale from november 1984. japanese needs thousands of characters, so captain did not transmit text at all. it sent each page down the line as a pre-rendered image, coded roughly the way a fax machine codes a scanned sheet. by |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Dreamarena 📖 1999 - 2002 three hundred thousand registrations across europe by september 2000, and every one of them reached the network by letting a console dial a phone number sega had picked in advance. dreamarena was built for sega europe by icl and bt, one partner isp per country, with the game servers walled off from |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|????-|
| ????|
|_____|
|
Delphi 📖 1983 - ~2002 the boston online service that started in 1981 as a hypertext encyclopedia and grew into a peer of compuserve. wes kussmaul ran it. news corp bought it in 1993, then sold it back in 1996. delphi got there first on full internet access in 1992, but the rest of its product never caught up to aol's int |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
İxir 📖 1999 - 2002 ixir was doğuş holding's consumer internet brand, an isp with a portal bolted to it, and for two years it bought more turkish television time than any of its competitors. the commercials had banu alkan in them and a chestnut seller explaining what dial-up was. it never found the advertising revenue |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Bildschirmtext (BTX) 📖 1983 - 2001 bildschirmtext was the german national videotex service. the federal post minister christian schwarz-schilling pressed a button at the ifa fair in west berlin on 1 september 1983 and the network came up across the bundespost telephone system. it grew slowly, never reached the household scale that mi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
OmniSky 📖 1999 - 2001 omnisky put a radio on the back of a palm v and charged thirty nine ninety five a month for as much data as you could pull through it. that was 2000, when most of the world's internet still arrived down a telephone line and was billed by the minute. it had spent more than forty million dollars to ea |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Netcentives 📖 1996 - 2001 $72 million came in at the october 1999 ipo and the stock touched eighty dollars a share. two years later the same stock was sixty-nine cents and the company was in chapter 11. netcentives ran clickrewards, which turned online purchases into frequent flyer miles on six airlines, and it spent far mor |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
PhotoPoint 📖 1998 - 2001 photopoint was one of the first places you could put your photographs on the internet for free, and by the end it held more than ten million of them for about one point two million members. the company that owned it ran out of money in december 2001 and closed its offices, and the servers went with |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Saturn Communications 📖 1994 - 2001 the kapiti coast, north of wellington, is where somebody first put a wire into new zealand houses that did not belong to telecom. kiwi cable started there in 1994 with a satellite dish on a farm, became saturn communications under australian pay-tv money, and carried television and a dial tone down |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
iName 📖 1995 - 2001 two men bought twelve hundred domain names in the mid nineties and had to find a way to pay the renewal fees, so they gave away email addresses on them. the pitch that built iName was permanence: one address, free for life, reachable anywhere in the world. on 1 december 2001 forwarding became a prem |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
HeadHunter.NET 📖 1996 - 2001 184,153 job listings and 340,463 resumes, counted on the homepage in january 2000, which was the entire pitch: a board big enough that you did not need a second one. headhunter.net came out of norcross, georgia in 1996 and went public on nasdaq three years later. it grew by giving away what monster |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
MobileStar 📖 1998 - 2001 mobilestar built the first serious public wi-fi network in america and signed starbucks in january 2001, which meant paying for a wired t1 line into every store before it could sell anything wireless. about 650 locations were live when the private equity market closed in mid-2001 and september 11 to |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Excite@Home 📖 1996 - 2001 excite@home was the company that made cable broadband real in the us before cable broadband was a thing. then it paid $6.7 billion for the excite portal right before the dot-com bust. the cable partners walked while the bondholders fought over the corpse. four million subscribers were told to find a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
PictureTel 📖 1984 - 2001 two mit students and their professor started it in august 1984 to sell the first commercial codec that could push moving pictures down a dial-up isdn line. by 1996 it was taking better than $490 million a year and in most large companies the word for a video meeting was the brand name. a revenue res |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
LineOne 📖 1997 - 2001 lineone was the internet arriving free inside a sunday newspaper. bt built it in 1997 with two newspaper groups behind it and pushed the setup software into the sunday times on the weekend that paper ran its rich list, which put a dial-up account within reach of anyone who bought a paper. it collect |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Headbone Zone 📖 1997 - 2001 susan lammers left microsoft after eight years, put her own money into a children's cd-rom studio in seattle, and ended up building a website that mattered more than the discs did. headbone zone opened in march 1997 with moderated chat rooms and internet research races called headbone derbies that r |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Rhythms NetConnections 📖 1997 - 2001 catherine hapka left us west in 1997 to build a company that sold dsl to businesses, and for two years it worked. microsoft and the investment arm of mci worldcom each put thirty million dollars in during march 1999, and the ipo the following month raised over two hundred million. by april 2001 the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
BlueLight.com 📖 1999 - 2001 a big-box retailer decided to give away internet access so people would shop at its stores, then discovered that free dial-up brings you everyone except the customer you wanted. it grew fast on the promise of zero cost, capped the free hours, started charging, and got swept under when kmart went ban |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Chromatis Networks 📖 1997 - 2001 four and a half billion dollars in lucent stock, paid in june 2000 for a two-year-old company that had yet to sell its product, and fifteen months later the whole thing was switched off and all 150 people were let go on the same afternoon. it remains one of the largest sums ever paid for an israeli |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
ListBot 📖 1998 - 2001 submit it! built a free mailing list host, linkexchange absorbed it in june 1998, and microsoft owned it by november of the same year. by january 2000 it was carrying mail to more than twenty million subscribers. microsoft switched the email off on 6 august 2001 and gave everybody two weeks to downl |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
InternetCash.com 📖 1999 - 2001 internetcash was a new york prepaid-card company that launched in april 1999 under charles doherty and yiannis tsiounis. shoppers bought a card in store, scratched off a pin, then redirected at checkout to an internetcash window where the card got spent. the security team built the minting process a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Zing.com 📖 1998 - 2001 fifty three million dollars of venture money bought four million members and no way to charge any of them. kleiner perkins and alloy led the rounds, media metrix had it as the number one photo site in april 2000, and a year later the site was absorbing ninety percent of the company's resources, earn |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Women's WIRE 📖 1993 - 2001 two women who met on the well built the first commercial online service aimed at women, launched it in october 1993 with five hundred members, and charged fifteen dollars a month for a dial-up world where nine out of ten users were female. wired magazine sued them over the name. the web arrived and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
PSINet 📖 1989 - 2001 psinet was one of the first companies to sell access to the public internet for money. it grew from a kitchen-table operation in northern virginia into the largest independent isp in the us. then it borrowed too much in the late 90s, missed the dot-com floor, and filed chapter 11 in june 2001. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
One.Tel 📖 1995 - 2001 jodee rich and brad keeling started one.tel in sydney in 1995 with about five million dollars and turned it into australia's fourth telephone company by reselling other people's networks to young people who had never had a phone bill in their own name. the packer and murdoch families put more than a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Winstar Communications 📖 1993 - 2001 winstar sold bandwidth to office buildings over millimeter wave radio instead of over fiber, which in practice meant a small dish on your roof pointed at another small dish a few blocks away. it held spectrum at 38 ghz and 28 ghz across most of the large american markets and called the product wirel |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
WebRing 📖 1995 - 2001 webring was the discovery layer of the early web. sage weil wrote the original cgi as a high-school project in 1994 and incorporated it as a company in june 1995. starseed bought it in 1997, geocities folded that in 1998, and yahoo absorbed the whole stack through its $3.57 billion geocities deal in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
WTLS 📖 1999 - 2001 the final specification runs to 106 pages. five days after approving it the wap forum approved a fifteen page document telling everyone to use ordinary tls instead, and that was the end of it. wtls existed because a phone in 1999 could not afford real tls, so it shrank the handshake and invented a s |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
NorthPoint Communications 📖 1997 - 2001 northpoint was one of the companies trying to build the broadband internet before the big phone carriers bothered. it was a dsl wholesaler, it ran the lines and let independent isps sell the service under their own name. verizon agreed to buy most of it in september 2000, then backed out that novemb |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Geocast Network Systems 📖 1999 - 2001 the plan needed a box under your desk with a television antenna on it and a hard disk inside, filling itself overnight with video you had not asked for yet. geocast raised more than two hundred million dollars for that, built a satellite uplink in california and signed thomson to manufacture the har |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Winfire 📖 1999 - 2001 a toolbar was supposed to pay for your broadband. winfire shipped its first browser assistant in august 1999, a small bar that docked in the windows taskbar and handed out points for clicking its shortcuts, and in january 2000 broadband digital group bought the company and put chad steelberg in char |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Randnet 📖 1999 - 2001 nintendo put a disk drive under the n64 and then refused to sell it as a disk drive. you subscribed to randnet instead, in yen, by mail order, and the hardware arrived as part of the deal. fourteen months later there were about fifteen thousand people paying and ten disks to play, so recruit and nin |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
CalendarCentral 📖 1997 - 2001 on 1 february 2001 a small company in research triangle park shipped version 4.0 of its web calendar. on the 21st it issued a press release saying it was ceasing normal business operations and looking for an acquirer or a licensee. the last thirteen employees left on the 28th. goldman sachs and nasa |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1974-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Bridge Information Systems 📖 1974 - 2001 $275 million for knight-ridder financial in 1996, nine more companies after that, then dow jones telerate in 1998 for $510 million. bridge information systems spent five years buying its way into the same sentence as reuters and bloomberg, and borrowed for all of it. the chapter 11 petition went in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
ZapMe! 📖 1996 - 2001 a california company that handed american schools a free computer lab and a satellite connection, and took the corner of every screen as payment. by late 2000 it had 25,000 machines in 2,300 schools with around two million students sitting in front of the advertising panel. the campaign against sell |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Amazon Auctions 📖 1999 - 2001 amazon auctions launched on 30 march 1999 as bezos's direct attack on ebay, with eight million pre-existing amazon customers automatically registered as bidders. it was deprioritized within a year, scaled down through 2001, and folded into amazon zshops and then amazon marketplace by the mid-2000s. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
BIX (BYTE Information Exchange) 📖 1985 - 2001 byte magazine's online service. launched 1985 with $6 evening rates and cosy conferencing software. peaked at 17,000 subscribers, shut down 2001 after the open internet took the audience. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
ShareYourWorld.com 📖 1997 - 2001 shareyourworld.com launched in 1997 as the first video-sharing website on the open web, founded by chase norlin. it let anyone upload short clips in whatever format they had and share the URL, eight years before youtube. bandwidth was the problem. the average consumer connection in 1997 was a 33.6k |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
RemarQ 📖 1995 - 2001 usenet in a web browser, back when that was a real convenience and not a museum piece. remarq let you read and post to the newsgroups without configuring a single client, which is exactly the kind of friendly front door that got it bought. critical path paid a fortune in 2000 stock and then folded t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
The Useless Pages 📖 1994 - 2001 a directory of web pages that had no reason to exist, kept alive by three different people across seven years. it began in 1994 when paul phillips found a stranger's hand-typed cd catalog and decided the world needed a list of things like it. by 1996 it had its own yahoo category and a line of prais |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Commercial Internet eXchange 📖 1991 - 2001 the nsfnet backbone carried most of american internet traffic and was paid for by the government, so it came with an acceptable use policy saying you could not run a business across it. in mid-1991 psinet and uunet put a router somewhere that policy did not reach and agreed to swap traffic over it f |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Publius 📖 2000 - 2001 in july 2000 three researchers put a web publishing system online for a two month trial and named it after the pen name on the federalist papers. it encrypted a document and split the key into shares held on fifty volunteer machines, so no single operator could delete the thing or even work out what |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
JuniorNet 📖 1999 - 2001 boston, 1996: alan rothenberg set out to build a version of the internet for children in which nothing arrived that had not been checked first. juniornet launched in march 1999 at $9.95 a month, ran inside its own client with content shipped partly on cd-rom, and had $47 million of rcn's money behin |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Gopher protocol 📖 1991 - 2000 dormant the menu-based content protocol from the university of minnesota. you saw a numbered list of items, you typed the number, you got the next list. or a text file. or a download. for a year or two in 1992 to 1993 it was the fastest growing way to publish on the internet. then the web ate everything. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
FidoNet (the dial-up era) 📖 1984 - 2000 dormant a worldwide mail network built out of bulletin boards and long-distance phone calls, started by tom jennings in 1984. every night each machine dialed the next one in the chain and handed over a bundle of messages, which is how a post written in one country reached a board in another for the price of |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
HotOffice 📖 1996 - 2000 on 19 december 2000 a lawyer in palm beach county opened the case that ended hotoffice, four years after it was unveiled at comdex as the world's first virtual office service. intel and staples had both put money in. about 750 small businesses were handed over to a competitor on the way out, and the |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
germany.net 📖 1994 - 2000 michaela merz and stephan hess started it in frankfurt in 1994 with an offer nobody else in germany made: no access fee, only the phone call. the catch was a proxy that kept you inside the german part of the web and cut in with ad breaks. it had more than 500,000 participants by 1999 and 600,000 whe |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
1stUp.com 📖 1998 - 2000 in 1998 a san francisco company worked out that if you wrapped the browser in an advertising frame you could give dial-up internet away and bill the advertisers instead of the user. cmgi bought it in september 1999, and a deal to supply free access to altavista's users carried it to something like t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Visitalk.com 📖 1998 - 2000 phoenix, arizona, september 1998. a company that wanted to be the phone book for internet calls, handing out permanent twelve-digit numbers and routing calls between them for nothing. about fifty thousand people took a number. visitalk filed for chapter 11 on 29 november 2000 after a three million d |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
PageNet 📖 1981 - 2000 pagenet was the largest paging company in the world, more than ten million pagers in service and about a billion dollars a year in revenue, and it spent most of the nineties treating the pager as a category rather than a stopgap. it borrowed roughly another billion to build a two way network so that |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
iCanBuy 📖 1999 - 2000 parents put money into an account, chose which stores their kid could spend it at, and set a limit for each one. that was icanbuy, opened in march 1999 out of the san francisco bay area by paul herman and gayle keck, and for a year it was written up everywhere from time to american banker as the fut |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Zatso 📖 1998 - 2000 on friday 20 october 2000 zatso stopped making newscasts, two weeks after cutting its staff to thirty-eight. the service let you choose which local tv news stories you wanted and assembled them into a bulletin of your own, which is the thing cass sunstein named the daily me in a book published the f |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Freei 📖 1998 - 2000 freei was a free dial-up internet provider out of federal way, washington, that dialed you a local number and paid for it with a strip of advertising parked on your screen for as long as you stayed online. it worked well enough to reach 3.2 million registered users by the summer of 2000, fifth large |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
NETCOM On-Line Communication Services 📖 1988 - 2000 netcom was a bay area dial-up isp that ran shell accounts and the netcruiser dialer through the early-1990s commercial-internet boom. it was bought by icg communications in 1997 for stock, sold to mindspring in february 1999 for 245 million in cash and shares, and the brand was retired. the legacy s |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Quack.com 📖 1998 - 2000 pittsburgh in 1998 produced a company whose entire product was a phone number. you dialed it, you spoke, and quack.com read you stock quotes and movie listings off the web with no screen involved anywhere. america online paid about 201 million dollars for it on 31 august 2000, near the last moment s |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
RelayOne 📖 1998 - 2000 400 items a month is what a national postal service will tolerate before it stops. relayone was royal mail's attempt at the join between email and paper: you wrote a message on a computer, it was printed in london, and a postman delivered it to somebody who had no email address. royal mail called it |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
John Labovitz's e-zine-list 📖 1993 - 2000 4,392 zines, each one checked and listed with its contact details, is where the e-zine-list stopped. john labovitz started it in the summer of 1993 to tell people about the zine he and two friends were publishing, kept it going for seven years at roughly monthly intervals, and then posted a note tit |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1968-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Datapoint Corporation 📖 1968 - 2000 phil ray and gus roche incorporated computer terminal corporation in san antonio in july 1968 to build a quieter replacement for the teletype. two of their engineers designed a processor architecture over a thanksgiving weekend in 1969, intel built it as the 8008, datapoint rejected it for being too |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
MindSpring 📖 1994 - 2000 the atlanta dial-up isp charles brewer founded in february 1994. ran on a customer-service obsession that was unusual for the era, with named technicians and published service standards. by 2000 it had about five million subscribers and was the third-largest us isp behind aol and earthlink. merged w |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1979-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
UUCP 📖 1979 - 2000 uucp was how unix machines talked to each other before the internet reached most of them. unix-to-unix copy, written at bell labs in 1979, moved mail and usenet news one modem hop at a time: store and forward, each machine phoning the next in the middle of the night. you addressed a message by namin |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
MBone 📖 1992 - 2000 mbone was the internet's first real attempt at broadcasting to many people at once. built in 1992 as an experimental overlay of tunnels stitched across the ordinary internet, it carried ip multicast to the handful of universities and labs whose routers could speak it. the first live band on the inte |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1976-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
EIES 📖 1976 - 2000 murray turoff built the electronic information exchange system at the new jersey institute of technology with national science foundation funding, and it went live in 1976. it did group conferencing before there was a word for it, with threaded discussions and private messages and a directory of eve |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
X-Stream Network 📖 1998 - 2000 two canadian brothers worked out that a british isp did not need to charge a subscription, because the phone company was already billing the customer by the minute and would share that money. x-stream switched on free access on 8 march 1998, six months before freeserve made the idea a national story |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Global Village Communication 📖 1989 - 2000 global village started in mountain view in june 1989 and spent a decade making modems for one computer company's customers. the teleport sat on the desk and the powerport went inside the powerbook, and globalfax was the software that made either of them worth the money. apple used global village to |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
CareerMosaic 📖 1994 - 2000 an advertising agency that had spent decades buying help wanted space in american newspapers looked at the web in 1994 and put the listings there instead. bernard hodes built careermosaic, and inside a year two hundred employers were posting into it and four hundred thousand visits a month were comi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1971-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
Finger 📖 1971 - 1990s finger let you type a person's name at a machine you had no account on and get back their full name, whether they were logged in, how long they had been idle and whatever they had written in a file called .plan. les earnest built it at stanford in 1971 because people were running a finger down the p |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Veronica 📖 1992 - 1999 veronica was the search engine for gopherspace, written in november 1992 by steven foster and fred barrie at the university of nevada, reno. it crawled thousands of gopher servers and built a database of what every menu item was called, so what you searched was the labels rather than the documents u |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
GEnie 📖 1985 - 1999 general electric's dial-up online service from 1985 to 1999. it ran on the same time-sharing mainframes ge sold to enterprise customers during business hours, billed by the hour at night, and peaked at around 350,000 subscribers in 1994. it had an active sf writers community plus a strong online gam |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1969-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Periphonics Corporation 📖 1969 - 1999 bohemia, new york, december 1969: four people started a company to make computers answer telephones, two decades before anyone called that an industry. exxon held most of periphonics through the seventies and all of it by 1980, then let it go, and it came back as a public company selling voice respo |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
ONElist 📖 1997 - 1999 onelist was the free mailing-list service mark fletcher coded by himself in 1997 and opened publicly in january 1998. it grew to over a million lists before merging into egroups in november 1999. yahoo acquired the combined egroups in august 2000 for $432m in stock and rebranded it as yahoo groups b |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Prodigy 📖 1984 - 1999 one of the three big dial-up online services in the US, alongside compuserve and aol. it was a walled garden with weather, news, banking, and chat. it could not handle the open web when it showed up, and quietly faded out by 1999. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Iridium (1998-2001 original) 📖 1998 - 2001 motorola-backed satellite-phone consortium that put 66 active low-orbit satellites in the sky to make voice and paging work from anywhere on earth. commercial service launched november 1, 1998. handsets cost three thousand dollars and calls ran five a minute. indoor reception was nonexistent. by aug |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Sidewalk 📖 1997 - 1999 sidewalk was microsoft's attempt to put the urban weekly newspaper on the web. listings, restaurant reviews, hip features, one portal per us city. it lost money fast. microsoft sold the entertainment-guide portion to ticketmaster online-citysearch in july 1999. ballmer told reporters years later tha |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Ascend Communications 📖 1988 - 1999 two million dial-up ports went out of one company in alameda, california, and they are the reason a modem in 1997 got an answer. ascend built the max and then the max tnt, and aol and uunet bought them by the rack. lucent announced a twenty billion dollar merger on 13 january 1999 and closed it on 2 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
eaasySabre 📖 1985 - 1999 eaasysabre was american airlines opening a consumer door into its own reservation system in 1985, over a modem, at a time when the alternative was a travel agent with a phone. it ran as text menus on compuserve and prodigy, and it proved something the industry did not want proved, that ordinary peop |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Ionica 📖 1991 - 1999 ionica sold british households a telephone line that arrived through the air instead of down a copper pair, which meant a customer could leave bt without asking bt's permission. it floated in july 1997 and passed a billion pounds of market value inside a year. fifteen months later the money was gone |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Purple Moon 📖 1996 - 1999 purple moon was brenda laurel's attempt to build computer games for girls between eight and fourteen, using four years of interviews she had run at interval research before writing a line of design. it shipped rockett's new school and secret paths in the forest in 1997, both of them about navigating |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Shiva Corporation 📖 1985 - 1999 two mit graduates started a company in cambridge in 1985 to sell appletalk boxes, and ended up in the business of answering the telephone. the lanrover let an employee at home dial a number and land on the office network, which was a growth market right up until every office bought a leased line ins |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
International Lyrics Server 📖 1997 - 1999 the international lyrics server was the first big searchable lyrics database on the open web. one swiss guy named pascal de vries ran it out of his home starting in february 1997. by the time the police raided him on 14 january 1999 the site was serving 100,000 songs and one million pageviews a day. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
AOL Greenhouse 📖 1995 - 1999 greenhouse was the aol studios in-house incubator ted leonsis ran from 1995 onward. the program took 1200 user-submitted online show ideas and turned roughly 40 of them into branded properties inside the aol service. the survivors include the motley fool and ivillage. the program wound down by 1999 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Mandic BBS 📖 1990 - 1999 mandic was the bbs that became a commercial isp before the brazilian web really existed. aleksandar mandić opened it on 22 april 1990 from a spare room in his sao paulo house, on a single phone line his wife was not using, after eighteen years at siemens. by 1995 it carried 10,000 paying users on 90 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Beltel 📖 1986 - 1999 the videotex system run by the south african department of posts and telecommunications, and later by telkom, launched in 1986 on the british prestel standard. it did banking for seven of the country's banks and carried classifieds and farm price feeds on 40-column screens. around 14,000 users were |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Greenpoint 📖 1992 - 1999 greenpoint was ptt telecom's cheap answer to the car phone in the netherlands, a cordless handset that worked off your own base station at home and off roughly five thousand public ones bolted to post offices and gas stations. it could place calls and it could not receive them, so a lot of subscribe |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
TURNET 📖 1996 - 1999 three lines to the united states, two out of istanbul and one out of ankara, shared by around eighty service providers. that was turkey's commercial internet from august 1996, and its name was turnet. the tender behind it had been postponed since november 1995, and what finally opened was thinner th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
D2000-2 📖 1992 - 1999 reuters shipped automatic matching to the foreign exchange market in april 1992 and briefly owned the plumbing of the largest market on earth. within eighteen months a consortium of the banks that depended on it had funded a competitor for the explicit purpose of not depending on it. ebs took the ma |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
InfoVía 📖 1995 - 1998 telefónica had the monopoly on the line and used it to build a second internet with a gate on it. from anywhere in spain you dialed 055 at a local rate, and what answered was a directory of companies that had signed an agreement with the phone company. the real internet sat behind that directory, sl |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Chromeffects 📖 1998 - 1998 july 1998, siggraph: microsoft previews a markup language for putting 3d scenes on web pages, built on direct3d and wrapped in xml. by november the testers had called it slow and buggy and the standards crowd had called it proprietary, which was a bad month for a company sitting in an antitrust tria |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
FTP Software 📖 1986 - 1998 windows 95 shipped with tcp/ip included at no extra charge and that was the entire cause of death, arriving three years early and aimed at nothing in particular. before that, getting a dos pc onto the internet meant buying networking software, and the company that sold the good one was worth over a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
SpryNet 📖 1996 - 1998 sprynet was compuserve's admission that people had stopped wanting a walled online service and started wanting the internet. it opened on 6 february 1996 at $19.95 a month for unlimited dial-up through local numbers, no forums and no proprietary content, and it grew past two hundred thousand subscri |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
InterNIC 📖 1993 - 1998 for five years there was exactly one counter where every .com on earth got registered, and it was a project run under a national science foundation cooperative agreement by american defense and telecom contractors. registration was free until 14 september 1995, when it became fifty dollars a year an |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1955-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Racal-Datacom 📖 1955 - 1998 a british defense electronics group owned a florida modem maker for twenty-one years and put its own name in front of it. racal-datacom sold the equipment at the far end of the leased line, the part banks and airlines paid for and nobody at home ever saw. in september 1998 racal sold the business to |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Bay Networks 📖 1994 - 1998 bay networks was assembled in 1994 out of two companies with no reason to be in the same building, wellfleet in massachusetts and synoptics in california, and it kept a head office on each coast for its entire life. it spent four years as the second largest maker of enterprise networking gear withou |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Sega Channel 📖 1994 - 1998 sega channel was a cable tv add-on for the sega genesis. you paid your local cable company about $15 a month and plugged a special cartridge into your console. the cable head-end pushed a rotating menu of around 50 genesis games into the cartridge ram. when you turned the console off, the games disa |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
First Virtual Holdings 📖 1994 - 1998 the first company to take credit cards on the open internet, and it refused to do it the way everyone else later did it. virtual pin meant the card number never went over the wire. you got an email asking are you sure, and you typed yes or no or fraud. it worked, for four years, until the merchants |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Telebit 📖 1984 - 1998 paul baran, one of the people who invented packet switching, started telebit in cupertino in 1984, and it built the trailblazer: a modem that spread five hundred and twelve carrier tones across the phone line and faked acknowledgments back to the computer so that uucp transfers would not stall. unix |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1974-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Eurosignal 📖 1974 - 1998 the deutsche bundespost switched eurosignal on in 1974 and france joined a year later. it was a pager with no screen, so a call arrived as one of four tone patterns and the meaning had to be agreed in advance with whoever might be calling. around 230,000 germans carried one in 1994. gsm handsets cou |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Erols Internet 📖 1995 - 1998 erol onaran came to virginia from turkey, opened an electronics repair shop, put videocassettes in it, and ended up running the largest privately owned video rental chain in america. he sold it to blockbuster in 1990 and spent part of that money on an internet service provider with his own name on i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Living Books 📖 1992 - 1998 broderbund shipped just grandma and me on 7 february 1992, a mercer mayer picture book turned into a cd-rom where the machine read every page aloud and every object on it did something when you clicked it. it worked well enough that broderbund and random house signed a partnership on 9 september 199 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
CERFnet 📖 1988 - 1998 susan estrada proposed a california regional network in january 1988 and had it carrying traffic for thirty eight research centers by november 1989. the name was going to be surfnet, after the san diego coastline, until the dutch turned out to have it already, so the acronym became cerf and vint cer |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1969-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
ROLM 📖 1969 - 1998 a corporate campus in santa clara with a swimming pool and a recreation center on it, in the seventies, when the rest of the valley was tilt-up sheds and parking. rolm started by selling ruggedized military computers, then built a telephone exchange that was really a computer, and by 1980 it had mor |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
GTE mainStreet 📖 1993 - 1998 gte spent the late eighties and most of the nineties building a way to put interactive content on a television, out of a test project in cerritos, california. the box sat on the set and talked back over the customer's phone line. commercial rollout started around 1993 and topped out near sixteen tho |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Bi-Bop 📖 1991 - 1997 bi-bop was france telecom's answer to the price of a gsm handset in 1993. you could make a call while standing within about three hundred meters of a base station, and you could receive one only if you had registered with that station and had not moved since. calls cost roughly a quarter of what gsm |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Network General 📖 1986 - 1997 mcafee associates put up $1.3 billion in stock and the combined company came out on 2 december 1997 under a name neither of them had used before, which is how network general stopped existing the first time. harry saal and len shustek had started it in menlo park in may 1986 around an internal test |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Livingston Enterprises 📖 1986 - 1997 radius turns thirty-five this year and it is still what decides whether your password gets you onto the network. it was written by a father-and-son company in pleasanton, california that answered a request for proposals from merit network in 1991, then sold dial-in equipment to two thirds of the wor |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
RocketMail 📖 1996 - 1997 rocketmail was the free webmail four11 launched in 1996 that yahoo bought in october 1997 for $92 million in stock. the rocketmail engine became yahoo mail. the brand persisted as an email-suffix option yahoo briefly reopened for new signups in june 2008 and closed again in april 2013. the company t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Octel Communications 📖 1982 - 1997 two engineers who met over a broken piece of lab equipment started a company in september 1982 to sell businesses a machine that answered the phone. the first product held seven thousand five hundred mailboxes. by 1993 octel was doing $338 million a year and had the largest share of a market it had |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
ASCII Net 📖 1985 - 1997 ascii net opened as an experiment on 1 may 1985 and became the first commercial dial-up host in japan, run by the company that published the magazines everyone with a computer was already reading. it had a threaded board format at a point when the rest of the japanese services were still dumping eve |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
HyTelnet 📖 1990 - 1997 before anything crawled the internet, finding a machine you were allowed to log into meant knowing somebody who kept a list. peter scott kept the best list. hytelnet was a directory of telnet addresses for library catalogs on every continent, plus the freenets and databases and bulletin boards aroun |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
AppleLink 📖 1985 - 1997 applelink was apple's online service for dealers and developers, running on ge's mainframes from 1985 until apple finally shut it off in march 1997. its consumer spinoff was contracted out to a company called quantum computer services, who kept the rights and turned it into america online. applelink |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
WOW! from CompuServe 📖 1996 - 1997 compuserve was a business service that had spent a decade billing by the minute, and by 1996 it could see aol taking the household market with a friendly interface and a flat price. wow! was the answer: a separate consumer service, cartoon graphics, kids and adults in different areas, and seventeen |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1979-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Ungermann-Bass 📖 1979 - 1997 ralph ungermann had already co-founded zilog and walked out of it before he started this one in 1979 with charlie bass, on $1.5 million and a proposition that sounds obvious now: your network should not have to come from whoever built your computer. the niu-1 shipped in july 1980 as the first ethern |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Genesis Storytime 📖 1983 - 1997 a canadian cable channel that put children's picture books on the television one page at a time and carried no sound at all, because the point was for a parent to read it out loud. the pages were redrawn in naplps and pushed to telidon decoders sitting at the cable company's own headend, so no house |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Rurtel 📖 1986 - 1997 the arkleton trust, a research charity in the highlands of scotland, put a public dial-up conferencing system on a machine at nethy bridge in 1986 so that people living a long way apart could work together without driving. it ran cosy software licensed from the university of guelph and opened eight |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
BITNET Relay 📖 1985 - 1996 jeff kell wrote relay at the university of tennessee at chattanooga in 1985, in rexx, on a network of university mainframes where spending bandwidth on conversation was treated as close to theft. it gave bitnet named channels, a forward slash for commands and a peer-server design efficient enough th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Mirsky's Worst of the Web 📖 1995 - 1996 mirsky's worst of the web was a one-page link site that posted about three bad-website picks per week with a one-line acidic comment under each. david mirsky, an ex-harvard-lampoon writer, ran it from january 1995 to november 1 1996. the site was the inverse of cool site of the day. the press loved |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
anon.penet.fi 📖 1993 - 1996 anon.penet.fi was a machine in helsinki that johan helsingius ran out of his own pocket, and for three years it was how you spoke on usenet without signing your name. it worked by keeping a list, your real address on one side and an assigned number on the other. that list was the entire service and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
The Pipeline 📖 1993 - 1996 the pipeline started in december 1993 in new york, built by a science writer and a programmer who had met over a bridge table. it was the first internet service you could use without learning unix first, a program for windows and mac that put usenet and the web behind buttons, sold in the book plus |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Video On Line 📖 1994 - 1996 nicola grauso was a sardinian publisher who put l'unione sarda on the web in march 1994 and then decided that what italy needed was not more content but access, so he built a provider out of cagliari. video on line handed out months of free dial-up on a toll-free number and shipped its software on d |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
eWorld 📖 1994 - 1996 apple's online service from 1994 to 1996. it was the most beautiful of the walled gardens, with a cartoon town interface where the post office was your email and the newsstand was the news. it lasted 21 months and never had more than 90,000 users. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Telecom Gold 📖 1982 - 1996 british telecom licensed dialcom's software, ran it on prime minicomputers under a modified primos, and sold electronic mail to british business from 1982 as telecom gold. it bridged into telex and fax, reached dialcom systems in other countries, and hosted one of the first online communities on a n |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
CitySpace 📖 1993 - 1996 at siggraph 1993 an educator named zane vella switched on a 3d world that had nothing in it and let children fill it. cityspace ran for three years out of science museums, on networked silicon graphics onyx machines, and the kids who came to the workshops built the avatars and the streets. between i |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
WAIS 📖 1990 - 1995 wais was a search system for the internet before the internet had one, built at thinking machines in 1990 with apple and dow jones paying for part of it. you connected to a server, typed words in plain english and got back documents ranked by score, then handed a good one back to the system and aske |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Quantum Link 📖 1985 - 1995 q-link was the dial-up service for commodore 64 owners that started in 1985 and turned into aol four years later. quantum computer services renamed itself america online in october 1989 once it added apple and pc users, but the original c64 service kept running under the q-link name until 1995. it h |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Supra Corporation 📖 1981 - 1995 three hundred and ninety-nine dollars in january 1992 is the number that matters here. that was the price of the suprafaxmodem 14400, undercutting machines half its speed, and the rest of the industry had to follow it down within a year. supra had started in albany, oregon in 1981 making atari perip |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
NSFNET 📖 1985 - 1995 the national science foundation paid for the main road of the american internet and wrote a rule on it saying research and education only, no business. the rule held for a few years, then it bent, then congress repealed the reasoning behind it. by 1995 the backbone reached more than four thousand in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
MILNET 📖 1983 - 1995 in 1983 the pentagon took its own traffic off the arpanet and put it on a separate network built from the same hardware with no civilian hosts on it. mail still crossed the boundary through gateways, so nothing was truly severed, but the principle was. the first large secession from the internet was |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Advanced Network and Services 📖 1990 - 1995 the national science foundation paid for a backbone that was not allowed to carry business traffic. the answer its operators found in 1990 was to build a nonprofit to run the wires, then hang a for profit subsidiary off it and sell commercial access on the same fiber. half the industry called that a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
JUNET 📖 1984 - 1994 japan's academic internet started in october 1984 as machines phoning each other at 9600 bits per second and passing mail along with uucp. no backbone, no budget for one, just an agreement to be dialed. it reached 87 organizations in under three years and got out of the country in 1986 by calling cs |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
EARN 📖 1983 - 1994 earn was the european half of bitnet, running ibm mainframe protocols over leased telephone circuits that ibm paid for at the start. through most of the eighties the entire traffic between europe and the united states crossed one 4.8 kbit line. at its largest it reached several thousand universities |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
SynOptics 📖 1985 - 1994 revenue went from 1.8 million dollars in 1986 to 700 million in 1993, which is what happens when you sell the one thing every office building is about to need. two people out of xerox parc worked out how to push ethernet down ordinary telephone wire in 1987, then gave away the patent that would have |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
National Videotex Network 📖 1992 - 1994 u.s. videotel launched nvn in 1992 to compete with compuserve and genie, which was late by any reading of that market. it sold news and research databases over cheap packet-switched access, with island of kesmai and mud ii carrying the people who came for games. it was terminated abruptly on 17 june |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Alex 📖 1988 - 1994 alex was bell canada's minitel, launched in montreal at the end of 1988 with a northern telecom terminal you rented by the month and a 1200 bit/s modem inside it. directory listings and banking were the official pitch. the chat rooms were what people used, at up to thirty cents a minute, which produ |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1960-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Quotron 📖 1960 - 1994 in 1986 citicorp paid $630 million for the company whose terminals sat on a hundred thousand broker desks, around sixty percent of the market for financial data. eight years later reuters took it off their hands for $12.8 million and a payment toward the losses it was still producing. quotron had be |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1979-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Prestel 📖 1979 - 1994 prestel was the british post office's videotex service. it launched in september 1979 as the first public online information service in the world, running at 1200 bits per second over a phone line into a modified tv set or a dedicated terminal. it peaked at about 95,500 terminals in 1989, well below |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
MIDnet 📖 1987 - 1994 eight campuses sharing fifty six kilobits per second, and in september 1987 that became the first of the nsf regional backbones to run properly end to end. midnet carried the great plains onto the internet and then went non profit in 1992. two years after that a palo alto startup bought it, put its |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 1993|
|_____|
|
Rabbit 📖 1992 - 1993 rabbit was a phone you could carry but could not be reached on. hutchison put twelve thousand cordless base stations across britain, marked each one with a sign carrying a blue rabbit, and sold handsets that worked within about a hundred meters of a sign and nowhere else. it was cheaper than a cellp |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 1993|
|_____|
|
NEARnet 📖 1988 - 1993 darpa announced it was going to take the arpanet apart, so a group of boston universities built their own regional network rather than wait to be unplugged. nearnet started in 1988 with under ten members and reached more than two hundred across all six new england states. part of its backbone ran th |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1991|
|_____|
|
Micronet 800 📖 1983 - 1991 prestel was british telecom's videotex system, pages of text you called up on a screen over the phone. micronet 800 was the part of it built for people who owned a home computer, and it launched in march 1983 selling computer news alongside telesoftware, which meant programs that arrived down the li |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1991|
|_____|
|
CSNET 📖 1981 - 1991 getting on arpanet needed a defense research contract, and most computer science departments in america did not have one. csnet was the answer for everybody else: a five million dollar grant, a gateway, and a modem that dialed a relay host every few hours to trade mail. it reached more than 180 inst |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 1991|
|_____|
|
Phonepoint 📖 1989 - 1991 phonepoint was the first of britain's four telepoint services and the worst performing of them. a consortium led by stc and british telecom put 3,300 base stations onto high streets and into railway stations, sold a handset at £245 with a base station at £195, and then discovered that fewer than a t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1965-|
| 1991|
|_____|
|
Ticketron 📖 1965 - 1991 a mainframe in a hotel basement and a terminal in a record shop meant you could buy one named seat in a stadium two states away, and the seat could not be sold twice. that was 1968, thirty years before most people had a modem. control data ran it for two decades and by 1990 it had seven hundred and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 1991|
|_____|
|
Family Computer Network System 📖 1988 - 1991 a modem peripheral for the japanese famicom, released in september 1988 after hiroshi yamauchi told masayuki uemura to build a stock trading service with nomura securities. it also carried bank transfers and betting on horse races through the japan racing association, which turned out to be the only |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1969-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
ARPANET 📖 1969 - 1990 arpa funded a packet-switched network in 1969 to find out whether the idea worked at all, and the first message across it was two letters long before the receiving machine fell over. it ran for twenty years and moved to tcp/ip on new year's day 1983. the military half split off in 1984, and what was |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1928-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
Teletype Corporation 📖 1928 - 1990 in december 1928 a printing telegraph company took the name teletype, and eighteen months later at&t bought it for thirty million dollars in stock. for the next sixty years it built the machines that newsrooms and then computers typed on, including more than six hundred thousand model 32 and 33 unit |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1989|
|_____|
|
Viditel 📖 1980 - 1989 viditel went live in august 1980 and gave the netherlands a public dial-up information service eleven years before the web. it painted 24 lines of text onto a television at 1200 baud, and getting into it cost thousands of guilders. business users took it, consumers stayed away. the ptt switched it o |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1979-|
| 1989|
|_____|
|
The Source 📖 1979 - 1989 the source was the first thing in america you could call a consumer online service. it predates the web by sixteen years and predates anyone in turkey having a phone line that could reasonably make a long-distance call to virginia. it ran from 1979 to 1989 with about eighty thousand peak subscribers |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1971-|
| 1987|
|_____|
|
Centronics 📖 1971 - 1987 the fat 36-pin plug on the back of a printer was named for a company in hudson, new hampshire that shipped the first affordable dot-matrix printer in 1970 and stopped being a computer company in 1987. it sold the printer line to genicom for 87 million dollars and spent the money on ekco housewares, |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1971-|
| 1986|
|_____|
|
Confravision 📖 1971 - 1986 the post office opened confravision in 1971 and it was a video call you had to travel to. six studios in british cities with five seats and five microphones in each, up to three of them joined at once over microwave links. you booked a slot by telephone or by telex and paid by the half hour and by t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1986|
|_____|
|
Viewtron 📖 1983 - 1986 knight-ridder spent six years and more than fifty million dollars building an online newspaper and then switched it off. viewtron went live across four florida counties on 30 october 1983, running on a nine-hundred-dollar at&t terminal with a chiclet keyboard, carrying news and home banking in block |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1978-|
| 1985|
|_____|
|
Telidon 📖 1978 - 1985 telidon was canada's answer to prestel and antiope, and technically it was the better answer. instead of drawing pictures out of mosaic character blocks it sent instructions for the drawing itself, so the same page came out as sharp as whatever screen received it. ottawa put sixty nine million dolla |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1984|
|_____|
|
NABU Network 📖 1983 - 1984 nabu ran a computer network over cable television in ottawa from october 1983, pushing software down the coaxial line at 6.4 megabits a second while the rest of the world was still dialing at 300 baud. the cable only went one direction, so the bi-directional in the company name was a promise rather |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1977-|
| 1984|
|_____|
|
Qube 📖 1977 - 1984 qube was a two-way cable tv experiment run by warner-amex out of columbus, ohio from 1 december 1977 to 1984. thirty channels of pay-per-view and community programming, plus a beige remote with five response buttons that let you vote in real time on whatever the host on screen had asked. warner cabl |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1984|
|_____|
|
GameLine 📖 1983 - 1984 gameline put a modem inside an atari 2600 cartridge in 1983 and sold games down a phone line for a dollar each. the download sat in the cartridge for about a week or ten plays and then it was gone unless you paid again. the big publishers refused to license their catalogs and the console market coll |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1877-|
| 1984|
|_____|
|
Bell System 📖 1877 - 1984 on 1 january 1984 the largest private company on earth split into eight pieces, because two years earlier it had signed a consent decree rather than lose the case. the bell system had over a million employees and 150 billion dollars in assets at the end, and it owned the telephone in your house beca |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1869-|
| 1984|
|_____|
|
Western Electric 📖 1869 - 1984 the antitrust settlement that broke the bell system also erased the company that had built it. western electric made the telephones and the switching gear for a monopoly that was its only customer, which is what the justice department sued over in 1949 and again in 1974. on 1 january 1984 at&t techn |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1972-|
| 1981|
|_____|
|
CYCLADES 📖 1972 - 1981 louis pouzin built a french research network on the idea that the network itself should promise nothing and the machines at the two ends should sort out what went missing. he called each packet a datagram. the french telephone administration was building the opposite thing on a state monopoly, so th |